IN his 1964 work, One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), one of the leading Frankfurt School theorists, deals with the idea that bourgeois society’s repression of sexuality inevitably leads to a vast reservoir of discontent. This notion, prior to the arrival of the so-called ‘Swinging Sixties’, had been a central part of Marxist psychology, but Marcuse set out to shatter this theory by declaring that the sexual liberation of the 1960s was something that had been deliberately permitted by the capitalist system as a way of misdirecting and, thus, containing the potential for true rebellion.
There is probably some truth to this idea, but one rather amusing story comes to us from Marcuse’s stepson, Osha Neumann, himself the surviving son of another Frankfurt School thinker called Franz Neumann (1900-1954). When questioned about Marcuse’s own private life, which, for an audience that had eagerly digested his work on sexuality had become a matter of curiosity, Osha revealed that his stepfather loved stuffed toys and
felt a particular kinship with hippos, not as they actually shit and fight in the forest, but as some teddy bear version.
Leaving aside the actual propensity for hippos to engage in forest-based combat, not to mention woodland defecation, Osha went on to say that Marcuse
would sit with this one stuffed hippo on his lap and project this image of a non-aggressive, non-genital sexuality.
Apart from the fact that this bizarre revelation has possibly transformed Marcuse from a multi-dimensional prophet into the besotted owner of a fluffy comfort-hippo, fellow Frankfurt thinker Theodor W. Adorno used to end letters sent to his wife with the words: “My dear, faithful Wondrous Hippo Cow.”
It’s difficult to explain why the Frankfurt School became so obsessed with hippos, but it does account for the fact that so many contemporary Marxists have wide mouths, barrel-shaped torsos and a tendency to behave in a very aggressive and unpredictable manner.
