theory was not reactionary retreat into a Grand Hotel Abyss, but principled withdrawal into a fortress of thought, a citadel from which, periodically, radical jeremiads were issued

the cosseted German childhoods of these thinkers as they were raised by and rebelled against their fathers

we still live in a world like the one Frankfurt School excoriated

his adult exile from Germany into picaresque vagabondage and tragic death on the run from the Nazis aged forty-eight in 1940

Its rage for reinventing itself and erecting very nearly bombastic architecture

for Benjamin, the act of remembrance through writing had a palimpsest, dialectical character that raced backwards and forwards in time

the childhoods that we will never again live through, except by means of the relatively pallid movement of imaginative creation

Nearly all the leading lights of the Frankfurt School – Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Löwenthal, Pollock, Fromm, Neumann – were resistant to the Weltanschauung transmitted by paternal authority, and many rebelled in various ways against their fathers who had become very materially successful.

But their relationship took a different turn as she became part of the coterie.

That said, Schopenhauer’s eschatology, which Horkheimer shared, is not Marx’s. For Schopenhauer, there is no ultimate redemption, no punishment, no heaven, be it on or beyond Earth. There is, rather, pointlessness on a cosmic scale