2024-04-25 10:04:26
It was a capitalist who helped Marxism become a globally effective, politically consequential social doctrine. Without the generous support of Friedrich Engels, the son of a cotton manufacturer who had become rich after selling his shares in his father’s company, Karl Marx’s attempt to “unveil the economic law of motion of modern society” would have remained unfinished. Engels used the mechanisms of financial capitalism to increase his wealth through speculation: “I am not so childlike as to seek advice from the socialist press on my operations.”
Without the commitment of a capitalist and his son, the “Café Marx” would not have been founded a hundred years ago, as the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was called, the origin of a social philosophy that continues to shape intellectual and social policy debates to this day. Hermann Weil was the owner of a grain trading company based in Argentina. After reading the SPD’s “Erfurt Program,” his son Felix became a socialist who saw “private ownership of the means of production” as the fundamental evil of capitalist society. Together with his student friends, the entrepreneur sons Friedrich Pollock and Max Horkheimer, he discussed the chances of a “socialist revolution” after the end of the monarchy and the First World War. The answer should be found in an institute for social research. The financial generosity of father and son Weil created the conditions for this.
Not just Horkheimer and Adorno
The history of the institute has been told many times. The historian Philipp Lenhard, who teaches at Berkeley, tries to give this story new accents in “Café Marx”. It follows the changes in location forced by Nazi rule and war, which made the institute a traveling institution: from Frankfurt via Paris to New York and California and back to Frankfurt again.
Lenhard describes in detail the “physical and symbolic spaces” in which the development of the institute took place: For example, the chapter “In the Bahnhofshotel” recalls the “First Marxist Work Week” in Gera in May 1923, which, among others, included Friedrich Pollock, Felix Weil and Georg Lukács, “In the Coffee House” describes the atmosphere of Café Laumer, where the members of the institute argued with each other and encountered competing intellectual cliques such as the circle around Karl Mannheim and Norbert Elias. In the chapter “On the Couch” the Institute for Social Research cooperates with the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute and Erich Fromm. Horkheimer wanted to represent this cooperation personally and do an analysis. When he was told that this was only possible if he had a “symptom,” he cited his inability to give lectures freely. Horkheimer was allowed on the couch.
The “spatial and network-historical narrative,” as Lenhard calls his book, gains its narrative charm from the fact-based, literary-formed opening scenes at the beginning of each chapter. In addition, there is the interpretation of key texts such as Horkheimer’s comparison of traditional and critical theory or the “Dialectics of Enlightenment” written together with Theodor W. Adorno. Originally based on Marx, then distancing itself more and more clearly from Marxism, the search for a theory with emancipatory aspirations that would do justice to the complexity of late capitalism and its inherent contradictions remained the guiding principle of the Institute for Social Research.
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Horkheimer/Adorno to have a say
“Constellations” play a major role in Lenhard’s book. It begins with the friendship pact between Pollock and Horkheimer, who, with the help of their parents, bought a villa in the Taunus in 1922 and founded the institute there “initially mentally” two years before the official opening. Ironically apostrophized by their companions as “Lenin & Trotsky, a couple of friends”, they had chosen a life motto: “The interior always precedes the exterior”. This motto became the guiding principle for the institute. It owed its public impact to individual big names; internally, despite the inevitable formation of cliques, it operated as a collective. Women played a big role in this.
In addition to wives like Maidon Horkheimer and Margarete (“Gretel”) Adorno, who has a doctorate in chemistry, this also included secretaries like Juliette Favez, who took on the role of “office manager” in Geneva. Nobody disputed the “dictatorship of the director” with Max Horkheimer. He was originally hesitant to employ Adorno, whose vanity and overestimation of himself displeased him; in the later phase of the institute he refused to give his habilitation to “a gifted person named Jürgen Habermas who constantly claimed intellectual superiority.”
But Horkheimer was also capable of collegial care: When Leo Löwenthal, who was waiting in Geneva for his passage to the USA, was worried about his passage on the ship, Horkheimer, who was in New York, reassured him that his wife would ensure that Löwenthal had a meal with every ship meal additional “portion of cauliflower” is served. “If you wire to me personally, I’ll arrange caramel pudding.”
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Lenhard shows how much the institute benefited from financial policy cleverness. In this way it was possible to keep the foundation capital out of the reach of the Nazi authorities and to ensure the survival of the institute in the various places of its exile. When the American authorities increasingly targeted German emigrants after the United States entered the war, the FBI had difficulty finding its way through the thicket of trusts that managed the institute’s assets – it was, writes Lenhard, “at that point not only a research institute, but also a financial empire”. When Horkheimer and Adorno moved to California, Hannah Arendt said they both lived there on a grand scale, “the institute here in New York is purely administrative. No one knows what is being administered other than money.”
Unlike Walter Benjamin, most of the Jewish members of the institute managed to escape Nazi persecution. What remains astonishing is that many of them underestimated the impending danger of war in 1938. The institute’s return to Frankfurt was marked by enthusiasm for the reconstruction of a country that had been morally and physically destroyed. Then the student revolt rabidly questioned the critical potential of the “Frankfurt School”. The “Café Marx” was a thing of the past.
Stephan Lessenich, its current director, wants to free the Institute for Social Research from the “pressing burden of the history of great men and earlier times” and has tasked it with “expanding the canon of reference theories to include queer feminist and posthumanist approaches, anti-racist and decolonial perspectives”. The institute’s guiding principle is now political correctness.
Philip Lenhard: Café Marx. The Institute for Social Research from its beginnings to the Frankfurt School. CH Beck, 624 pages, 34 euros
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