Grandhotel nad propastí - Životy myslitelů Frankfurtské školy – Jeffries Stuart (2022)

Thinking about society and culture can sometimes hurt. Both society and thinkers. If someone is interested in politics, society, and culture, they must have come across the term neo-Marxism. In the Czech Republic, it is often spoken of with prejudice — yet behind it lies one of the most vibrant intellectual currents of the twentieth century. Its most prominent representatives were German intellectuals like Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, who began to notice before World War II the contradictory effects that mass media and culture have on contemporary society. They observed social pathologies and attempted to name and perhaps even rectify them by creating critical theory at a new research institute in Frankfurt. However, after the war, the Frankfurt School dispersed around the world, along with its ideas. Benjamin committed suicide while fleeing from the Nazis, Adorno unsuccessfully tried to pursue a career in California, and Marcuse became an idol of the hippies... Grandhotel over the Abyss is a collective biography, a guide to neo-Marxist philosophy, and also somewhat a chronicle of the twentieth century. A critical chronicle.