American culture

The Frankfurt School: Lost in America

A RANT

(Image c/o wikiwand. Early Brutalism?)

THE PROBLEM with our intellectual class is how easily impressed they are with the facade of intellectualism, especially when presented in a university setting.

THE CLASSIC example of such is the so-called Frankfurt School of German Marxist intellectuals who set up shop in the United States (at Columbia University in New York) when the Austrian paper hanger and his crew of violent misfits took power in Germany in 1933.

New York academics were of course happy to have such distinguished names operating on their turf. Horkheimer! Marcuse! Adorno! Fromm! “The Frankfurt School”– in America!

Unfortunately, the great minds transplanted across an ocean were disconnected from their roots, in the sense that America was not Europe. Due to the circumstances of its founding and settling, America had become a unique culture: mostly lower-class Scotch-Irish, African, Native American, Irish, Jewish, Italian, and other influences mixed together in a blender. Best evidenced by the rise of rock n’ roll in the early-to-mid 1950’s, with origins tracing back to the 1800’s.

Rock n’ roll? Chuck Berry? Bill Haley? Little Richard?? Elvis Presley??! Our well-schooled recently arrived Frankfurt visitors couldn’t comprehend it. A barrage of chaotic energy blasting from 45 rpm vinyl disks on turntables. “What is this?” they asked. To them it sounded like pulsating screeches from an alien planet. They scrambled for an explanation. As the musical contagion– sprung from black churches, Appalachian porches, and Memphis/New Orleans/Chicago/New Jersey streetcorners– quickly became commercialized via low-rent hustlers Leonard Chess, Alan Freed, Sam Phillips, Dick Clark, Berry Gordy Jr. and others, the Frankfurt Boys and their gullible follow-the-rules students came up with inapplicable theories of top-down “masscult” and other status quo reactionary rationalizations, not realizing that at the core of the rock n’ roll explosion sat a simple truth: this was American DIY up-from-below folk music. Something Marxists should’ve been able to appreciate.

But the German professional intellectuals were already committed to austerely elitist varieties of classical music and other difficult or inscrutable art forms, and Marxism had by then already lost whatever populist views it’d once held, had become a thoroughly institutionalized Ivory Tower philosophy. As the clueless buttoned-down expats from Europe well represented.

-Karl Wenclas

Finding New Influences

HOW TO REVIVE AN ART

Winston Churchill, one of the first politicians to see the threat posed by an Austrian crackpot named Adolf, once said something to the effect that he could see farther into the future, because he looked further back into the past.

Following that strategy, searching for new influences and sources, I’ve been studying American cultural history of past decades. Current one examined: the 1930’s.

Which has led me to a uniquely overlooked novel: City for Conquest by Aben Kandel. A throwback to when novels were large of experience and passion, and attempted to encompass the world. Were critical standards different from what they are now (critics today favor inward-looking tomes of refined language), it might be considered one of the nation’s great novels, as it portrays the reality of America and its growth as well as any novel ever has. Instead, though, to know about the work, you have to find out about it by accident, inevitably by encountering the minimalist-by-comparison movie version. For the gatekeepers of “Literature-with-a-capital-L,” the novel might not be politically incorrect, but it’s stylistically unacceptable. Too raw. Too real.

The book is described in the Introduction to its latest printing as “vivid, overwrought, and melodramatic.”

My reaction: Awesome! This is exactly what the new novel will need to be to grab the attention of the unwary in this tumultuous, ultra-noisy civilization– every bit as noisy today near the end of 2023 as the way Kandel described it in 1937. I’m nine chapters into the book and it doesn’t disappoint. Its strengths adeptly utilized can be part of an upcoming and very necessary Culture Shock provided by never-before-seen kinds of literary products able to stand a once-great but currently-stagnant art form on its head.

Don’t bet against it.

-Karl Wenclas