Notes
281 notes PREFACE 1. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno; or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 7. 2. Witte’s second seminar became the basis for his influential collection, Theorie des Kinos: Ideologiekritik der Traumfabrik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972). American Studies, with its programmatic interdisciplinarity and broader, anthropologically based concept of culture, was generally more open to the study of film. My first article, coauthored with Martin Christadler, was on the relationship between film and concepts of history in Griffith’s Intolerance (1976), previously presented at an American Studies conference with a special focus on the Progressive Era. When I taught my first film courses in 1975–76, together with Heide Schlüpmann, on realism in the fiction film and on postwar youth rebellion films, they were held at the Frankfurt Volkshochschule, an institution of continuing education. 3. See Adorno’s important analysis of this notion, “The Meaning of Working through the Past” (1959), in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 89–103. 4. See Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance , trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), and Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1973). The problem with these labels in English-language academic and publishing contexts was twofold: one, the largely retrospective term Frankfurt School became all-inclusive, extending to writers such as Bloch and Benjamin who, despite their more or less informal associations with—or even financial dependency on—the institute, could not by any stretch of the imagination be thus 282 notes to preface subsumed; second, the term critical theory, in lowercase, by the 1980s had come to name varieties of poststructuralist thought. 5. The Auschwitz trials were mounted, against much resistance, by Fritz Bauer, attorney general of the state of Hesse and part of the social circle around Adorno and Horkheimer. Kluge pays homage to Bauer in his first feature, Yesterday Girl (Abschied von Gestern, 1966), in which the attorney general appears playing himself. 6. See Gertrud Koch, “Chassidische Mystik und popular culture: Erste Eindrücke vom wiederentdeckten jiddischen Film,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 5 July 1980; Das jiddische Kino, ed. Ronny Loewy (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1982); and New German Critique 38, Special Issue on the German-Jewish Controversy (Spring–Summer 1986). 7. See Michael Geyer and Miriam Hansen, “German-Jewish Memory and National Consciousness ,” in Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, ed. Geoffrey Hartmann (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994). 8. See Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered” (1963), trans. Anson G. Rabinbach, intr. Andreas Huyssen, New German Critique 6 (Fall 1975): 3–19; repr. in Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (CI), trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 98–106. 9. See Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” (1970), in Enzensberger, The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics, and the Media, trans. Stuart Hood (New York: Continuum, 1974). 10. In addition to Witte’s work on and with Kracauer, the pathbreaking scholarly study was Inka Mülder-Bach, Siegfried Kracauer—Grenzgänger zwischen Theorie und Literatur : Seine frühen Schriften, 1913–1933 (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1985). While Kracauer was never invited to any even semipublic event at Frankfurt University, he did participate— thanks to the endeavors of Hans Robert Jauss—in two meetings of the legendary working group Poetik und Hermeneutik in 1964 and 1966. The designation of his work as “journalism ,” which Kracauer considered offensive as a label for his work, occurs most recently in Dudley Andrew, “The Core and the Flow of Film Studies,” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (Summer 2009): 908. 11. “Über die Aufgabe des Filmkritikers,” Frankfurter Zeitung (hereinafter FZ), 23 May 1932, repr. in Kracauer, Kino: Essays, Studien, Glossen zum Film, ed. Karsten Witte (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), 11; “The Task of the Film Critic,” trans. Don Reneau, in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 635; trans. modified. 12. See Michael Rutschky, Erfahrungshunger: Ein Essay über die siebziger Jahre (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1982), in particular “Allegorese des Kinos,” 167–92; 184, 171, 181. For an example of Wenders’s assimilation of Kracauer, see his remarkable review of Werner Nekes’s film Kelek (1969), in West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices, ed. Eric Rentschler (New...
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