Institute-taught critical theory seeded the left intellectual current inside the German SDS

Evidence

The critical thinking conveyed to students by Adorno and Horkheimer, and by other associates of the Institute such as Oskar Negt and Jürgen Habermas, had made a vital contributionboth in Frankfurt and in a few other cities such as Marburg, Berlin, Göttingen and Münsterto the development of an intellectual left within the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), the league of German socialist students. The Frankfurt students, in particular, regarded working with the SDS not as a springboard to a party career in the SPD, but as a focus for committed socialist theoretical work and for political activity based on that. The dissatisfaction of the SPD party executive with the party’s student organization grew in proportion to the increase in the influence of these left intellectuals within the SDS. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 589

Categorization

• XREF: Links the Frankfurt Institute’s teaching mission directly to the student movement that would later turn on Adorno — the causal hinge of the 1968 rupture.
• DEFINE: Identifies the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) and the later SHB as the institutional vehicles of student left politics.