“Doch ist das Wirkliche auch vergessen, so ist es darum nicht getilgt”. Beiträge zum Werk Siegfried Kracauers Herausgegeben von Jörn Ahrens, et al. (review)

This varied and sophisticated collection of essays may have the—presumably unintended—effect of clarifying why it is that many of us experience reading Siegfried Kracauer as something of a guilty pleasure. We do enjoy the ease with which Kracauer sums up his contemplation of surfaces in apparently weighty theses, but at the same time we can scarcely overlook how adroitly he substitutes the impression of such weight for real substance. To its credit, the book does not give way to a blind valorization of its object, though it does not include any resolutely critical voices either. It organizes its eighteen contributions, thirteen in German and five in English, under six very imposing headings: “Gegenwart im Feuilleton,” “Literatur und Sprache,” “Gesellschaft als Mosaik,” “Musik,” “Fotografie und Film,” “Philosophie und Geschichte.” These headings correspond in general terms to a chronological sequence of interests Kracauer pursued in his wide-ranging development, and under each one of them the contributors undertake to justify the magnitude of its theme. The essays approach their material with very different kinds of scholarly manner, ranging from Leif Weatherby’s highly philosophical “The Poetics of Sociology. Second Nature and Narrative in the Early Kracauer” under the “Gesellschaft als Mosaik” heading to Maria Zinfert’s tight focus in “Zum Bild des Autors Siegfried Kracauer” on a set of photographs depicting Kracauer himself.

The difficulty in such an undertaking emerges with particular force in the fourth section, simply entitled “Musik.” Kracauer had no disciplined understanding of music whatsoever. His book on Offenbach offers impressions of the way the composer’s Parisian public consumed his work but contains no reference at all to the formal characteristics of Offenbach’s compositions. The result scandalized Theodor Adorno to such an extent that it caused a rift in his friendship with Kracauer. One can well disagree with Adorno’s claims in his own efforts to find history reflected in musical composition, but to do so demands one approach his work at a highly informed level. Kracauer presents no such challenge. The chapter by Ethel Matala de Mazza on Offenbach sets aside objections to these gaps in formal analysis as irrelevant. Instead she invites the reader to admire the elegant lightness of touch with which Kracauer passes so easily from one realm of historical and cultural phenomena to another, echoing the lightness of effects achieved in Parisian operetta.

The attraction here, and everywhere in each realm Kracauer explores, arises for his reader from the sweet simplicity of an allegorical way of thinking. He assembles images in constellations that reassure us most pleasurably in the face of a history through which more disciplined thinkers have only found more perilous paths. For the sake of such reassurance, we may certainly feel tempted to pass over the fragility of Kracauer’s assertions. How happily we might embrace the idea that film “redeems physical reality,” or a simple explanatory line of evolution from Dr. Caligari to Hitler, or take the Tiller Girls to embody an essence of modern sensibility.

The introduction attributed collectively to the four editors certainly loses no time acknowledging the difficulties that arise as we go beyond an interdisciplinary enterprise and descend into the circle of undisciplined assertions. The volume does not fail to acknowledge that we are living in times of urgent danger precisely because of a general descent into undisciplined political discourse. That should turn our concerns toward sharper questioning rather than toward a warm piety. For the most part, the contributions are, for all their defensive approach, commendably more disciplined than the material they interpret, but inevitably the impulse to valorize outweighs the concern with strict criteria.

The first of these essays, Claudia Öhlschläger’s “Kracauers feuilletonistische Städtebilder,” eases the reader into terrain...