Lowenthal’s scientific-materialist upbringing reacted against his orthodox Jewish grandfather.

Evidence

Leo Lowenthal was proud to have brought Erich Fromm to the Institute. Among those who later became members of the Horkheimer circle, Lowenthal was, next to Fromm, the one who had the closest ties with Judaism during the 1920s. Like Fromm, he was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1900. Lowenthal’s father, a middle-class doctor, had become a supporter of a mechanistic form of materialism and a firm believer in the power of science, in reaction against his own father, who was a strictly orthodox Jew. He encouraged his son to read Darwin, Haeckel, Goethe and Schopenhauer. In the afternoons, Leo Lowenthal joined schoolfriends from prosperous Jewish families to read and discuss Dostoevsky, Zola, Balzac and Freud. While still at school, he also met Adorno, and developed a lifelong love-hate relationship with him, first in connection with Siegfried Kracauer, who was a friend and mentor to both of them, and later on in connection with Horkheimer, who was research assistant with Cornelius to begin with, and eventually director of the Institute of Social Research. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 251

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the generational secularization dynamics described elsewhere in the Frankfurt School narrative and in broader assimilation history.