Praxis and Poiesis: Toward an Intellectual Biography of Herbert Marcuse [1898-1979

Abstract

The affluent, assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie of pre-World War I central Europe has proved to be an almost predictable source of some of the century's most radical political ideas: the elder Lukaics managed the largest bank in Szeged, Walter Benjamin's father was a wealthy Berlin art dealer, Horkheimer's was a prosperous member of the Stuttgart textile trade, and the list goes on. From rather modest beginnings, Carl Marcuse (the name, incidentally, is genealogically identical to that of Karl Marx) also established himself in the flourishing German textile industry, but prudently transferred his holdings to real estate before the war. The Marcuse family moved from Berlin to the fashionable suburb of Charlottenburg, and Herbert Marcuse, like so many of his future colleagues, grew up in circumstances which enabled him to take for granted the material achievements of industrial capitalism and set his sights elsewhere. Herbert Marcuse's early education also followed a familiar pattern: the humanistic, civic and religious ideas of the Prussian and Jewish cultures were presented in their: official form, purified of their subversive or transcendental content, only to return with vengeance later in his life. Even at that time, however, a rebellious instinct could be discerned: his rabbi once took it upon himself to assure Herbert that it was most unlikely that he would ever become a productive member of society (not a bad prophecy), and the public Gymnasium instruction in the German classics was being undermined his early attraction to the writers of the French avant-garde (especially Gide), the esoteric works of Stefan George and his circle, and the early novels and stories of Thomas and especially Heinrich Mann. When his interests began to outstrip the means of a schoolboy to satisfy them, Herbert negotiated an elaborate system of credits with his father, which he would be permitted to forego his place at the family's sumptuous supper table in return for money with which to buy books. His one early link with the Marxian proletariat: he was indeed driven to his work by the lash of hunger.