The first comprehensive history of the Frankfurt School in its American exile: A Q&A with author Thomas Wheatland

Thomas Wheatland, who once worked in editorial acquisitions at Harvard University Press, is an assistant professor of German history at Assumption College. This year, Wheatland published The Frankfurt School in Exile, a book with pioneering research on the influence of German intellectuals on postwar American thought, with University of Minnesota Press. He recently answered a few questions from UMP with regard to the hugely influential Frankfurt School; its leader, Max Horkheimer; and Wheatland's own experiences shaping this book.

Q: What is perhaps most generally misunderstood about The Frankfurt School? What about the school and the Horkheimer Circle did you hope to make people more aware of in conceptualizing this book?

A: In a letter of June 29, 1940, Max Horkheimer eloquently developed one of the metaphors that became central to the history of critical theory in America. Writing to actress and screenwriter Salka Viertel, Horkheimer despaired: “In view of everything that is engulfing Europe and perhaps the whole world, our present work is of course essentially destined to being passed on through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle [Flaschenpost].” This trope of the Flaschenpost has been taken literally by many of the historians and scholars of critical theory and has helped to reinforce the illusion of the Frankfurt School’s “splendid isolation” in the United States. The traditional account further proclaims that if critical theory was cast (like a message in a bottle) into a dark and angry sea during the 1930s and 1940s, it was spectacularly found and uncorked on the beaches of the U.S. by New Leftists, hippies, and flower children in the 1960s. The image of the message in a bottle underplays the interactions between critical theory and American intellectual life during the Frankfurt School’s years in exile, and it simultaneously helps to overplay the relationship between the Horkheimer Circle’s legacy and the American New Left. That is why this metaphor of the Flaschenpost, as much as I find it poetic and powerful, needs to be broken and discarded. This book has been an attempt to do just that.

Read the rest of Thomas Wheatland's Q&A here.