The Cabinet of Dr. Kracauer: Siegfried Kracauer; An Introduction

In: Dissent: a journal devoted to radical ideas and the values of socialism and democracy, Band 48, Heft 3, S. 113

Abstract

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. Neither of his two novels, Ginster (1928) and Georg (1934), has been translated into English; 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. 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). The English-speaking world is missing an important side of Kracauer. We know the Kracauer who fatuously unveiled the portents of National Socialism in such classic Weimar films as Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. 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). But we have little insight into Kracauer's writings from the Weimar period and from his first years of exile. 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. Combining biographical sources and close textual analysis, Koch surveys 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. 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. '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 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.') 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. BORN IN 1889 into an established Frankfurt-based Jewish family, Kracauer was raised amid a variety of cultural currents. His uncle Isidor Kracauer, who played a critical role in his upbringing, was an authority on the history of the city's Jewish community. 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. (He would eventually break with Rosenzweig and Buber, publishing a vociferous critique of their Bible translation in 1926.) 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. 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. Indeed, in a 1923 letter addressed to Lowenthal and Adorno, Kracauer sardonically adopted a phrase from Georg Lukacs, giving his location as 'the headquarters of the transcendental homeless.'.