The German Jewish Occult: Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the Philosophy of the “Irrational”

In this article, I discuss the dealings of a group of well-known German Jewish authors, notably Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin, with esoteric concepts. All of them were associated in some way with Frankfurt School critical theory, arguably the most significant strand of Marxist cultural criticism. While their critique of esotericism and occultism has been widely noted, I take a more complex approach, focussing on their selective appropriations of the so-called “irrational” (from Kabbalah and Schelling to Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and C.G. Jung). In post-war West Germany, authors such as Jürgen Habermas have subsequently treated the specific Messianic concepts developed in this tradition as representative expressions of Judaism/Jewish thought. In what follows, I disentangle these various traditions.