Grand Hotel Abyss - Stuart Jeffries

In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came
together to at Victoria Alle 7, Frankfurt, determined to explain the
workings of the modern world. Among the most prominent members of what
became the Frankfurt School were the philosophers Walter Benjamin,
Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Not only would they
change the way we think, but also the subjects we deem worthy of
intellectual investigation.

Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and
storytelling to reveal how the Frankfurt thinkers gathered in hopes of
understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism. Some
of them, forced to escape the horrors of Nazi Germany, later found exile
in the United States. By taking popular culture seriously as an object of study-whether it was
film, music, ideas, or consumerism-the Frankfurt School elaborated upon
the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanised society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.