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Suggest pagesSiegfried Kracauer
| Siegfried Kracauer | |
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 A young Siegfried Kracauer |
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| Born | February 8, 1889 Frankfurt am Main, Germany |
| Died | November 26, 1966 (aged 77) New York City, United States |
| Occupation | Journalist, sociologist, film theorist |
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Influences
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Siegfried Kracauer (February 8, 1889 – November 26, 1966) was a German-Jewish writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist. He has sometimes been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
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[edit] Biography
Born to a Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main, Kracauer studied architecture from 1907 to 1913, eventually obtaining a doctorate in engineering in 1914 and working as an architect in Osnabrück, Munich, and Berlin until 1920.
Near the end of the First World War, he befriended the young Theodor W. Adorno, to whom he became an early philosophical mentor. In 1964, Adorno recalled that "[f]or years Siegfried Kracauer read the Critique of Pure Reason with me regularly on Saturday afternoons. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that I owe more to this reading than to my academic teachers. [...] If in my later reading of philosophical texts I was not so much impressed with their unity and systematic consistency as I was concerned with the play of forces at work under the surface of every closed doctrine and viewed the codified philosophies as force fields in each case, it was certainly Kracauer who impelled me to do so."[1]
From 1922 to 1933 he worked as the leading film and literature editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung (a leading Frankfurt newspaper) as its correspondent in Berlin, where he worked alongside Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, among others. Between 1923 and 1925, he wrote an essay entitled Der Detektiv-Roman (The Detective Novel), in which he concerned himself with phenomena from everyday life in modern society.
Kracauer continued this trend over the next few years, building up theoretical methods of analyzing circuses, photography, films, advertising, tourism, city layout, and dance, which he published in 1927 with the work Ornament der Masse (published in English as The Mass Ornament).
In 1930, Kracauer published Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses), a critical look at the lifestyle and culture of the new class of white-collar employees. Spiritually homeless, and divorced from custom and tradition, these employees sought refuge in the new "distraction industries" of entertainment. Observers note that many of these lower-middle class employees were quick to adopt Nazism, three years later. In a contemporary review of Die Angestellten, Benjamin praised the concreteness of Kracauer's analysis, writing that "[t]he entire book is an attempt to grapple with a piece of everyday reality, constructed here and experienced now. Reality is pressed so closely that it is compelled to declare its colors and name names."[2]
Kracauer became increasingly critical of capitalism (having read the works of Karl Marx) and eventually broke away from the Frankfurter Zeitung. About this same time (1930), he married Lili Ehrenreich. He was also very critical of Stalinism and the "terrorist totalitarianism" of the Soviet government.[3]
With the rise of the Nazis in Germany in 1933, Kracauer migrated to Paris, and then in 1941 emigrated to the United States.
From 1941 to 1943 he worked in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, supported by Guggenheim and Rockefeller scholarships for his work in German film. Eventually, he published From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), which traces the birth of Nazism from the cinema of the Weimar Republic as well as helping lay the foundation of modern film criticism.
In 1960, he released Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, which argued that realism is the most important function of cinema.
In the last years of his life Kracauer worked as a sociologist for different institutes, amongst them in New York as a director of research for applied social sciences at Columbia University. He died there, in 1966, from the consequences of pneumonia.
His last book is the posthumously published History, the Last Things Before the Last (New York, Oxford University Press, 1969).
[edit] Reception
Although he wrote for both popular and scholarly publications throughout much of his career, in the United States (and in English) he mainly concentrated on philosophical and sociological writings. This may have diminished his influence in the United States, during his lifetime. For example, in her 1965 book I Lost It at the Movies, film critic Pauline Kael wrote that
Siegfried Kracauer is the sort of man who can't say 'It's a lovely day' without first establishing that it is day, that the term "day" is meaningless without the dialectical concept of 'night,' that both these terms have no meaning unless there is a world in which day and night alternate, and so forth. By the time he has established an epistemological system to support his right to observe that it's a lovely day, our day has been spoiled.
[4] In subsequent decades the posthumous translation of some of Kracauer's more popular writings, such as "The Mass Ornament," and the publication of his letters in German, has revealed a fuller portrait of Kracauer's style of writing and expression that far exceeds that mandarin style which Kael sought to poke fun at.
At the time of his death Kracauer in the United States in 1966 Kracauer was somewhat marginal in both American and German intellectual contexts. He had long ago abandoned writing in German, yet his research remained difficult to place within American scientific and academic categories. Despite this, his reputation gradually grew among scholars of film, German literature, and to a lesser extent theorists of historiography. His former colleague from Weimar, Leo Lowenthal, expressed plesant surprise at the newfound fame that seemed to accumulate around Kracauer in his death. [5] Since the 1980s and 1990s a new generation of film theorists and critics, including Gertrud Koch, Miriam Hansen, and Tom Levin have interpreted and introduced his work for a new generation of scholars. [6] [7]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Theodor W. Adorno, "The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer," in Notes on Literature, Volume 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 58.
- ^ Walter Benjamin, "An Outsider Makes His Mark," trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Selected Writings, Volume 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 307.
- ^ Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, New York: Oxford University Press, 1960, p.221
- ^ Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies, Boston: Little, Brown, 1965, p.269.
- ^ Gertrud Koch, Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction, Princeton: Princeton, p.vii.
- ^ Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, University of California Press, 2011 p.vii.
- ^ Michael Kessler and Thomas Y. Levin, Eds. , Siegfried Kracauer. Neue Interpretationen., Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1990.
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Primary literature
- Kracauer, Siegfried (1947). From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film.
- Kracauer, Siegfried (1960). Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality.
- Kracauer, Siegfried; Paul Oskar Kristeller (1969). History: The Last Things Before the Last.
- Kracauer, Siegfried (1971). Der Detektiv-Roman - Ein philosophischer Traktat.
- Kracauer, Siegfried; Thomas Y. Levin (1995). The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays.
- Kracauer, Siegfried; Quintin Hoare (1998). The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany.
- Kracauer, Siegfried; Gwenda David & Eric Moshbacher (2002). Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time.
[edit] Secondary literature
- Oschmann, Dirk, Auszug aus der Innerlichkeit. Das literarische Werk Siegfried Kracauers. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter 1999
- Koch, Gertrud (2000). Siegfried Kracauer: an introduction. Princeton University Press.
- Reeh, Henrik (2005). Ornaments of the Metropolis: Siegfried Kracauer and Modern Urban Culture. The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-18237-8.
