FELLOW-TRAVELLERS

The surprisingly sunny origins of the Frankfurt School.

- THOMAS MEANEY

For German intellectuals between the wars, Italy offered a different view of life.

One of the more reliable chemical reactions in European culture occurs when particles of German mental matter enter Italy. Suddenly, German writers discover that life is worth living again, as they succumb to the view from the veranda. For going on three centuries, the Italian scene has disarmed some of the most distinctive spirits from the north. Goethe, Heine, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Theodor Fontane were each its willing captive. Even Nietzsche, master exposer of escape fantasies, treated Italy as a life preserver. "How have I merely endured living until now!" he wrote. Beholding the sky over Naples, tears welled in his eyes; he felt like someone approaching death, yet "saved at the last moment."

When, in the mid-nineteen-twenties, a group of German academics took a series of extended holidays in southern Italy, they knew they were following in a distinguished tradition. Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, and other figures, many of whom would come to constitute the body of Continental thought known as the Frankfurt School, all felt stymied in the inflationary pressure cooker of the Weimar Republic. They were young, Jewish, and Marxist, and they wanted to take a work holiday in a better climate, to get away from family obligations, and to see how far their Reichsmarks could go. In particular, they were attracted to Naples and also to Capri, where, earlier in the century, Maxim Gorky and a faction of Bolsheviks had founded a Communist academy that briefly made the island a hub of revolutionary activity.