Berlin entertainment palaces rationalized leisure to console white-collar workers’ powerlessness

Evidence

At the very same moment at which the factories are being rationalized, these establishments [i.e. the Haus Vaterland', the Resi’ or Residenz-Kino, and the Moka-Efti' in Berlin] are rationalizing the amusements provided for the armies of non-manual workers. When I asked why they provide for the masses in a mass way, I was told by one of the staff bitterly, Because people’s lives are far too run down for them to be able to do anything sensible with themselves.’ Whether that is true or not, the masses are at home in these establishments, and in their own company. And it is not out of concern for the business interests of the owner, but because of their own, unconscious, powerlessness. They keep each other warm, they console each other for the fact that they cannot escape sheer quantity of numbers. Belonging to a mere quantity is made more bearable by their lordly and palatial surroundings. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 468 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Capitalism, it seemed, could no longer continue in its old forms, and even its supporters were at least discussing its possible collapse, in view of the world economic crisis and the emergence of authoritarian governments. But higher-level employees seemed to want a new economic order less than ever. White-collar workers were compensating for the unnoticed horror of normal existence' by adding the business of amusement, with its glitter and its distractions, to the business of work. It seemed that this was becoming an example which blue-collar workers were also wanting to follow, rather than that white-collar workers were moving closer to the attitudes of class-conscious proletariansalthough the offices of white-collar workers in larger firms had also been the victims of machinery and assembly-line methods during the period of rationalization between 1925 and 1928. — <cite>Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 469</cite> (#corroborates`, via linked claim)

Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanization has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably afterimages of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardized operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 107 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Berlin’s palatial entertainment palaces rationalized mass amusement in parallel with factory rationalization. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 468; Mass amusement reproduces the mechanized work process in leisure — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 107; Mass culture erases the distinction between leisure sport and working-week drudgery — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 129 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Berlin’s palatial entertainment palaces rationalized mass amusement in parallel with factory rationalization. #corroborates (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 468
• Workers compensated for meaningless rationalized jobs with glittering distractions instead of class consciousness #corroborates (0.88) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 469
• Mass amusement reproduces the mechanized work process in leisure #expands (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 107
• Mass culture occupies workers’ leisure with content stamped by the labor process they endure #expands (0.85)
• Mass culture’s technical rationality masks class domination as consumer demand. #corroborates (0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 94
• Mass culture erases the distinction between leisure sport and working-week drudgery #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 129
• Culture-industry pleasure leads back to the drudgery it promises escape from #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 360
• Do-it-yourself ideology re-absorbs formerly paid labor into leisure #expands (0.75)
• Taylorism deliberately breaks up skilled workers’ psycho-physical nexus #complicates (0.72)