Kracauer, Siegfried b. February 8, 1889; Frankfurt am Main, Prussia d. November 26, 1966; New York City
Eminent German American philosopher of culture, journalist, film theoretician, and author. Contrary to what is often said, Kra- cauer did not study philosophy or sociology, but rather the history of architecture, which was the topic of his PhD thesis, defended in 1914.
From the early 1920s, Kracauer came in contact with some members of the Frankfurt School, including Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch. Under their influence, Kracauer published various essays on mass culture and related topics, such as Ornament der Masse (Ornaments of the Masses, 1927), inspired by his PhD thesis, followed in 1930 by Die Angestell- ten. Aus dem neuesten Deutschland (TheSalaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany), about the white-collar workers in German cities. He was sometimes presented as a member of their group of critical thinking, but biographer Gertrud Koch rather describes Kracauer “as a distant relative of the Frankfurt School” (Koch 2002, 3). Between 1921 and 1933, Kracauer also wrote countless chronicles and film critiques in the Frankfurter Zeitung (Frankfurt News), where he worked as the editor of the arts section. Because Kracauer was Jewish, he was forced to leave Germany in 1933. He went to Paris, where he stayed for seven years.
In 1941 Kracauer arrived in the United States. Here he had a hard time finding work. He was unknown, shy, and a stutterer. Eventually, Kracauer found a job at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He received Guggenheim and Rockefeller scholarships to research Nazi propaganda films and to write a report that later became an addendum to the book that gave him a worldwide reputation, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947). Written in English, it purported to find the ideological roots of National Socialism in some silent films from the Weimar Republic (1919—1933), especially in Robert Wiene’s film classic Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1919), but also in the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Josef von Sternberg.
For Kracauer, the German films produced between 1915 and 1933 already included many of the ideological values that unconsciously prepared German society for Nazism, such as a “collective complex of inferiority,” the cult of authority, and the awaiting of a strong chief. Published with Princeton University Press and translated into many languages, this influential and controversial book nevertheless paved the way to an understanding and teaching of German film history for many generations. However, its main postulate, that films reflect a nation’s mentality, was highly controversial because films can only be seen as the representations of selected, subjective creators’ perceptions or glimpses of a society and should not in any case be confused with the hypothetical revelator of the inner society.More moderate in tone was Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), an apology of realism in cinema that mentioned very few German films; in this case, his methodological and ontological approaches were much more influenced by French theoretician Andre Bazin. At the end of his life, Kracauer questioned the way history was written in a posthumously published book, History: The Last Things before the Last (1969).
Yves Laberge
See also Frankfurt School; Intellectual Exile; Lang, Fritz; Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm; Sternberg, Josef von
References and Further Reading
Culbert, David, “The Rockefeller Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, and Siegfried Kracauer, 1941.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 13: 4, 1993, p. 495.
Koch, Gertrud. Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction. New York: Princeton University, 2002.
Kracauer, Siegfried. Die Angestellten. Aus dem neuesten Deutschland. Frankfurt am Main: Frankf.Societat-Druckerei, 1930. English trans.: The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany. London: Verso, 1998 [1930].
Manvell, Roger, and Heinrich Fraenkel. The German Cinema. New York: Praeger, 1971.
Murray, Bruce. Film and the German Left in the Weimar Republic: From Caligari to Kuhle Wampe. Austin: University of Texas, 1990.