The Frankfurt School and Frankfurt

The Jewish Museum in Frankfurt invited unit-design to participate in a competition to design an exhibition at the Jewish Museum dealing with the remigration of members of the Frankfurt School after the Second World War. The exhibition covered contemporary history before, during and after the war and, in particular, with the national and transnational connections of protagonists such as Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm and Friedrich Pollock, who wanted to play an active role in democratic reconstruction. The Nazis had compelled the emigration from the Institute for Social Research, founded in 1923. The exiled members' journeys took them via Geneva and Paris to New York. Not all of them survived; some, such as Walter Benjamin, succumbed to the terror as they fled.

The design for the exhibition, which also dealt with the resurrection of the Institute for Social Research, attempted to give an overview with a strongly geometric spatial concept and to provide deeper insight with the aid of exhibits in the form of media and artifacts.