I guess it’s tempting that every time you have a group/collective/society you look back and think of them as creative geniuses who were also great pals and just hung out a lot. That of course very very rarely was the case.
But of course we’d like to think of the whole Nouvelle Vague/Cahiers crew, for example, as characters in a sort of niche-y but really alive French sitcom. There is Jean-Luc the cynic, there is François, the dreamer. There is uptight Éric and there is Jacques, who nobody is able to figure out but who’s certainly the biggest genius. And sometimes “Melville”, the grouchy neighbor drops by. How much fun would that be!
Godard and Truffaut had a big falling out – which culminated in a letter Godard wrote to Truffaut after “La Nuit Américaine”, which Godard considered a lie. But even before that they weren’t like best friends. They were co-workers first and friends second, essentially. (I might be wrong. Please tell me if I am.)
And sometimes we’re aware of the friction, which makes it even more exciting, because it adds drama. Adorno, Arendt, Horkheimer, Kracauer, Benjamin and Marcuse often get lumped together (guess what they had in common…), which couldn’t be further from the truth. (Same goes for the Parisian people of the late 40s.)
There hasn’t been a single narrative of the Frankfurt School – maybe such a thing would be cheapening, maybe the idea itself isn’t German enough. Maybe to see these people not in the context of their ideas but their actual lived lives is strange, or scary. But it is important, too. Kracauer always was better informed than Adorno or Benjamin. He knew what was happening in parliament, they rarely did. And yet who wants to be Kracauer?