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Hello, to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, so wrote the German thinker

Theodore Adorno in the wake of the Second World War.

This famous aphorism was more than a bleak one-liner. It came from the heart of a

philosophy that Adorno and his intellectual comrades had developed over the previous quarter century

of turmoil. Adorno, Max Horkheimer,

Walter Benjamin and others had come together in an independent

Institute set up at Frankfurt University in the aftermath of the

First World War. The Frankfurt School, as they became known,

set themselves the goal of making sense of 1920s Germany.

How they wanted to know did capitalism keep workers and consumers cooperating to find out they turned not to the economy but to culture.

But then in the 1930s they were forced to flee the Nazis and ended up in California

where these austere German mandarins crashed into the full tilt alien technical abrasness of the 1940s population. Mandarin's sense of both Hollywood and the Holocaust.

With me to discuss the ideas and impact of the early Frankfurt school

are Raymond Goyes, professor in the faculty philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

Esther Leslie, professor in politicalhetics at Birkbeck College, University of London,

and Jonathan Wray, freelance historian and philosopher.

Jonathan Wray, can you set the political and intellectual scene of 1920s Germany for a place?

Well I think when we look back at it from the point of view of the 21st century we tend to think of it as the

prelude to the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi Party.

But of course that wasn't how it felt to people at the time.

...