In Our Time - The Frankfurt School

Episode Date: January 14, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and guests Raymond Geuss, Esther Leslie and Jonathan Rée discuss the Frankfurt School.This group of influential left-wing German thinkers set out, in the wake of Germany's defeat in the First World War, to investigate why their country had not had a revolution, despite the apparently revolutionary conditions that spread through Germany in the wake of the 1918 Armistice. To find out why the German workers had not flocked to the Red Flag, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and others came together around an Institute set up at Frankfurt University and began to focus their critical attention not on the economy, but on culture, asking how it affected people's political outlook and activities. But then, with the rise of the Nazis, they found themselves fleeing to 1940s California. There, their disenchantment with American popular culture combined with their experiences of the turmoil of the interwar years to produce their distinctive, pessimistic worldview. With the defeat of Nazism, they returned to Germany to try to make sense of the route their native country had taken into darkness. In the 1960s, the Frankfurt School's argument - that most of culture helps to keep its audience compliant with capitalism - had an explosive impact. Arguably, it remains influential today.Raymond Geuss is a professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge; Esther Leslie is Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, University of London; Jonathan Rée is a freelance historian and philosopher, currently Visiting Professor at Roehampton University and at the Royal College of Art.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. So wrote the German thinker Theodore Adorno in the wake of the Second World War. This famous aphorism was more than a bleak one-liner. It came from the heart of a philosophy that Adorno and his intellectual comrades had developed over the previous quarter-century of turmoil. Adorno, Max Hochheimer, Walter Benjamin and others had come together in an independent institute set up at Frankfurt University in the aftermath of the First World War. The Frankfurt School, as they became known,

set themselves the goal of making sense of 1920s Germany. How then wanted to know, did capitalism keep workers and consumers cooperating? To find out they turned not to the economy, but to culture. But then in the 1930s, they were forced to flee the Nazis and ended up in California, where these austere German mandarins crashed into the, the full-tilt alien technical abraseness of the 1940s popular culture. It spurred them into developing a highly influential worldview

that sought to make sense of both Hollywood and the Holocaust. With me to discuss the ideas and impact of the early Frankfurt School are Raymond Goise, professor in the faculty of philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Esther Leslie, Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Jonathan Ray, a freelance historian and philosopher. Jonathan Ray, can you set the political and in a political and in a world? intellectual scene of 1920s, Germany, for us, please? Well, I think when we look back at it from the point of view of the 21st century,

we tend to think of it as the prelude to the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi party. But, of course, that wasn't how it felt to people at the time. And it's very difficult to make sense of the 20s in Germany. It's very paradoxical because it's dominated by two completely different moods. There's a mood of despair. There's been the experience of defeat in the 1914-18 war, I think, suffering like 2 million people dead and 4 million injured in a war, you know, it was a war of choice,

which had led to a humiliating defeat and to peace terms, reparation terms, which were deeply resented. So there was the experience of depression and defeat. But there was also, paradoxically, an extraordinary feeling of hope. There's an art historian called Fritz Saxel, who was in Berlin in, I think, 1918, and he said,

We've lost the war, but we've gained hope. And there was a sense that an outdated 19th century culture had died and that something new and youthful was going to replace it. It was, if you like, it was a kind of Obama moment. It was a moment of youth and hope, and the idea was that the bad old past was over. But swirling around was unrest, it was inflation. Just over there was the eminent.

of the Russian Revolution and the power that that might bring and the power of thought that it might have seemed, Marxism to take over a vast continent of a country. So that was playing into it as well. And some people thought that because of all this, Germany might have expected to face some sort of revolution or some sort of mass political unrest go for communism. But they didn't.

So why, and people were beginning to ask, why did that not happen? You know, an old friend of mine, sadly no longer alive, was a little girl in Berlin in the, and she remembered her first memory was 1917 and her mother coming into the bedroom and saying, my kinder, minor, kinder, my children, there is revolution in Russia and we are all going to be free. And I think that that was not an unusual thing. I mean, Germany was in turmoil. You can talk about a German revolution in 1918, as well as the Soviet Revolution in 1919. and it was possible to see them as part of a sequence. The Communist, when the Communist Party got, the German Communist Party did get something like 10 or 15% of the vote throughout the 20s. So there was a continuing appeal of the Soviet ideal, but on the other hand, the left in Germany was unbelievably fractious. One of the leaders of the left said, yeah, we socialists are very good at struggle, but unfortunately we struggle. with socialists and not with capitalists.

And I guess that the problem was that the communists were a Marxist party, obviously, and so were to some extent the Social Democrats. But they had different ideas about what Marxism implied. There was this script about where the working class was supposed to rise up and defeat capitalism. And so the question that the left was divided about was why isn't the working class acting the role? all assigned to it in the Marxist plot.

Yes, because it was 10 or 15, but they'd expected a bigger role. As Sir Leslie, in 1924, this Institute for Social Research was set up privately and very importantly, independently of the state. Can you introduce us to the key figures involved? Well, in the initial period, it's set up by a figure called Fritz Valle

and then Karl Grunberg takes control of it. But I think the period when it's coming into its own in the later 20s, there's Max Horkheimer as certainly a significant figure who takes over directorship of the Institute from 1930, and he brings into its orbit, Teodor Adorno, and as time goes on, a number of other figures, Herbert Marcusa, Erich from, Walter Benjamine, on the fringes of it. So these are some of the main players, within the Institute. And Vile is a Jewish businessman.

Why did he put his money and his mind to doing that? I think he's caught up in the sort of tendencies, fascinations, hopes and interests that Jonathan has been describing as in Germany of the 1920s, this sense that change may happen, could happen, the proximity to Russia and the Soviet revolution and the fact of various uprisings in Germany, not just in 18 and 19, but on until 1923 really, where there are small Soviet republics declared in various parts of Germany.

Vial, even though he was a millionaire, was also confident and hopeful, that Germany too could become a Bolshevik or communist country and the institute is set up to, in a sense, explore that process in some ways forward that process. As that wave recedes, it becomes much more about why has the process not happen, what is workers' consciousness and they get involved in various sort of empirical studies to think about what is the average German white-collar worker or blue-collar worker thinking,

what is their relationship to Germany and to the capitalist society within which they find themselves? As I understand it, German universities were very bound into the state, sometimes of very fruitful results, particularly in science, for instance. And it's important, I use the word independent in my introduction to this, and the fact that this was an independent institute for social research was important, wasn't it? The independence was a very important factor. Although it does have a position within the University of Frankfurt

and Hawkeheimer, when he takes over the directorship of it, is a professor of the University of Frankfurt. But it does sit very askew with normal German academic process, and it was certainly established to do that, to be absolutely critical of the two main... tendencies within German scholarly thought at that time. So Adorno presents himself as a social philosopher

to overturn traditional philosophical, metaphysical thinking as it might be carried out within the university and at the same time to present the Institute as a scientific body. That can do science better than the scientists in the university who were too tied up in the matter that they're looking at to have any kind of social understanding of the effects of science and technological progress and development. Sorry, now we're talking about independent minding men,

Marx, Hawkehme, Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, as I'm afraid. I called him, and later from and Marcusa. But let's talk to those three. And yet they're known as a Frankfurt school. Is it possible to say briefly what they had in common, what was their aim as a school? did they bring something between them as one or two main points that drove through? I think that the notion of a school as a coherent set of ideas is a little bit difficult in that it develops over time.

And one of the key factors of their thinking is that thinking is tied utterly to the historical moment. and if one thinks about the historical moments that Germany passes through from 1923 to 1969 or whenever we want to sort of close the period, there are many different exigences and contingent moments. So it's hard to have a summary, but I think all of them are united by a sense that philosophical thinking is necessary, but it needs to think the world in its entirety. It can't take off into this metaphysical plane and just say universal, timeless truths about human action. Philosophy is grounded in social reality

and in living, experiencing human beings on the one hand. And that science is a strong, force within the world but it is being used predominantly to exploit nature to make money for the capitalist system or to dominate and oversee social groups and so it's not being used in order to forward any sort of aim of human liberation. human liberation would be, I suppose, one of the central ways in which the Frankfurt School thinks theory should be used to further that cause. Raymond Gois, these people are on the political left, so you might expect them to concentrate on the economy, but they seem to concentrate more on Germanist culture. How surprising was that and why did they choose to do that? Well, just to take up the points that the two previous speakers made, I think one of the really important things that holds them together,

to the extent to which you can hold them together, is the idea that philosophy has to be critical. That is, it shouldn't be like science, it shouldn't be descriptive of the world, it shouldn't affirm the world, it has to criticize the world. Now, what it means to criticize the world is very, very different, and they have their own views about that.

But their view is always it has to be critical. Now, in the particular situation which they found themselves, of course they expected, along with everyone else, for the German working class to rise up and overthrow the capitalist mode of production. That didn't happen. And now the question is, why didn't that happen? Did they expect that, I'm my interview for a moment.

Did they expect that to happen because of a theory or because they were getting messages from the people or it looked like that from various little Soviet enclaves that were taking part of, which has to refer to? Well, they stand at the end. of a long tradition of social democratic thought and left-wing thought, which assumes that the only way to understand this society is to understand it as a society that's based on the exploitation of workers

and that the workers won't put up with this forever. So they have this theory, and then they have the example of the Soviet Union in front of their eyes. And so it's almost inevitable for them to think that, well, this is what's going to happen. But it doesn't happen. And again, just to pick up on what Jonathan said, for a philosopher, failure is much more important than success. Failure is the thing that stimulates you to think. If your society puts all of its efforts into a war and it fails, you have to ask the question why. If it succeeds, you don't have to ask the question why, because you can complacently think that you succeeded because, of course, you're naturally superior.

That's what every society thinks about itself. So this moment of defeat after the First World War is a moment of great stimulation. And the failure then of the proletariat to rise up and imitate the thing that happened in the Soviet Union is also a big theoretical moment for them because it causes them to reflect on what was wrong with the natural leftist assumptions that they took over from this tradition, namely that all of this would happen by itself, that the exploitation of the workers would be more and more severe, and they would then overturn the system.

And why hasn't that happened? And why hadn't they happened? They turned to culture because they saw, as I understand it, please, please clarify all this, that capitalism had induced or given or the proletariat had accepted, you'll disentangle that, their obedience to the system and inculcated what they called a false consciousness.

And that was one of the things they concentrated. And why was this false consciousness there that repressed with connivance of those who were repressed what they should have done, which was rise up? They thought that the whole tradition of social democratic thought in which they grew up was too focused on the economy and wasn't sufficiently interested in other aspects of the society. And they thought that if you understood society

as a whole you'd see that there was an economy, but there was also a culture, and the two of them were interconnected in various ways. And so part of the reason why the proletariat didn't rise up was, of course, because the capitalist class was very strong. But another part of the reason was because the members of the working class had the wrong form of consciousness. They were deceived about their own interests, and therefore it was a task which previous social democratic thinkers had not posed for themselves the task of understanding why the workers had the false consciousness that they had. Jonathan briefly, Holgheimer said he wanted to develop a critical theory

to explore and perhaps make, and explode this false consciousness. What was new about that? Well, he made this contrast between traditional theory and critical theory. And some people say that really he was using the word critical theory because he was a bit too frightened to use the word Marxism. That's not quite true. I mean, the general idea of criticism is he's saying critical theory recognises that every theory is a response to a certain interest

that the theorist has. And critical theory is based on the interest, the future interests of the oppressed. Traditional theory is based on complacency about the status quo. That's the general distinction. But there is a deeper point. point in this idea of criticism. The word criticism is one that is all over the work of Karl Marx. But the Marxism of the Communist Party didn't make much of this idea of criticism. The Marxism

of the Communist Party thought in terms of iron laws of history that were propelling the historical process. What Hawkeheimer and the other members of the Institute were very impressed by was an argument of Marx's right at the beginning of Volume 1 of Capital about where Marx talks about the fetish character of the commodity. And the idea here is that it's not just consciousness that is false. There's something about the whole economic system that is false, because what capitalism brings about is the idea that commodities can't be understood just in terms of what they are, sorry, things can't be understood just in terms of what they are in themselves,

but in terms of what they can be exchanged with. Everything becomes replaceable by something else. That's the essence of fetishism in Marx's theory. So that the task of critical theory is to undo this work of fetishism and enable us to see objects as they really are in themselves rather than just see them in terms of their exchangeability with other things. And clearly that's one of the tasks of art, the idea to bring us into confrontation with objects

as they really are in themselves and not just in terms of their equivalence. Remindgoats, can you take that on? Can you take us into the way Jonathan's outlined very clearly where that takes us into the use or examination or belief in and the centrality of culture to any debate about levering the working classes out of what they saw as passive repression. Well, I think they all think that there is an inherent problem in all forms of culture, including art.

They think that forms of art have a natural tendency to make people conformist. because a work of art, in fact, is connected with the pleasure. I take pleasure in a work of art, otherwise we wouldn't produce works of art and we wouldn't consume them. But the pleasure that I take in a work of art is therefore naturally connected with a certain sense of relaxed acceptance of the world in which that work of art exists. So they think that, in fact, if you want to understand how you might resist the, the domination of the economic factors that exist in the world at the moment.

One of the ways you can do that is to try to see whether you could get a form of art which turned itself against itself. So you could find a form of culture that was negative rather than being affirmative. This distinction between an affirmative culture and a negative culture, an affirmative culture and a critical culture is very important for them. And so they find avant-garde works of art like Berg, of particular importance. So for them, the point of the work of art is not to make me happy, but as Adorno says in a famous passage,

the point of the work of art is to make me unhappy. Because if I'm happy, I'm going to accept the world in which I live. Really, what the work of art should do is it should be oppositional. It should make me unhappy and focus that unhappiness on motivating me to see what the true horrors of the world in which I exist are. As the Leslie, they drew on many ideas, but I'd like to pick up Sigmund Freud on whom they drew, which I think relates to what Raymond had just said. Can you bring that into a remark or, sorry, a paragraph or two about the way Freud played

into what they were doing about culture, thinking about culture, sorry. I think Freud's very important for their... in terms of this whole question of acceptance and conformism. So the elements of Freud, which they take over in particular, would be questions around regression or sadomasochism, or, you know, why do we get pleasure out of watching other people's charmed lives being played out on screen or why do we take pleasure in Donald Duck

taking a beating in the cartoons and find that amusing and a door-nose verdict on that is it's accommodating us to our own beatings because essentially we are sadomasochistic subjects within a society that keeps us endlessly suffering and turns that suffering into a type of pleasure and one could see then how Freudian notions of regression might play a role

there. And this also comes to be part of the explanation for why people become susceptible to the charms of the dictator equally as to the charms of the Hollywood star who addresses the audience as an infantilised subject whose desires can be fulfilled by this other figure. It does suggest that they have a feeling of the malleability of the proletariat, that these people just yield, surrender to what's given to them and they don't really have any minds of their own? That has been part of the criticism, but I don't think it's part of the impulse for the thinking. It's trying to address the fact that there's an incredible totality that emanates from the mode of production, that capitalism and the fetish of the commodity and the...

social relations on which it's based and all of its values of competition and so on, is forced outwards across the whole society, and it is as if everybody affected by that is trapped in a kind of cage of only certain modes of existence, and nobody can resist that in a sense. And their analysis is not just directed at the working class as dupes or dupes or, of these systems, but everybody, you know, from the scientist to the journalist to the bureaucrat is carrying out the logics of the society. Can I just ask for a footnote, Ryan, before we move on, would you almost be saying,

would they almost be saying that if you're happy, you really don't know what's going on? If you're happy, you're missing out on the real world, your feeling of and your acceptance of or you're seeking for happiness is basically unreal and profoundly, well, let's put it to say, third rate. They think that if you're happy in any society known to us, you're liable to be happy only by virtue of being rather obtuse, and that being happy will make you rather obtuse. You're not going to go further?

Well, how far would you like me to go? I'm happy to go as far as you'd like. I don't know. You can't use that word. I can't use which word. I'm happy use, and I'm happy to go as far. Freud has this very useful concept. I think he talks about gain through illness.

And the idea is that people become neurotic, not actually because it actually gets them something. You produce neurotic symptoms, and that actually makes your life easier to live. And I think that's rather the way to think about the possible happiness of the working class, that they gain through, working as if there was nothing possible

except a commodity society and exchange society. So it's not completely false. It's not completely crazy to think that if you're a conformist, you'll get on better. There is a way, I mean, there is a way

which I think is very important to keep in mind in which they're not worried about not being affirmative. They're happy to be completely negative. That's one of the things they hated most about the United States.

They go to the United States And the first thing they're confronted with is people telling them to keep smiling all the time. People telling them to be happy. People telling them to Brecht at one point says, it's really exhausting to live in this country. Everybody's always telling me to keep smiling. But sometimes I just prefer to be depressed and look in the air and not do anything. And so they have no objection to this Schopenhauerian view that the world is basically,

the worlds we live in, is basically a horrible place and an evil place, because it could be so much better, but it is only what it is. So it could be paradise, Adorno says. But instead of being paradise, it's really just California. Which takes us to America, Jonathan. They left and the Nazis got busy. They knew they had no place there, these people. And so they went first of Geneva, and then to America.

Walter Benjamin, alas, took his own life. He was trapped. And in America they joined people at Brecht and Thomas Mann on the West Coast. Why didn't they go to the Soviet Union? I don't think it crossed their mind to go to the Soviet Union. I mean, one of the points about their analysis of contemporary society was that they thought capitalism had changed. It wasn't just that Marxism needed to be reformed.

It was that the world had changed. And they used this phrase late capitalism or state capitalism, too. And the idea was that actually the Soviet Union was a capitalist country too. They were never tent. Well, Benyemin was tempted by the Soviet Union. Well, Lucas, he wasn't part of the group. He wasn't part of the group. He was a people contemporary intellectual.

And, you know, they were rich, prosperous bourgeois people. They depended on the vast investments which had gone into the institute at its foundation, as Esther was explaining. And Max Holkheimer was sensible enough to move the funds into Switzerland and then to America. they were, I mean, because they thought that everybody was compromised by the system, they didn't, they weren't trying to make themselves into saints,

into pure, into heroes of political purity. America was much the most convenient place for them to go. And actually, they were anti-American, but they were also, especially after the Second World War, they were also very anti-American. Right, let's take with America for a moment as the, they started in, New York. They obviously keep their own language, keep their own magazines, keep very much to themselves, are regarded as strange mandarin's, but then that's nothing new in America, all sorts of groups come in and regarded Australians. That's one of the strengths or characters of the country. But when they

get to Hollywood, that's where they meet consumer culture. That's where they meet public capitalism. That's where they meet what we nowadays call celebrity. What did they make of that? I think this was a very striking experience, especially for Adorno and Hawkeheimer, who are in Los Angeles, in Hollywood, at the heart of the beast of American mass popular culture. And it is as if they have turned up somewhere that is the antithesis to all that they remember about Europe, which of course has been destroyed by the Nazis, but a tradition of high modern. music, difficult avant-garde culture, all that is being destroyed by the Nazis and they personally have left it all behind to turn up in a place of slip-on shoes and off-the-peg clothing and cheap plastic goods and Hollywood stars and advertising, this whole environment glaring down at them from billboards.

And in terms of their sensibility, they just... find it repulsive. What it enables them to think about is this notion that culture, this place that should be a space for subjective expression and with a little glimmer of sort of utopian, non-instrumentalised life in it, has become industrialised. And so they talk of the culture industry, which should be an anathema. But it's not.

It's what powers the whole of California. In their writings while they were in America, they changed again when they came back to Europe. Is there any trace of the fact that, yes, it's all, they say, it is all the things you say, and Germany is full of high culture and all the things. But the German high culture led to them voluntarily going into a massive war, and the American slip-on shoes was struggling towards producing

what people think of as a great democracy. Did they not ever make that comparison? I think Also things that people wanted to see Yeah they Well I mean obviously They they Realise that for all the culture

That was produced in Germany It could not It did not prevent the ultimate Barbarism Of Nazism Which is But did disappear in their writings I'm not trying to be

I'm not into Well I am in Turkey I didn't mean to be a good I just was interesting I'd say that afterwards But what about world in America Don't they see it while they're there? between 40 and 45-46.

Raymond, do you want to come in? You see, you're again presupposing that there must be a solution if it's not European high culture, it's going to be American culture industry. And that's exactly what they're rejecting. They're rejecting the necessity to choose. They're rejecting the view that. Well, if it's not one, it must be the other.

They're standing up for their ability to say, no, it's not that. And it's also not the only other alternative that's around in the moment. And then if you say to them, well, what are you to do? Well, that's the question that really disturbs them, and they don't know what to say about that. But they still stand up for their ability

to reject both sides of any given dichotomy. Adorno has this wonderful little essay that he wrote when he was in America about Hollywood films. And he says it's like these children's stories where a witch is offering some poison broth to some children. And she's saying, yum, young, young. This is really gorgeous. You're really going to enjoy this.

And he says, this is the basic trick that Hollywood plays. And he says, where did they learn this trick? They learned this trick from Richard Wagner, the great, you know, the operatic, the composer of music dramas in 19th century Germany. And from some people's point of view, the great hero of German culture. So if there's something wrong with Hollywood,

where does it come from? It comes from the hearts of what's rotten in Germany. Roman guys, they seem to have thought that popular culture was subtly oppressive or not so subtly oppressive, but higher offered glimpses of hope. Could you address those two points, please? Well, if you think that popular culture

has as its function to make people satisfied with the status quo and to hide from them the reality of the life they're living, then it isn't surprising that you think there's something deficient about that. The model of an alternative way of doing art, which they think might have some critical potential, is something like the music of Alban Berg. Adorno had been a trained musician,

as you know, and worked with a student of composition of Berg. And so if you think of Berg's operas like Lulu or Wotzek. That's the model, I think, that they have, of what kind of art could be both liberating and encourage reflection. And there, the basic idea is this is a work of art that's inherently negative. It presents happiness,

but it presents happiness only in the form of a contrast with everything that's presented in the world. So you see the world in which Votsack, lives, it's horrible. He's oppressed by the captain. He's oppressed. He's betrayed by his wife. Everything goes wrong. And somehow the presentation of that work of art, of that world of horror in a way that is still comprehensible to people with the appropriate aesthetic sensibility as something that they can enjoy gives you a negative image of what the world could be like. The world could be like exactly the opposite of the world that's described in Votsik.

I think that's interesting to reflect back on the culture industry is precisely not giving an image of difference or otherness, isn't it? Adorno has this phrase, the dreams do not dream, that popular culture is precisely not an escapism, it's precisely the pushing through of exactly the same values that exist in the of work and everywhere else, of the kind of domination, of competition between people and so on, whereas high,

this different avant-garde culture also embodied in Beckett, even in its black, stumpy negativity, at least proposes that things could be different from what we have. It could be other worlds. If you think of a holiday, there's a famous Hollywood film from the 40s called

It's a Wonderful Life, and that is at worst, sums up what they thought about the nature of these Hollywood films. They were kitschy, sentimental ways of saying, the life you live is wonderful. And that was the thing they were most... And of course, Votsack doesn't say the life this person leads is wonderful. He says, it says, the life he leads is really terrible.

Think to yourself about what something different might be. But that isn't the whole of popular culture, is it? I mean, they saw the Hollywood part of popular culture, but there's all sorts of other popular culture going in the States. I mean, people singing protest songs, strumming guitars in the Midwest on the railroads, writings which actually pointed to the other side of America, we think of Steinbeck and grapes of broth. I mean, there's a lot of evidence going all over the place.

There was Mark Twain as well, and Adorno's definitely had a soft spot for Mark Twainers. And we should remember, actually, that these guys were not just theorists. And, I mean, they wanted to be artists in a way. Beniamen was a translator. He wrote an extraordinary, I mean, he was an essayist. He was a developer of the art of the essay. all of them were interested in using aphorisms but writing sort of philosophy in the form of poetry

rather than in the form of theory gets us off on the... And do you know, Adonno, in the 30s, planned to write an opera. He wrote a libretto for it. It's called Deschats des Indiana Joe. It's an opera about Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. That would have been his masterpiece

if he'd managed to become the great musician that he wanted to be. Can we talk... When they come back to Europe, Roman Gauss, after the defeat of the Nazis, they returned to Frankfurt, I don't know, and Hochheimer do. What did they, how did they, how did that, what was their thinking now, after Germany, after communism after that? So did their thinking change?

How did they imply, how did they apply their philosophy, as it were, in the late 40s in Germany, to Germany, did it change? I thought, would, even know what I'm saying. Yes. Well, I have what I think is a rather non-stander view. one that's not shared by most people, which is that I think their real theoretical work was the work they did in the United States.

They hated it, but precisely because they hated it so much, it was very productive for them. And so when they went back to Frankfurt, they essentially continued doing the same sorts of things they had done in the 40s, developing the position they had there. Adorno at one point says, and I think this is very important for the discussion,

the only thing that's true are exaggerations. And so I think you have to see that all of their theoretical activity is an attempt to draw attention to certain things by exaggerating certain salient features. So of course they knew that there were parts of popular culture that were not quite like Hollywood. They knew that. But they also thought that exaggerating it

by presenting the culture industry as if that was the only thing was a kind of wake-up call. and it was cognitively very important. And so they go back to Germany and they attempt to bring back the sense of the seriousness of a certain kind of high culture without allowing that to be compromised by the National Socialist past. And I think also they take the kind of partly empirical work they've been doing into the personality and so on in America and reapply that back in Germany to ask how could these people, have become susceptible to Nazism.

Are there still traces of fascism or Nazism within German society? What is democracy? How do you keep democracy? And it's those questions that play very closely into the German student movement of the 60s who then start to perceive elements of continuing fascism within the society. And so there's this direct kind of. of inflow of their ideas into 68 and they're mobilising students. But their belief in the redeeming, the possible redeeming place of high art,

isn't that not challenged by what we began this programme with, the quotation from Adorno, to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, Jonathan? Well, you know, I... To go back a bit, I think that it was, when they got back to Germany, they thought of themselves as anachronisms. And I think one very important point is the death of Valta Benyeman in, was it 1940? Yeah, that sort of brought that really not the stuffing out of them. I think they all regarded Benyman as the most talented of them all.

And they felt that they hadn't treated him very well. They were very rude to him in a way, but they thought that that was going to stimulate him into new work, which was never going to be. And I think there was a real sense of mourning. I mean, they went on living, but it was a kind of afterlife. and obviously when they got back and in the 60s were confronted by left-wing students, they were completely puzzled by this. I mean, Adorno writes about how very strange it is to find himself constantly being attacked

as a cultural and political reactionary because he'd spent his whole life sort of tried to court the opposite criticism. So, Raymond goes, did that bleak worldview continue? Yes. when Adorno, as the previous speakers have said, Adorno and Horkama become kind of patron saints of the student movement in the 60s, and then at a certain point, there's a rupture between the students and the two of them.

A famous occasion, as you know, the students occupy the Institute for Social Research, and Adorno calls the police to have them thrown out. So he reacts just in the way every other bourgeois professor would have acted. in similar circumstances. And the interesting part about it is that he is completely nonplussed by the student's reaction to this.

He says, oh, I only thought I was describing some theoretical models, and they tried to realize these with Molotov cocktails. And so you see that by this point, he's got completely out of touch with the world. I think Jonathan was right. Benjamine, in a funny way, was a stable, He didn't look like it at the time, but he was a kind of stabilising element in the whole thing. And they somehow lose a bit of touch with reality back in the New Germany. Finally and briefly, do you think their views are relevant and prevalent today?

I think Adorno is thinking on mass culture, which went through a period of being very unfashionable postmodernism, which embraced popular culture, hated Adorno. He was the bogey man. But I think in an era of ex-exhawnal, Factor and creative industry, PLC, Britain, his ideas have come back quite forcefully and he's been suddenly read again. Well, thank you very much. So Leslie, Jonathan Ray, Raymond Gois. Thank you for hurtling through that. And next week we'll be talking about the Glencoe Massacre,

1692. Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. Find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio four.