What is the Frankfurt School? (2)

Karl Korsch (1886-1961), a major early participant in the Frankfurt School

Since the Frankfurt School is commonly associated when it's mentioned in popular articles with only a few thinkers such as Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, it's useful to see the figures Schmid and Van Riejen highlight as the most prominent members. Some of them were associated with critical theory their entire careers. Others such as Erich Fromm later took a different direction in their work. Schmid and Van Riejen arrange them by alphabetical order of the last names:

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) is best known for his sociological work on the authoritarian personality.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) had a major influence in the field of literary criticism.

Franz Borkenau (1900-1957) from Vienna was a Communist activist after the First World War until his expulsion from the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1929, the same year he received support from the Institut for developing his study Die Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild [The Transition from the Feudal to the Bourgeois Worldview] (1934).

Hans Cornelius (1863-1947) was a philosophy professor at the University of Frankfurt who taught the Frankfurt School figures Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Leo Löwenthal.

Erich Fromm (1900-1980) is a famous psychologist who was associated with the Institut from 1930 to 1938 and was the founder of the Psychoanalytic Institute in Frankfurt in 1929 and an analysand of Hans Sachs, another famous figure in the history of psycholanalysis.

Kurt Albert Gerlach (1886-1922) was the first head of the Institut für Sozialforschung.

Henryk Grossmann (1881-1950) became an Assistant to Carl Grünberg, the Director of the Institut für Sozialforschung, in 1925 and authored the first book to appear in the Institut's series of publications, Das Akkumulations- un Zusammenbruchsgesetz des kapitalischtischen Systems (Zugleich eine Krisentheorie) (1930-31).

Carl Grünberg (1861-1940) could be said to have represented the Frankfurt School before there was a Frankfurt School as publisher of the Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung. (The editions for 1911-1916 are available online.), known more succinctly as the Grünberg Archives. In 1924, Grünberg took over the directorship of the Institut after Gerlach's 1922 death. He played a key role in the publication of the collected works of Marx and Engels, called in German the „Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe“ (MEGA). Ludwig von Friedeburg perhaps overreaches and bit in calling him "the father of Austro-Marxismus."

Aracdius Rudolf Lang Gurland (1904-1979), born Arkadij Gurland, fled Germand in 1933, worked with illegal socialist organizations against the Nazi dictatorship, and emigrated to the US in 1940. He collaborated with Franz Neumann on his book on Nazi Germany, Behemoth 1942, expanded edition 1944), which is still considered an important and useful source.

Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) was the editor of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and is credited with inventing the term "critical theory" to describe the general perspective of the journal and of the Frankfurt School. He became the director of the Institut in 1931.

Otto Kirschheimer (1905-1965) studied under the still-controversial political scientists Carl Schmitt; during the Second World War, he worked with the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), one of the predecessor organizations to the CIA.

Karl Korsch (1886-1961) was elected to the parliament of the German state (province) of Thuringia in 1924 on the KPD ticket but was expelled from the Party around 1927. He did a biography, Karl Marx (1938) while working for the Institut.

Siegfriend Kracauer (1889-1966) began sociology-based film criticism in Germany; wrote From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) and Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960).

Karl Landauer (1887-1945) was a psychoanalyst, an analysand of Sigmund Freud, a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society beginning in 1913, and Max Horkheimer's psychoanalyst. He died of hunger in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen.

Leo Löwenthal (1900-1993) was a philosophy Ph.D. who did his dissertation on the conservative 19th century Prussian Catholic reformer Franz von Baader (who incidentally introduced the world "proletariat" into German); eventually worked for the Voice of America (1949-53), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and as a professor of sociology at UC-Berkeley..

Georg Lukács (1885-1971) had quite a colorful career: People's Commisar of Education in the short-lived Soviet Republic of Hungary (1919), active collaborator with the Institut, refuge in the USSR during the Second World War, deported from Hungary to Rumania for supporting the reform Communism associated with the Hungarian uprising of 1956, reutrned to Hungary in 1957 and lived there until his death. Lukács is known for his brand of Marxism heavily influenced by Hegel and was an important theorists for East German (DDR) dissidents.

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was famous (or infamous!) as one of the main intellectual influences on the New Left in the US, West Germany and France in the 1960s. He took part in one of "soldiers' counsels" during the democratic revolution of 1918 in Germany, later studied under Martin Heidegger, did extensive philosophical work on Hegel, Marxism, and Freud, and was notably influenced by existentialism and phenemenology. Franz Neumann brought him to the OSS in 1943, and he worked for the federal government for several years, succeeding Neumann as headof the Research and Intelligence Division of the US State Department in 1947.

Franz Leopold Neumann (1900-1954) is best known as the author of the important study Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (1942; expanded edition 1944). Also from 1942 to 1947, he worked with Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War and then for the State Department; he contributed research to the preparation of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970)began work with the Institut in 1923, where over the next years he worked on the publication of the collected works of Marx and Engels and a major study of the planned economy in the Soviet Union.

Richard Sorge (1895-1944) is not remembered for the little scholarly work he did but for being one of the most talented spies known to history, successfully spying for the Soviet Union in Japan for most of the Second World War. A good account of his spycraft is found in Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring (1984) by Gordon Prange, Donald Goldstein and Donald Goldstein. He was eventually exposed as a spy and executed by the Japanese in 1944.

Andreas Sternheim (1890-1944) contributed to one of the Institut's most important publications, the Studien zu "Authorität und Familie" [Studies on Authority and the Family]. He died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

Paul Tillich (1886-1965) was a noted Christian Protestant theologian who after the Second World War served as a professor at Harvard and the University of Chicago.

Lucio Felix José Weil (1898-1975)was the Argentinian-born son of the wealthy agricultural trader Hermann Weil; Felix Weil studied national economics and played a key financial and organizational role in founding the Institut. His most important published work is The Argentine Riddle (1944).

Hermann Weil (1868-1927) wealthy agricultural trader and philanthropist who supported the founding of the Institut and whose son Felix Weil was the formal founder of the Institut in 1922 along with Kurt Albert Gerlach.

Karl August Wittfogel (1896-1988) was for a time (1926-27) the China expert for the KPD, left the KPD after the German-Soviet Non-Agression Pact (aka, the Hitler-Stalin Pact), became an American citizen in 1941, and eventually became decidedly anti-Communist. in his in his book Oriental Despotism, he described Russia (1947) as "Asiatic Russia".

There were also women associated with the Frankfurt School including Margaret Mead, and others less well known, and which didn't rate their own separate photo and biography pages in Grand Hotel Abgrund. But the main text of book is an essay my Michael Buckmiller, "Die 'Marxistische Arbeitswoche' 1923 und die Gründung des 'Institute für Sozialforschug'", describing a retreat in 1923 at which a number of intellectuals, including several women, discussed the initial perspective and direction of research of the Institut.

Buckmiller notes that it was Richard Sorge who formally convened the group. Sorge was the Assistant Director and was the lead official of the Institut after the death of Gerlach in 1922. Buckmiller notes that Julius Mader observed that most of the participants of the Marxist Working Week were at the time members of the KPD. But Buckmiller argues that it was not a formal KPD meeting. Felix Weil and other participants credited Karl Korsch as having developed the idea for the meeting.

Of those listed above, Georg Lukács, Friedrich Pollock and Karl Wittfogel were participants, in addition to Sorge, Korsch and Felix Weil. Buckmiller gives short sketches of the following particpants, whose presence is documented by a photo taken during the event: Gertrud Alexander (1882-1967) and her husband Eduard Ludwig Alexander (1884-1945); Hedda Korsch (1890-1982); Kuzuo Fukumoto (1894-1984); Margarete Lissauer and her future husband Béla Forgarasi (1891-1959); Hede Massing (1900-1981) and her future husband Juliam Gumperz (1898-1972); Christiane Sorge (1887-?), Richard's wife; Käthe Weil (1902-?), Felix' wife; Rose Wittfogel, Karl's wife; and, Konstantin Zetkin.

Buckmiller identifies by first initial and last names a few other possible particpants based on later memories of known participants: B. Roniger, H. Süßkind, W. Biehahn, H. Büchel, K. Frank, and, K. Schmückle.

The 1923 edition of Carl Grünberg's Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung reflects the early perspectives of the Frankfurt School, including pieces by Korsch, Lukács, and Felix Weil.

Many of the formal associates of the Institut in the early 1930s were Jewish. That along with their activity in left politics and their association with the Institut that was known for its Marxist approach created heavy incentives for many of them to emigrate out of Germany, as a number of them did.

Sources:

Grand Hotel Abgrund: Eine Photobiographie der Frankfurter Schule (1988), edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Willem van Reijen.

Göran Therborn, "The Frankfurt School", New Left Review Sept-Oct 1970

Rolf Hecker, Es begann mit einem Theorieseminar in Thüringen Trend Online Zeitung June 1999 (which apparently first appeared in Neues Deutschland)

Ludwig von Friedeburg Geschichte des Instituts für Sozialforschung, with an English summary.

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