Gertrud Koch's Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction

...At a time when scholarly disciplines seem to be more rigidly defined than ever, when the academy rarely interacts with the public at large, and when an unconventional career path such as that taken by Kracauer no longer seems viable, the import of his work has a new urgency...

...It was all as it had been on the screen...

...As a motif, it crops up in Kracauer's early essays, many of which focus on sites of transience—the hotel lobby, the passageway, the waiting room—observed from the vantage point of an urban stroller, a flaneur (or, as Benjamin prefers to call Kracauer, a "ragpicker...

...Koch provides a balanced reading of From Caligari to Hitler, linking the book to Kracauer's earlier work and to such pieces written in American exile as his contemporary interpretation of "Hollywood Terror Films," thereby cautioning against the simple attacks on Kracauer's overstated determinism...

...Koch demonstrates the wide-ranging significance of homelessness...

...What Streets in Berlin revealed in its assortment of rich, luminous essays, nearly all of them first published as articles in the 1920s, was that Kracauer had in fact enjoyed a very distinguished career before his flight from Nazi Germany in 1933...

...The dark premonitions of a final doom had also been fulfilled...

...This does not mean, however, that his method of analysis changed significantly from the prewar years...

...But there was also, as Martin Jay has pointed out in his essay on Kracauer's "extraterritorial" life, a personal dimension to his sense of marginality: Kracauer not only had a highly noticeable speech impediment, which prevented him from occupying certain stable positions such as teaching, but he also possessed unusual physiognomic traits that set him apart from his contemporaries...

...Where then does he live...

...As he wrote in 1932 concerning the task of the film critic, "His mission is: to uncover the social ideas and ideologies concealed in your average film and, by means of these revelations, to break the influence of the films wherever necessary...

...The central thesis, which, as Koch points out, rested upon "forty years of film history from memory" (he had little or no access to the films he examines in the book), can be summed up in its final articulation: "Irretrievably sunk into retrogression, the bulk of the German people could not help submitting to Hitler...

...Kracauer exists," she asserts, "either as a film theorist or as a distant relative of the Frankfurt School, either as a journalist or as a philosopher, either as an essay-writer or as a novelist...

...Kracauer's critique of mass culture in his essays on photography, dance, literature, cinema, and commerce proved incisive in the debates of his time, and has remained relevant to those of our own era as well...

...He would eventually break with Rosenzweig and Buber, publishing a vociferous critique of their Bible translation in 1926...

...Indeed, in a 1923 letter addressed to Lowenthal and Adorno, Kracauer sardonically adopted a phrase from Georg Lukács, giving his location as "the headquarters of the transcendental homeless...

...Neither of his two novels, Ginter (1928) and Georg (1934), has been translated into English...

...But we have little insight into Kracauer's writings from the Weimar period and from his first years of exile...

...Certainly much of this was professionally related, as Kracauer never seemed to fit into the rigidly defined boundaries of the vocations he pursued...

...As Koch states, "Exile prompted him to study the emergence of the German collective consciousness, and From Caligari to Hitler was intended precisely as such an investigation...

...We know the Kracauer who famously unveiled the portents of National Socialism in such classic Weimar films as Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr...

...Among the paramount concerns that followed Kracauer throughout his career, the idea of homelessness—what he later termed "extraterritoriality"— figured prominently in his intellectual world...

...116 n DISSENT / Summer 2001...

...Combining biographical sources and close textual analysis, Koch surDISSENT / Summer 2001 n 113 BOOKS veys the development of Kracauer's thought from his first sociological and journalistic writings in the 1910s and 1920s up to his final work, History: The Last Things Before the Last, published in 1969, three years after his death...

...The gripping story of unrequited love earned praise among early readers of the manuscript, including Thomas Mann, who called the work a "great portrait of society" But the fate of the novel mirrored that of Kracauer, who in 1935 wrote ruefully to his friend Benjamin, also exiled in Paris, that the book "has not yet been accepted anywhere...

...As A MEANS of bridging the gap between the pre-war German works and their postwar American counterparts, Gertrud Koch's brief critical overview of Kraucauer's entire oeuvre, Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction (first published in Germany in 1996 and translated here by Jeremy Gaines), offers a key addition to the still evolving secondary literature...

...the original English rendition of his social biography of composer Jacques Offenbach, Offenbach and the Paris of his Time (1937), written during Kracauer's Parisian exile, is long out of print, not to mention incomplete and flawed...

...In Ginter, for example, as Joseph Roth wrote, 114 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 BOO KS we encounter a Chaplin-like protagonist, a comical pariah in the modern, war-torn world...

...And it is only in the past several years that English editions of his writing from the Weimar period have appeared, most notably his anthology of essays The Mass Ornament, put out by Harvard University Press in 1995, and the recent Verso translation of Die Angestellten, published as The Salaried Masses (1998...

...SIEGFRIED KRACAUER: AN INTRODUCTION by Gertrud Koch translated by Jeremy Gaines Princeton University Press, 2000 137 pp $14.95 SOMETIME IN the early 1990s, while I was a graduate student in Germany, I stumbled across a small paperback at one of the makeshift stands that sellers set up in front of university cafeterias...

...At the outset of her study, Koch notes the profound difficulty critics have faced when trying to make sense of Kracauer's diverse, and sometimes competing, works and their reception...

...Caligari and, to a lesser extent, the Kracauer who reflected on the aesthetics of cinema in his other major American publication, Theory of Film (1960...

...Implicit in her reevaluation is the understanding that readers, especially on this side of the Atlantic, still have much to discover...

...His uncle Isidor Kracauer, who played a critical role in his upbringing, was an authority on the history of the city's Jewish community...

...Not unlike Benjamin's city portraits from the late 1920s or parts of his unfinished Arcades Project, Kracauer's essays tend to take shape around philosophical musings and material description...

...Yet, without attempting to attribute an artificial consistency to Kracauer's trajectory of thought, Koch examines, in seven crisp chapters, its development within a broad set of historical and theoretical contexts...

...While living in America, Kracauer kept afloat with stipends from the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, Mellon, Rockefeller, and other foundations, and also by way of a steady stream of freelance assignments from such magazines as Commentary, the Nation, and Harper's...

...he could not find a place for himself in the academy, and his role in journalism, even at the Frankfurter Zeitung, was often more of a freelance nature...

...BORN IN 1889 into an established Frankfurtbased Jewish family, Kracauer was raised amid a variety of cultural currents...

...Kracauer himself showed a certain awareness of this problem, suggesting late in life that he should not be viewed merely as "a film man," but as a "philosopher of culture, or also a sociologist, and as a poet...

...In such works, Kracauer offers critical reflections, sometimes more akin to vignettes, on the symbolic weight attributed to such "in-between" spaces...

...Throughout the Weimar years, Kracauer published his writing—a kind of Kulturkritik, a philosophical and cultural criticism infused with analytical rigor, elegant style, and heterodox politics—in the left-liberal Frankfurter Zeitung...

...In fact, Adorno invoked the term "extraterritorial" to explain how Kracauer looked...

...Since Germany thus carried out what had been anticipated by her cinema from its very beginning, conspicuous screen characters now came true in life itself...

...After completing his studies in architecture, philosophy, and sociology, Kracauer himself participated to some degree in Frankfurt Jewish life, joining a small circle (which also included Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Leo Lowenthal) gathered around the charismatic Rabbi Nehemiah Nobel...

...If anything, the first years of Kracauer's professional life reveal, as Koch suggests, deep commitment to a number of enterprises, from architecture to philosophy, from journalism to cultural criticism, without ever gaining a sense of permanence in any one single place...

...As a writer and editor for the newspaper's illustrious arts pages, the socalled feuilleton section, he filed close to two thousand pieces, among them were his serialized examination of Weimar Germany's rising white-collar consumer class, Die Angestellten ("The Office Workers," 1930...

...In a retrospective account of Kracauer's critical legacy, the eminent art historian Meyer Shapiro, who was instrumental in assisting Kracauer's flight from Vichy France to America, poignantly remarked, "[Kracauer] should become better known, not only because of his actual gifts as a writer and as a man with important interests in sociology and theory and philosophy . . . but also [because] he's an example of the type of nonacademic man who is saturated with the standards of German scholDISSENT / Summer 2001 n 115 BOO KS arship without belonging to one of the professions...

...He focuses, in close-up range, on the surfaces, the ornamental realm, of his chosen sites as a means of revealing what lies underneath— an approach he would develop to a much greater degree in his film criticism...

...He is the author of Between Redemption and Doom and is currently at work on a book on émigré filmmaker Edgar G. Ulmer...

...He is an uprooted figure, alienated and unable to find his niche in society (Koch likens him to "a Kafkaesque younger brother of Robert Musil's 'man without qualities...

...In the near-vacuum of extra-territoriality, the very no-man's land...

...Kracauer completed the study of propaganda film at the same time he was researching From Caligari to Hitler, and much of the controversy surrounding the book's publication revolved around its damning argument about the German "mentality" conveyed in film, an argument that one critic dubbed a "refugee's revenge...

...0 F COURSE, it is important to note the renewed intensity in Kracauer's preoccupation with homelessness once it was converted from an idea to an actual condition...

...Koch does an admirable job of providing a greater sense, if in an abbreviated form, of Kracauer's life and work...

...In his fictional work, metaphors of the "inbetween" and other variations of "transcendental homelessness" permeate Kracauer's prose...

...It was also around this time, however, that Kracauer's relationship to the far more secular Adorno, with whom he met regularly on Saturdays to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, began to blossom, as did his work on Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Edmund Husserl...

...In Georg, which Kracauer finished in 1934 but which was not published until after his death, the theme is manifested in Kracauer's depiction of the threat of expulsion and the rise of National Socialism...

...The book was called StraPen in Berlin and anderswo (Streets in Berlin and Elsewhere) and its author, Siegfried Kracauer, was somebody I knew of only from his psychological history of Weimar cinema, From Caligari to Hitler—written in English and published in America, where he was in exile, in 1947—and from his personal ties to the more renowned members of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Leo Lowenthal, and others...

...Unlike Adorno and other Frankfurt School associates who returned to Germany after the war, Kracauer chose to remain in the United States, accepting the fate that he later described of the "exile who as an adult person has been forced to leave his country or has left it on his own free will...and the odds are that he will never fully belong to the community to which he now in a way belongs...

...After 1933, Kracauer's choice of subject seems to have been determined, at least in part, by his expulsion from Germany...

...The English-speaking world is missing an important side of Kracauer...

...Thus it came as a surprise to me, after reading the small selection of essays in his "street" book, that so little of Kracauer's early work seems to have reached the other side of the Atlantic...

...NOAH ISENBERG teaches German studies at Wesleyan University...

...Among Kracauer's early assignments in New York was a critical examination of "Propaganda and the Nazi War Film," commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art (and appended to his From Caligari to Hitler), which he undertook as part of the larger collaborative effort among refugees from Nazi Germany— including Adorno, Lowenthal, and Herbert Marcuse—engaged in American-sponsored studies of fascism and totalitarianism...