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Siegfried Krakauer's  The Salaried Masses  explores the lives, the hopes, the dreams, and ultimate dissapointments of Berlin's pracarious middle class (named the "salariat" by Walter Benjamin) in the late 1920s. This is a class of people who are alienated from their work but paid just enough to consume a little extra. The salaried masses are immersed in Adorno's culture industry and suffer from Marx's alienated labor. They are unhappy but not desperate. Whereas the unemployed consider killing themselves, the salaried masses have just enough auspicious consumption to keep them thinking too hard about what's going on. In fact, as one interviewee remarks, thinking too hard is a distraction from what would otherwise be more interesting. The salaried masses, young and surrounded by commodities, have absorbed the ideas of the bourgeoisie, much like the characters in Georges Perec's 1965 novel  Things: A Story of the Sixties .  Alas, a mass of things does not...

  Martin Monath: A Jewish Resistance Fighter Among Nazi Soldiers By Nathaniel Flakin Pluto Press, $20.00. Martin Monath lived during tumultuous times; his short life intersected with events that included both World Wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, and the Spanish Civil War. He was, as author and translator Nathaniel Flakin explains, a “child of war and revolution” (p. 7). Monath lived several lives under a host of different names, made many friends (and many more enemies), and died twice. Reshaping Monath’s life through a variety of hard-to-find sources, Flakin expertly places the story of one man within the larger context of what the late Eric Hobsbaum termed the Age of Extremes . Monath’s door into Marxism and the struggle for proletarian emancipation was not an uncommon one for young Jewish men growing up Berlin. In 1917, the Balfour Agreement sealed Britain's support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Antisemitism — what August Bebel call...