For more than a half century I have primarily concerned myself with the sociology of literature and the problem of mass culture. With financial support from the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, I began in 1926 with studies on German writers in the nineteenth century.' In these studies one may discern the socially critical spirit which motivated this group of young scholars at the Institute to reject conventional research methods and to seek a new and bolder mode of analyzing material in the social and human sciences-in short, to dare to break through the walls of the academic ivory tower where specialists pursued their professional interests without any social or moral consciousness. I had the privilege of being one of the first members of this group, which I joined in 1926 at the invitation of Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock. The years of my academic training were devoted to the study of sociology and literature. Later, in my first independent work, I attempted to apply what I had learned from Marx, Freud, and the great philosophical tradition of Europe to a new appraisal of European literature since the Renaissance. Like many other intellectuals in my circles of that time, I was convinced of the decadence of Western society. All of us felt Hitler's threatening advance and by the same token considered the rest of the