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“Dioramas of a New World” Siegfried Kracauer and Weimar Exhibition Culture Kerstin Barndt Siegfried Kracauer is well known to us as a ‹lm historian, as a theorist of visual and mass culture, and as a literary author in his own right. But alongside ‹lm, photography, and literature, Kracauer ‹ne-tuned his cultural philosophy by attending to exhibition as a medium that profoundly shaped Weimar modernity. Kracauer’s lesser-known writings on trade shows, building expositions, and contemporary design invite us to revisit key tropes of his cultural theory such as waiting, ornamentation, or spatial images (Raumbilder) that gesture beyond the constraints of the interwar present . While conceptually linked to other intellectual projects that occupied Kracauer in the 1920s—the theorization of ‹lm, photography and mass culture, or the writing of “modernist miniatures,”1 —his exhibition reviews also depart from these writings as they consistently stress the enlightening prospects of this particular mass medium. In a recent article on Kracauer’s city miniatures, Andreas Huyssen notes how these texts expose agoraphobia, a fear of empty spaces, and recognize “the disciplining power of a rationalist and abstract regime of visuality that denies agency to the human body as subject of sensual perception.”2 In contrast to, and alongside, this ideology critique, his writings about interwar exhibition culture celebrate the staging of alternative and more livable worlds. The spatial and theatrical aspects of exhibition, Kracauer suggests, hold open the possibility to cut through the “abstract regimes of visuality” and to empower the audience through a form of visual pedagogy. In the displays of futuristic housing models Kracauer detected a more open and democratic society, and he was intrigued by elaborate city models that rendered visible the hidden infrastructure of urban life. None of this, however, meant giving up on the critique of modernism, and Kracauer did not ap166 proach Weimar exhibition culture only af‹rmatively. Pointing out the “dreamy” side of particular Werkbund objects and the elusive ghosts inhabiting the glass architecture of Mies van der Rohe, Kracauer also read the sober surfaces of contemporary display culture as negations: not as full- ›edged new, modern forms but as lack; not for what they were in the present but for what they recalled from the past and for what they pointed to in the future. As a journalist working for the Frankfurter Zeitung, Kracauer reviewed local exhibitions as early as 1921. One of his ‹rst reviews concerned a memorial show for Ferdinand Luthmer, an architect and former director of Frankfurt ’s Museum for Arts and Crafts who had recently died. Kracauer celebrates Luthmer as a master of his ‹eld whose “indomitable creativity”3 resulted in an impressive oeuvre ranging from silver metal art to architectural drawings of French, Italian, and German buildings and their ornaments. Searching for works by Luthmer that may “meet our contemporary artistic sensibilities,” however, he ‹nds only very few; Kracauer is impressed by the depth and breadth of Luthmer’s encyclopedic erudition but considers him representative of a bygone era. Some forty years later, having devoted his attention to exhibitions as a cultural form throughout his time in Germany and into exile in France and the United States, Kracauer would pen his last museum notes after a visit to Henri Langlois’s collection of visual technology and ‹lm memorabilia, exhibited in Paris’s Cinemathèque. Kracauer visited Paris in 1960, and Langlois himself guided him through his show. In his notes, Kracauer dwells on the historicity of pre-cinema devices such as the zootrope or praxinoscope, leading up to Lumière’s camera: “In looking at these nineteenth century products, it is as if one watched the secret life of this marvelous century which still harbors so many secrets—as if, for the ‹rst time, one caught a glimpse of its entrailles.”4 In both his ‹rst and his last notes, Kracauer records his thoughts on shows devoted to memory—to a past life and the subterranean (pre)history of a young medium, respectively. Both cases, in other words, conjure up an idea of the museum as linked to rituals of mourning, dream, and death (as Adorno reminds us, museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association).5 The main body of Kracauer’s exhibition reviews, by contrast, emphasizes a temporality perhaps best characterized as “present future” or “future made present.”6 Quite in distinction from the nostalgia for the nineteenth century that we ‹nd in Kracauer’s praise of Langlois’s eclectic collection, he adopts an antinostalgic...

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