NEWSLETTER - FALL 2009
In a 1964 tribute to his longtime friend, Theodor W. Adorno described Siegfried Kracauer as “a curious realist” who “thinks with an eye that is astonished almost to helplessness but then suddenly flashes into illumination.” An emphasis on looking, observing, and discovering is indeed central to Kracauer’s writings, which probe issues of modernity and modern mass culture in a variety of realms that range from film and photography to the circus, sports, operetta, detective novels, and tourism. A theorist with a keen interest in the complexly constructed, pluralistic nature of cultural modernity, particularly its visual and optic dimension, Kracauer’s discussions of the surface level of things, the ornamental, and the cult of distraction are part of a larger project that reclaims experience for contemporary theory and makes him an unacknowledged predecessor for current trends in Cultural Studies. Kracauer’s proclivity for the trivial, the fragmented, and the ephemeral led Walter Benjamin to characterize him as a “rag-and-bone man, early—at the dawn of the revolutions.”
An architect by training, with a PhD in engineering (on the art of wrought iron), Siegfried Kracauer (Frankfurt, 1889 – New York, 1966) was best known during his lifetime as a journalist and novelist, as well as a critic, historian and theorist of film. As editor-in-chief of the Frankfurter Zeitung’s Berlin bureau, he published over two thousand articles on all aspects of contemporary culture, until, following Hitler’s rise to power, he was dismissed for political reasons. His more programmatic feuilleton pieces of that period are gathered in the volume The Mass Ornament. Published in Germany in 1963, this collection contains the only writings available in English from that period, apart from Die Angestellten/The Salaried Masses, a sociological study that employs investigative journalism to paint a portrait of the then-emerging class of white-collar workers (who were also avid movie-goers). A friend of Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Joseph Roth, Kracauer was at the forefront of Weimar Germany’s public intellectuals, attuned to the most heated cultural debates of his time while always mindful of how to address a larger public. During his exile in France (1933-1941), he supported himself by working for various Swiss newspapers and by writing a biography of the composer Jacques Offenbach. Through the intervention of colleagues and friends associated with the New School in New York, he escaped to the United Sates in 1941, where he began researching at MOMA on the use of film propaganda and the history of German film while eking out a living writing for the Nation, Harper’s Magazine, New Republic and the New York Times Book Review. The publication of From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film in 1947 established his reputation as a founder of the sociology of film, followed by the equally influential Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960). During the last years of his life, Kracauer was associated with Columbia University while simultaneously working on a philosophy of history that was published posthumously as History: The Last Things Before the Last (1969).
Apart from Kracauer’s history of Weimar cinema and his work on film theory, his writings have often been eclipsed by those of his better-known colleagues Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Leo Löwenthal, whose institutional support he could not rival, or by the work of Benjamin, whose rise to critic extraordinaire in the last decades stands in stark contrast to the widespread neglect of Kracauer’s works. As Gertrud Koch, the author of the only English-language monograph on Kracauer, wrote in 2000: “The reception of Kracauer still stands on unsteady feet, to the extent that it stands at all.” Over the past few years, Kracauer’s work has admittedly gained some influence on contemporary visual and cultural studies, but it remains widely underappreciated. A number of factors contribute to this state of affairs. Few of his works from the 1920s and 30s have been translated into English (notably, none of his novels), while his English writings from his exile period suffer from his limited command of the language. Even in Germany, however, a full assessment of Kracauer’s work has yet to take place. A critical edition of his collected works is only now nearing completion. What is more, Kracauer’s highly eclectic style and his open disregard for entrenched academic disciplines have resulted in repeated misreadings of his works, some of them productive, but most of them detrimental. In this country, Kracauer is still best known for his history of Weimar cinema, From Caligari to Hitler, in which he attempts to make sense of Hitler’s rise to power from a postwar perspective. Although vastly influential, the book displays little of the sophistication of his Weimar writings and in recent years has rightly been taken to task for its conflation of film history and a psychological reading of a ‘national disposition.’ Similarly, his Theory of Film has been criticized for what critics perceived as naïve realism, often because of a lack of understanding of Kracauer’s approach to phenomenology (a fate he shares with André Bazin). Especially in this country Kracauer never fully persuaded his critics that for him film “was never anything but a means of making certain sociological and philosophical points.”
