NAPLES 1925

A German literary theorist examines how the Neapolitan landscape influenced the philosophical movement known as Critical Theory.

Followers of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and other Frankfurt School luminaries do not typically associate Naples with Critical Theory or any part of its genesis. But as Mittelmeier shows, “that sulfurous, chaotic [and] exhausting city,” along with the neighboring island of Capri, likely played a far greater role both in the intellectual formation of Frankfurt School proponents and in how they thought about society, history, and modernity. The author takes as his starting point the late summer of 1925, when Adorno, then a music composition student, traveled with Frankfurter Zeitung editor Siegfried Kracauer to Naples, which by that time had become established as the charming “southernmost stop on the grand European educational journey.” There, and especially on Capri, they found themselves surrounded by an intoxicating mix of “nonconformists…dreamers and revolutionaries.” One in particular, literary scholar Walter Benjamin, had become fascinated by porosity, which he detected in the building materials—fashioned from volcanic stone—and social interactions he saw around Naples. Porosity in turn became a concept that Benjamin—and later Adorno—would use to understand and explain social and historical processes that they believed were based on a process of continual intermingling of contradictory elements. For Adorno (as for Benjamin), porosity held possibilities for what he would identify as “unforeseen constellations” out of which new combinations could be born. The author further observes that this concept would revolutionize how both men would structure their theoretical works: less as a clear progression of ideas leading to a definitive conclusion and more as a constellation of dissimilar elements. Vigorous, provocative, and persuasive, Mittelmeier’s book offers original insights that will undoubtedly prove invaluable to scholars of Critical Theory.

An exceptionally refreshing take on the origins of the Frankfurt School.