It was a happy coincidence for critical social theory in Germany. In the early 1920s, Felix Weil, the son of a grain farmer, founded an institute for the study of scientific Marxism, which he one day handed over to the victorious German council state put hoped.

Thomas Thiel

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The Soviet Republic did not come, but the Institute for Social Research (IfS) became the foundation of one of the most influential schools of thought of the twentieth century: the Frankfurt School or Critical Theory, associated with names such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, Erich Fromm and Leo Loewenthal.

The founding decree 100 years ago is being celebrated today with a ceremony as a prelude to the anniversary year.

When the institute opened on June 22, 1924, it was believed that capitalism was on its last legs.

After the early departure of the founding director Carl Grünberg, the IfS was initially managed by the entrepreneur's son Max Horkheimer, who wrote the program of the critical theory with his inaugural speech in 1931: The aim was a criticism of society schooled on Marx and Freud, aimed at practical change.

The utopian perspective lay in the unabridged experience of art, which is the pole of tension of this theory to this day.

Dreams and childhood, music and literature were all part and parcel of this philosophy as a matter of course.

Despite the criticism of scientific positivism, Horkheimer believed that philosophy had to be based on an exact picture of society.

The individual sciences were to be subsumed in a social theory that never really took shape.

The empirical studies on prejudices, authoritarianism or co-determination were carried out rather conscientiously.

Schönberg and Beckett were closer to Adorno than the working atmosphere at Mannesmann.

Flirting with socialism

Ultimately, it was never quite clear what this theory was politically aimed at.

Horkheimer and Adorno flirted with socialism, but were already disappointed by its revolutionary subject, the worker.

So the emphasis of this actually practical philosophy was on theory (worst criticism: lack of theory) and its problem was finding the point at which it could become practical, which was still its goal.

Georg Lukács brought this to the famous formula of the Grand Hotel abyss.

What was meant was a circle of intellectuals who complained in a tone of exalted despair about a world in which they had settled comfortably.

One must not forget that the World War and National Socialism formed the real empirical basis of this theory.

In 1933 the institute was closed by the National Socialists.

They emigrated to New York via Geneva and docked there at Columbia University.

Horkheimer and Adorno later relocated to California's West Coast after a not-very-friendly parting from Institute staff.

Again and again, the two easily reconciled high-spirited appeals to humanity with petty intrigues.

The best-known work of the Frankfurt School was created in California.

The “Dialectic of Enlightenment” is a deep black text that sees the instrumentally derailed Enlightenment fatefully heading for the catastrophe that culminated in Auschwitz and, in its general rejection, itself bears totalizing traits.

The following generations worked hard to give critical theory a more hopeful turn, as a kind of tailwind for the young Federal Republic of Germany.

In 1951, Adorno and Horkheimer returned to the reopened Frankfurt Institute to train a phalanx of non-conformist intellectuals who would exert practical influence on the young republic.

The big hour could have been sixty-eight.

The opposite happened.

Horkheimer had long been moving in conservative waters and was shocked to see the rebellious students quoting his early, Marxist-tinged writings.

end of self-deception

For Adorno there was no doubt: this mob did not fulfill any theoretical claims.

It came to a head.

The institute was occupied by students and the police were called.

"Randale, Bambule, Frankfurt School" is still a popular slogan in the Frankfurt protest milieu.

He ignores reality.

Adorno's death the following year not only marked the end of the Frankfurt School (as Habermas thought) but also the end of a self-deception: the free society of free people - was there more than a romantic notion of it?