Postwar Europe let Horkheimer imagine dignified poverty amid ever-present horror.

Evidence

One can still imagine living in poverty here without having to rot away. Although nothing that happened here has passed without leaving its traces, and although the threat of fresh horrors is always present, our ideas about humaneness being able to etch itself into objectivity are surpassed by what we are immediately experiencing.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 422

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘Humaneness etching itself into objectivity’ is a compact statement of the Frankfurt commitment to reason embedded in material reality.
• XREF: connects to: Horkheimer found postwar Switzerland and France places where poverty could be lived with dignity; Post-war Switzerland struck Horkheimer as livable frugally yet haunted by recent horrors — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1707; Europeans in 1948 shared horror and hope beyond national parallels — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 651
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Horkheimer found postwar Switzerland and France places where poverty could be lived with dignity; Post-war Switzerland struck Horkheimer as livable frugally yet haunted by recent horrors — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1707; Europeans in 1948 shared horror and hope beyond national parallels — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 651

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer found postwar Switzerland and France places where poverty could be lived with dignity #corroborates (0.97)
• Post-war Switzerland struck Horkheimer as livable frugally yet haunted by recent horrors #corroborates (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1707