Oss & The Frankfurt School: Recycling The “damaged Lives Of Cultural Outsiders”

Transcript

American intelligence agencies during World War II recycled European sociologists and psychologists to analyze German radio propaganda, study American radio music and programming to boost morale at home, and to psychoanalyze Hitler. Frankfurt School sociologists Theodor Adorno, Paul Lazarsfeld, Herta Herzog, who along with Erich Fromm, originally worked on Adorno’s classic The Authoritarian Personality were involved in the Princeton Radio Project, which later morphed into Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Research. Lazarsfeld, Adorno and Herzog did research on American radio for OWI/ONI. Sociologists Herbert Marcuse and Hans Speier, as well as psychologist Ernst Kris worked for OSS. The work of Erik Erikson was also utilized by American intelligence. How the theories of these radical refugee scholars was used by military intelligence is also discussed.