Brecht once satirized the Institute as a magnate’s self-probing philanthropy

Evidence

See the excerpts in Iring Fetscher, “Bertolt Brecht and America,” in The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals (Salmagundi, 10/11 [Fall, 1969-Winter, 1970]). For example, on May 12, 1942, Brecht wrote in his diary: “With Eisler at Horkheimer’s for lunch. After that, Eisler suggests for the Tui novel: the story of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. A wealthy old man dies, worried over the suffering in the world, leaves in his will a substantial sum of money establishing an institute that shall search for the source of misery — which of course was he himself” (P. 264). — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 1478

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Institute’s founding by Hermann Weil and general concern about its philanthropic origins discussed elsewhere in the book; also, the joke mirrors the introspective self-critique of capitals’ contradictions central to critical theory.
• SEED: The joke about philanthropists endowing research into the misery they helped create could anchor an essay on institutional irony and the sociology of foundations.