KRACAUER, SIEGFRIED (1889–1966)

Architect, cultural critic, philosopher, writer, sociologist, film scholar, theorist of history.

Siegfried Kracauer was one of the most significant and original thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century. A German-Jewish intellectual writing in the heady atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, Kracauer first gained prominence in the 1920s and 1930s, when he published influential essays on such topics as mass culture, photography, urban modernity, the cultural logic of visual surfaces, and even the philosophy of the hotel lobby. A selection of these essays was later published as The Mass Ornament, a book that, as a whole, devotes itself to a micrological analysis of modernity and the masses as they converge on a wide range of surface phenomena, the marginal and ephemeral experiences that structure modern life.

While Kracauer is best known for the works on film theory that he published in English after he was forced to emigrate to the United States to escape Hitler's regime—especially From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film (1947) and Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960)—his significance for the development and structure of Weimar literature and cultural criticism cannot be overstated. He was known to a broadly educated audience as a leading contributor to the prestigious German newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung in the 1920s and also for such works as Soziologie als Wissenschaft (1922; Sociology as science). Devoting himself to the epistemological and political aspects of media aesthetics long before this practice became common in cultural theory, Kracauer pursued a kind of phenomenological reading that views culture as a complex text saturated with competing meanings, a method developed from that of his teacher the philosopher Georg Simmel, with whom he had an extensive correspondence and whose work he analyzed in a number of publications. Kracauer also crafted aesthetic complements to his own theoretical texts. Such works include the literary documentary The Salaried Masses (1930) and the novels Ginster (1928) and Georg (1934).

Although Kracauer enjoyed personal relations with many of Weimar Germany's leading intellectuals, including Martin Buber, Ernst Bloch, Franz Rosenzweig, and Max Scheler, his thinking exerted the greatest impact on the work of those colleagues who collectively would come to be known as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, especially his close friends Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Leo Löwenthal. Adorno (1903–1969), who as a young man met with Kracauer for regular Saturday afternoon discussions of Immanuel Kant and later wrote that he had learned more from his older friend than from any academic teacher. Similarly, Benjamin's (1892–1940) well-known writings on media aesthetics, especially those devoted to photography and film, would hardly be thinkable without Kracauer's example and guidance. In fact, Kracauer even invented the term illuminations that later came to be synonymous with Benjamin's work. Lastly, as in the writings of his Frankfurt School colleagues, the project of a critical redemption of thinking suffuses Kracauer's final book, History: Last Things before the Last, which remained unfinished when he died of pneumonia in New York exile.

"The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch's judgments about itself." Siegfried Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," 1927

See alsoBenjamin, Walter; Cinema; Frankfurt School .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, Mass., 1995. Translation of Das Ornament der Masse (1963).

——. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. With an introduction by Miriam Bratu Hansen. Reprint. Princeton, N.J., 1997.

Secondary Sources

Jay, Martin. "The Extraterritorial Life of Siegfried Kracauer." In his Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America, 152–197. New York, 1986.

Koch, Gertrud. Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction. Translated by Jeremy Gaines. Princeton, N.J., 2000.

Richter, Gerhard. "Siegfried Kracauer and the Folds of Friendship." German Quarterly 70, no. 3 (1997): 233–246.

Gerhard Richter