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Siegfried Kracauer was one of the twentieth century's m...)
Siegfried Kracauer was one of the twentieth century's most brilliant cultural critics, a daring and prolific scholar, and an incisive theorist of film. In this volume his finest writings on modern society make their long-awaited appearance in English.
This book is a celebration of the masses--their tastes, amusements, and everyday lives. Taking up themes of modernity, such as isolation and alienation, urban culture, and the relation between the group and the individual, Kracauer explores a kaleidoscope of topics: shopping arcades, the cinema, bestsellers and their readers, photography, dance, hotel lobbies, Kafka, the Bible, and boredom. For Kracauer, the most revelatory facets of modern life in the West lie on the surface, in the ephemeral and the marginal. Of special fascination to him is the United States, where he eventually settled after fleeing Germany and whose culture he sees as defined almost exclusively by "the ostentatious display of surface."
With these essays, written in the 1920s and early 1930s and edited by the author in 1963, Kracauer was the first to demonstrate that studying the everyday world of the masses can bring great rewards. The Mass Ornament today remains a refreshing tribute to popular culture, and its impressively interdisciplinary essays continue to shed light not only on Kracauer's later work but also on the ideas of the Frankfurt School, the genealogy of film theory and cultural studies, Weimar cultural politics, and, not least, the exigencies of intellectual exile.
In his introduction, Thomas Levin situates Kracauer in a turbulent age, illuminates the forces that influenced him--including his friendships with Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other Weimar intellectuals--and provides the context necessary for understanding his ideas. Until now, Kracauer has been known primarily for his writings on the cinema. This volume brings us the full scope of his gifts as one of the most wide-ranging and penetrating interpreters of modern life.
The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany
(First published in 1930, Siegfried Kracauer’s work was gr...)
First published in 1930, Siegfried Kracauer’s work was greeted with great acclaim and soon attained the status of a classic. The object of his inquiry was the new class of salaried employees who populated the cities of Weimar Germany.
Spiritually homeless, divorced from all custom and tradition, these white-collar workers sought refuge in entertainment—or the “distraction industries,” as Kracauer put it—but, only three years later, were to flee into the arms of Adolf Hitler. Eschewing the instruments of traditional sociological scholarship, but without collapsing into mere journalistic reportage, Kracauer explores the contradictions of this caste. Drawing on conversations, newspapers, adverts and personal correspondence, he charts the bland horror of the everyday. In the process he succeeds in writing not just a prescient account of the declining days of the Weimar Republic, but also a path-breaking exercise in the sociology of culture which has sharp relevance for today.
(Best remembered today for his brilliant study of early Ge...)
Best remembered today for his brilliant study of early German cinema, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Study of the German Film, and for his involvement with the Frankfurt School (he mentored Theodor Adorno), Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) was the editor for cultural affairs at Germany’s leading liberal newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, during the Weimar Republic until its disastrous end.
His novel Georg is a panorama of those years, as seen through the eyes of a rookie reporter working for the fictional Morgenbote (Morning Herald). In a defeated nation seething with extremism right and left, young Georg is looking for something to believe in. For him, the past has become unusable; for nearly everyone he meets, paradise seems just around the corner. But which paradise? Kracauer’s grimly funny novel takes on a confused and dangerous time which may remind us of our own.
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Siegfried Kracauer's classic study, originally publishe...)
Siegfried Kracauer's classic study, originally published in 1960, explores the distinctive qualities of the cinematic medium. The book takes its place alongside works in classical film theory by such figures as Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, and André Bazin, among others, and has met with much critical dispute. In this new edition, Miriam Bratu Hansen, examining the book in the context of Kracauer's extensive film criticism from the 1920s, provides a framework for appreciating the significance of Theory of Film for contemporary film theory.
("The late Siegfried Kracauer was best known as a historia...)
"The late Siegfried Kracauer was best known as a historian and critic of the cinema. His main intellectual preoccupation during the last years of his life was the relation between past and present, and the relation between histories in different levels of generality. Philosophy is concerned with the last things while history seeks to explain 'the last things before the last.' One after another he examined various theories of history and exposed their strengths and weaknesses. Well written and cogently argued." --Library Journal This edition features a new introduction by editor Paul Oskar Kristeller of Columbia University.
From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film
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A landmark, now classic, study of the rich cinematic hi...)
A landmark, now classic, study of the rich cinematic history of the Weimar Republic, From Caligari to Hitler was first published by Princeton University Press in 1947. Siegfried Kracauer--a prominent German film critic and member of Walter Benjamin's and Theodor Adorno's intellectual circle--broke new ground in exploring the connections between film aesthetics, the prevailing psychological state of Germans in the Weimar era, and the evolving social and political reality of the time. Kracauer's pioneering book, which examines German history from 1921 to 1933 in light of such movies as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis, and The Blue Angel, has never gone out of print. Now, over half a century after its first appearance, this beautifully designed and entirely new edition reintroduces Kracauer for the twenty-first century. Film scholar Leonardo Quaresima places Kracauer in context in a critical introduction, and updates the book further with a new bibliography, index, and list of inaccuracies that crept into the first edition. This volume is a must-have for the film historian, film theorist, or cinema enthusiast.
In From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer made a startling (and still controversial) claim: films as a popular art provide insight into the unconscious motivations and fantasies of a nation. In films of the 1920s, he traced recurring visual and narrative tropes that expressed, he argued, a fear of chaos and a desire for order, even at the price of authoritarian rule. The book has become an undisputed classic of film historiography, laying the foundations for the serious study of film.
Kracauer was an important film critic in Weimar Germany. A Jew, he escaped the rise of Nazism, fleeing to Paris in 1933. Later, in anguish after Benjamin's suicide, he made his way to New York, where he remained until his death in 1966. He wrote From Caligari to Hitler while working as a "special assistant" to the curator of the Museum of Modern Art's film division. He was also on the editorial board of Bollingen Series. Despite many critiques of its attempt to link movies to historical outcomes, From Caligari to Hitler remains Kracauer's best-known and most influential book, and a seminal work in the study of film. Princeton published a revised edition of his Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality in 1997.
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Siegfried Kracauer was a leading intellectual figure of...)
Siegfried Kracauer was a leading intellectual figure of the Weimar Republic and one of the foremost representatives of critical theory. Best known for a wealth of writings on sociology and film theory, his influence is felt in the work of many of the period’s preeminent thinkers, including his friends, the critic Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, who once claimed he owed more to Kracauer than any other contemporary.
This volume brings together for the first time all of Kracauer’s essays on photography that he wrote between 1927 and 1933 as a journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, as well as an essay that appeared in the Magazine of Art after his exile in America, where he would spend the last twenty-five years of his life. The texts show Kracauer as a pioneering thinker of the photographic medium in addition to the important historian, and theorist, of film that he is acknowledged to have been. His writings here build a cohesive theory on the affinities between photography, memory and history.
With a foreword by Philippe Despoix offering insights into Kracauer’s theories and the historical context, and a Curriculum vitae in pictures, photographs from the Kracauer estate annotated by Maria Zinfert.
Siegfried Kracauer was an American social scientist and writer. In his journalism, as in his more serious writings, he served as a worthy pioneer, especially in film history, where a subsequent generation of scholars, even those who disagreed with his basic premises, continued to refer to many of his theories.
Background
Siegfried Kracauer was born on February 8, 1889 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He was the son of Adolf Kracauer, a successful businessman, and Rosette Oppenheim. From childhood he was afflicted with a severe stammer. His father died while Kracauer was still a child, and the boy subsequently lived with his uncle Isidor K. Kracauer, a well-known historian of the Frankfurt Jewish community.
Education
Kracauer attended the Klinger Oberrealschule in Frankfurt and, from 1908 to 1914, various German universities and polytechnics, where he studied architecture, philosophy, and sociology. Because of his stammer (which he felt closed the academic world to him), as well as for financial reasons, he chose to become an architect. He received his doctorate in engineering from the Berlin-Charlottenburg Technische Hochschule in 1915; his dissertation dealt with wrought-iron decoration in Prussia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
Career
While Kracauer was working as an architect, a number of German periodicals published his essays on philosophical, sociological, and cultural problems. In 1920 he abandoned architecture and joined the prestigious Frankfurter Zeitung. He quickly assumed much of the editorial responsibility for its cultural pages, contributed numerous essays and reviews, and wielded great influence as a cultural critic. In 1930, when the newspaper went national, he assumed the editorship of its Berlin feuilleton page, a task that he performed brilliantly. Kracauer's writing was influenced by various strands of Marxism.
His close associates were part of the coterie of intellectuals who clustered around the Institut für Sozialforschung, first in Frankfurt and then in exile after the Nazis assumed power in 1933.
Between 1922 and 1933, Kracauer published a number of books, including a well-received sociological overview, Soziologie als Wissenschaft (Sociology as a Science, 1922); a semiautobiographical antiwar novel, Ginster (1928), which he published anonymously; and a striking study of German white-collar workers, Die Angestellten (The Employees, 1930).
On March 3, 1933, shortly after the Nazi takeover, the Kracauers left for France. There Kracauer tried to establish ties with French intellectuals. André Malraux's wife translated Ginster, but the French edition (1933), though well reviewed, was not successful. Like many exiles, Kracauer had a hard time making ends meet. Despite problems, he continued to write, often anonymously or pseudonymously, for French journals, the exile press, and Swiss newspapers. A favorite topic of his was the cultural politics of Nazi Germany. A novel, Georg, the story of a newspaper editor just prior to the Nazi takeover of Germany, was finished in 1934, but it was not published until 1977. In 1937 he published a biography of Jacques Offenbach in French, American, and Dutch editions. As with much of Kracauer's work, this biography dealt with a marginal culture, in this instance, operetta.
In 1941, when it finally became possible to leave France, Kracauer immigrated to the United States. He arrived in New York City on April 25, 1941. During his first years there he eked out a limited income with foundation grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1943 - 1945). This support helped finance research for his best-known American work, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), a psychological study of German film from 1919 to 1933.
He also published articles on film in journals such as the Public Opinion Quarterly and in magazines such as Harper's.
During the 1950's, Kracauer used his expertise in qualitative analysis while working for the Evaluation Branch of the Voice of America (1950 - 1952) and as a senior staff member of Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research (1953 - 1958). Much of his work for these organizations remained unpublished. But 1956 saw the publication of Satellite Mentality (written with Paul Berkman), an empirical study of Eastern European refugees based on hundreds of interviews; the work, which suffered from its cold-war overtones, lacks the panache of his earlier efforts. Theory of Film (1960), a complex reworking of Kracauer's ideas, emphasized the importance of what was filmed rather than how it was captured and spliced together. Kracauer insisted that the realistic or documentary tendency of film was more important than the purely cinematic. The book was not well received by critics, who held that Kracauer's theories were inadequate, contradictory, and questionable. Thereafter, Kracauer turned away from film and became interested in the philosophy of history. He had by the time of his death prepared the bulk of a manuscript, which was published posthumously. History: The Last Things Before the Last (1969), the subject of a lawsuit between Kracauer's widow and the person hired to put the manuscript into publishable shape, fared badly. The work emphasized "the heterogeneity of the historical universe" and argued against identifying history as a process. Kracauer's ideas were greeted unsympathetically and the book, as one critic put it, "sank with scarcely a ripple. " In the main, Kracauer's last years were happy ones. His work received new attention in West Germany, where his early journalism was anthologized in Das Ornament der Masse and Ginster was republished (both 1963).
("The late Siegfried Kracauer was best known as a historia...)
Politics
Although radical, he was never a member of any political party, being what one critic has called "an existential leftist. " Kracauer was not an unprejudiced observer, albeit he became less radical over the years.
Views
Although brought up in religious surroundings, Kracauer, like many German Jews of the time, was assimilationist.
Kracauer argued that there are deep layers of a "collective mentality" that extend to a greater or lesser degree below "the dimensions of conciousness. "
Personality
Kracauer was shrewd and sensitive.
Connections
Kracauer's wife, Elisbeth ("Lili") Ehrenreich, whom he married on March 5, 1930, was Catholic; they had no children.