Philipp Lenhard

Café Marx: this was the flippant name given to the Institute for Social Research by friends and foes alike. And indeed, the beginnings of critical theory and the Frankfurt School lie in an engagement with Marxism. Based on extensive archival research, Philipp Lenhard tells the story of the people, networks, ideas and places that shaped the Institute and were in turn shaped by it. This makes it vividly tangible why the Frankfurt School shaped the great intellectual debates of the 20th century like no other. Just in time for the 100th anniversary of the inauguration of the Institute for Social Research (June 22, 1924), Lenhard presents Café Marx, the first up-to-date history of the Frankfurt School in decades, in which he illuminates completely new perspectives: For the first time, he tells the story of the women of the Frankfurt School and reports on the Jewish members of the Institute who fled into exile in the USA after 1933.

Philipp Lenhard is DAAD Professor of History and German at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2019, he published the first biography of Friedrich Pollock, Die graue Eminenz der Frankfurter Schule.