The Frankfurt School

Hannah Arendt's birthplace in Linden (Bernd Schwabe)

Maps provide the directions to particular villages and towns along a road. Psychogeography is another way of measuring connectivity and finding one's way. Just as a city is created to provides optimal conditions for survival in terms of sustenance and commerce, intellectual history has its centers which  tender to spiritual and emotional conditions. For instance you have the Weimar Republic and the Frankfurt School, the Geneva accords, The Black Mountain School and Silicon Valley. Camp David is named after Dwight D. Eisenhower's grandson. There is Greenwich Mean Time. Bretts'on Woods, a ski resort in New Hampshire, is synomous, with the monetary system, Telluride with film. Yalta, where Chekov's "The Lady With a Dog," takes place, was also where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt convened after the Second World War. You can even map the connection between thinkers. Being and Time, the famous Heidegger tome gave birth to Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Where would Bishop Berkeley "esse est percipi," "to be is to be perceived" be without Descartes "cogito ergo sum?"

listen to Joan Baum's NPR review of The Kafka Studies Department

and listen to "(I'm a) Roadrunner" by Junior Walker and the All-Stars