Adorno may refer to:

Ernst Bloch (German pronunciation: [ˈɛʁnst ˈblɔx], July 8, 1885 – August 4, 1977) was a German Marxist philosopher.

Bloch was influenced by Hegel, Marx, and novelist Karl May. Counted also among his influences are apocalyptic and religious thinkers as diverse as gnostics like Valentinus (see "Spirit of Utopia") and Thomas Müntzer (see "Thomas Müntzer als Theologe der Revolution"). He established friendships with Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Bloch's work focuses on the concept that in a humanistic world where oppression and exploitation have been eliminated there will always be a truly revolutionary force.

Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen, the son of a Jewish railway-employee. After studying philosophy, he married Else von Stritzky, daughter of a Baltic brewer in 1913, who died in 1921. His second marriage with Linda Oppenheimer lasted only a few years. His third wife was Karola Piotrowska, a Polish architect, whom he married in 1934 in Vienna. When the Nazis came to power, they had to flee, first into Switzerland, then to Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, and finally the USA. Bloch returned to the GDR in 1949 and obtained a chair in philosophy at Leipzig. When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, he did not return to the GDR, but went to Tübingen in West Germany, where he received an honorary chair in Philosophy. He died in Tübingen.

Harald Franz Schmidt (born August 18, 1957 in Neu-Ulm, Bavaria) is a German actor, writer, comedian and television entertainer best known as host of two popular German late-night shows.

As son of refugees who fled from South Moravia (now Czech Republic) in 1945, Schmidt spent his youth in Swabian Nürtingen, where he went to grammar school. Due to his strict Catholic upbringing he devoted time to the Roman Catholic church, serving as choirmaster and playing the organ.

At the age of 21, Schmidt went to Stuttgart to attend drama school for three years. After that, he gained on-stage experience at Städtische Bühne (Municipal Stage) in Augsburg. His first role was that of the 2nd Mamaluke in Lessing's Nathan the Wise. In 1984, Harald Schmidt became a text writer for the cabaret Kom(m)ödchen in Düsseldorf and in 1986, was honoured as "Best Newcomer cabaret artist" and toured through Germany with his own show.

Before long, TV noticed the talented young comedian and in 1988 Schmidt began to host his first TV show, MAZ ab. This was followed by shows like Psst! and Schmidteinander, but the biggest boost to his career occurred in 1992, when he started hosting the popular Saturday night show, Verstehen Sie Spaß? (a variation of Candid Camera). Schmidt was awarded Germany's most important TV award, "Adolf-Grimme-Preis", which would be followed by many others. Just one year later, he was honoured as the "Entertainer of the year" and awarded the famous Bambi award and the Golden Camera.

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (German pronunciation: [ˈvaltɐ ˈbɛnjamiːn]; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German-Jewish literary critic, philosopher, social critic, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. Combining elements of German idealism or Romanticism, Historical Materialism and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism, and has sometimes been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Among his major works as a literary critic are essays on Goethe's novel Elective Affinities; the work of Franz Kafka and Karl Kraus; translation theory; the stories of Nikolai Leskov; the work of Marcel Proust and perhaps most significantly, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.

His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose critical aesthetics developed epic theatre and its Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarisation, alienation). An earlier influence was friend Gershom Scholem, founder of the academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism.

John David Ebert (born June 26, 1968) is a writer, thinker & raconteur interested in mythology and popular culture and the myriad ways they intersect with modern life. He is respected for the breadth & depth of his scholarship and generosity in sharing it, most propitiously in his engrossing series of You Tube videos on subjects ranging from Rudolph Steiner, Oswald Spengler, Jean Gebser & Marshall McLuhan, to Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley & The Beatles.

John David Ebert's style of discourse has been described variously as conversational, relaxed, intimate, erudite, witty, discursive, polemical, off-the-cuff, solemn, brilliant. His growing audience, while tending to skew towards those who came of age around or after the end of the Cold War, seems united less by age or background than the shared awareness of love of learning & wisdom....a feeling of being short-changed if not outright betrayed by compulsory and higher "Education"....which Ebert's spontaneous penchant for thinking extemporaneously vividly illuminate Plato's observation that learning is a form of remembering -- a natural, joyful state.