We can't underscore enough how cray things were in Germany of the 1930s. You had Hitler as chancellor, rampant anti-Semitism, and the Nazi's unstoppable propaganda machine. Go rent Triumph of the W...

The gist of the Adorno-Benjamin beef was that Adorno thought Benjamin played too fast and loose with the idea of the Marxist commodity. The way that Benjamin describes the commodity in The Arcades...