Café Marx

A new history of the Institute of Social Research that restores the women, students and workers behind its celebrated thinkers

The Frankfurt School and its leading theorists—Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and Marcuse—were the revolutionary heart of Weimar Germany. Their critiques of fascism and bourgeois liberalism reverberated around the world and reshaped modern thought. But with the rise of Nazism, the scholars of the Institute of Social Research fled into exile, not returning to Frankfurt until 1951.

In this revisionist account, Philipp Lenhard tells the story of the Institute itself: an engine for radical scholarship, and far more than its celebrity names. He recovers the forgotten women who worked there and the Jewish contexts of its founding, and introduces the students and activists, librarians and archivists, cleaners and janitorial staff who called the Frankfurt School home and helped build a globally influential body of thought.

The result restores a whole world of politics and ideas—and shows how much of today's intellectual life still runs through it.