A fractious Europe, a failing currency, a challenged economy, populist parties on the rise, a divided left, migration from the east, an atmosphere of fear combined with social and sexual liberalism. The parallels between Britain today and Germany in the 1920s may well make this a compelling moment to revisit those postwar German thinkers who gathered in what was known as the Frankfurt school for social research – something akin to a Marxist thinktank, though one whose policy papers and brilliant books fed future generations as much or more than their own.

Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, together with the close, but formally unattached Walter Benjamin, and from the 1970s Jürgen Habermas, were the core constellation. With the rise to power of the Nazis, the school’s Frankfurt headquarters had to be abandoned. Double persecution, as Marxists and Jews, began in 1933. Adorno, a brilliant musician as well as theorist, went to Oxford first to study with Gilbert Ryle. The school itself moved briefly to Switzerland and then the US, settling in what novelist Thomas Mann called “German California”. Despite their unchanged stance on capitalism, some of them were recruited for wartime intelligence work in the battle against the Nazi regime.

Marcuse held out some hope and stepped into the fray. During the Vietnam war, he took on the mantle of a cultural hero

Between them they married Freud to Marx, then largely gave up hope, after the failure of the German uprising in 1918, of a revolutionary working class, and drew on Marx, Kant and Hegel to engage in a rigorous critique of capitalism and its technocratic systems. Crucially, they emphasised the ways in which consumerism and mass culture – from film to TV to pop music – lull us into a pleasant enough ideological slumber. It is thanks to the Frankfurt school that all aspects of culture are seriously studied today.

Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) marked an early dismantling of the myth of progress and its concomitant exaltation of reason, while Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), begun before the war, probed the question that taxed them all: why had the German people succumbed to Hitler’s seductions and engaged in a war that took barbarism to newly horrific dimensions?

Given the philosophical difficulty of their project, it might seem surprising that critical theory – the name given to the Frankfurt school’s intellectual practice – is alive and well and reaches parts other branches of university enterprise often fail to reach. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing introduced Walter Benjamin’s resonant analysis of art in an age of mechanical reproduction to millions. In his latest book, White Sands, Geoff Dyer makes a pilgrimage to Adorno’s modest LA home in Brentwood, where many of the aphorisms in Minima Moralia were penned. At the start of Jonathan Franzen’s bestselling The Corrections, the impecunious hero sells his collection of Frankfurt school books to a secondhand dealer.

Stuart Jeffries finds the title of his lively group biography in the Hungarian Marxist critic György Lukács’s ironising description of the Frankfurt school. Having taken up residence in a sumptuous grand hotel, they can indulge their pessimism from a safe distance and analyse the woes of the world rather than engage in the struggle for change. Well before Adorno’s 1966 book of that name, the group was engaged in negative dialectics. Jeffries is an able though combative narrator, drawing in large swaths of material but demanding that his biographees justify their projects and behaviour at every point. He’s worried about their class credentials. He doesn’t quite trust intellectuals for whom thinking seems work enough. Fine journalist that he is, he wants to interrogate the fact that the Frankfurt headquarters was built with capitalist money, that research was done for governments. He also wants to question their lack of active political engagement early on and in the radical 1960s and 70s when the call from students came.

For Benjamin at the last, hope wasn’t there: he committed suicide at the Spanish border while fleeing the Nazis

Herbert Marcuse is the exception: his Eros and Civilisation and bestselling One-Dimensional Man influenced the 1968 generation of radicals, whether Marxist, liberationist, hippy or just young. Then Black Panther Angela Davis was among them. Marcuse held out some hope, at least of art, and stepped into the fray, even writing on Marxism and feminism. During the anti-Vietnam war years, he took on the mantle of a cultural hero.

Adorno, the greater philosopher, had meanwhile returned to Frankfurt. Though he supported some student action, he was also critical of what he called “left fascism”. In January 1969, he called in police to dislodge an “occupation”. As legend has it, his death was hastened by a rowdy “Busenaktion” in which three women bared their breasts during a lecture. He died of a heart attack on 6 August that year.

Jeffries has set himself a daunting task in trying to combine life stories, a rapidly changing context of time and place, as well as explication of difficult philosophical work, some of which he doesn’t seem always to relish. Direct contact provides a fascinating interview with Jürgen Habermas, a rebel against the older Frankurtians as they were against their own fathers. He finds Habermas’s optimism a little Pollyanna-ish, but something of a relief. His ideas about democracy and the public sphere are compelling as is his system for working out ways in which “the citizens of a political community could still exercise collective influence over their social destiny through the democratic process”.

Jeffries’s favourite among his cast is palpably the great Walter Benjamin, the Kafka of critical theory. The last words of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man come from Benjamin. “It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.” For Benjamin at the last, hope wasn’t there: he committed suicide at the Spanish border while fleeing the Nazis.

Little wonder, given the history of the 20th century, that the Frankfurt school gave us intellectual pessimism and negative dialectics. Jeffries’s biography is proof that such a legacy can be invigorating.

Lisa Appignanesi’s Trials of Passion (Virago) is out now in paperback. Grand Hotel Abyss is published by Verso (£18.99). Click here to buy it for £15.57