The Frankfurt School

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2010

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the Inartime podcast. For more details about Inartime and for our terms of use
0:05.4	Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy the program
0:12.5	Hello to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric
0:15.9	So wrote the German thinker Theodor Adorno in the wake of the Second World War
0:20.9	This famous aphorism was more than a bleak one liner
0:24.0	It came from the heart of a philosophy that Adorno and his intellectual comrades had developed over the previous quarter
0:29.6	A century of turmoil. Adorno, Max Hawkeimer, Walter Benjamin and others that come together in an independent institute set up at Frankfurt University in the aftermath of the First World War
0:40.2	The Frankfurt School, as they became known, set themselves the goal of making sense of 1920's Germany
0:46.1	How they wanted to know did capitalism keep workers and consumers cooperating to find out they turned not to the economy but to culture
0:54.2	But then in the 1930's they were forced to flee the Nazis and ended up in California
0:58.3	Where these austere German mandarins crashed into the full tilt alien technical abrasionist of the 1940s popular culture
1:05.4	It spurred them into developing a highly influential worldview that sought to make sense of both Hollywood and the Holocaust
1:12.6	We'd me to discuss the ideas and impact of the early Frankfurt School of Raymond Goys
1:17.2	Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge
1:20.8	Esther Leslie, Professor in Political aesthetics of Birkbeck College University of London and Jonathan Ray
1:26.8	freelance historian and philosopher Jonathan Ray, can you set the political and intellectual scene of 1920's Germany for a split?
1:35.1	Well, I think when we look back at it from the point of view of the 21st century
1:38.5	We tend to think of it as the prelude to the rise the power of Hitler and the Nazi Party
1:44.4	But of course that wasn't how it felt to people at the time and it's very it's very difficult to make sense of the
1:50.4	20s in Germany, it's very paradoxical because it's dominated by two completely different moods
1:54.8	There's a mood of despair. There's been the experience of defeat in the
1:59.6	1914-18 war I think
	...

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