Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction (review)

Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction. Gertrud Koch. Translated by Jeremy Gaines. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. v + 137. $39.50 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).

By the time of his death in 1966 at the age of 77, the German thinker Siegfried Kracauer had published two books on film, a novel, a biography of composer Jacques Offenbach, a study of detective fiction, an investigation of white-collar employees, a volume of cultural criticism, numerous short monographs, and over two thousand essays. A working journalist and prolific film critic during the Weimar Republic for the illustrious Frankfurter Zeitung, Kracauer came to know Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Leo Lowenthal, and other members of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, yet he never formally became affiliated with it or any other school. Add also his writings published in post-1933 French exile and the commissioned work on Nazi propaganda he produced in the United States (where he permanently settled in New York after 1941) and the result is an intellectual physiognomy that spans disciplines, institutions, objects, languages, continents, and methodologies in a manner that almost seems deliberately calculated to frustrate systematic classification.

Ironically, for a thinker so distrustful of notions of totality, progress, or the teleology of reason, history has treated Kracauer kindly and his posthumous reputation flourishes today. The absence in his thought of any overarching "will to a system" in Nietzsche's phrase has, if anything, helped rather than hindered its reception, and is increasingly recognized as a hallmark of Kracauer's integrity, originality, and critical agility. His polymathic legacy holds out the appealing prospect of a mode of cultural criticism that is historically specific, theoretically incisive, formally nuanced, and socially committed, but neither mechanical nor overly subjective. At their best, his analyses of urban spaces, popular films, social groups, and architectural environments identify and resonate with the "poetry in the profane" frequently neglected by contemporary practitioners of cultural studies (44).

First published in Germany in 1996, Gertrud Koch's overview of his principal writings is a valuable contribution to the recent florescence of Kracauer scholarship and translations in Europe and the United States. Despite the book's subtitle, its high philosophical level of argumentation presupposes some familiarity with Kracauer's work and intellectual formation. Nor does the awkward translation into English by Jeremy Gaines mitigate its difficulty. Koch, a Professor of Film Studies at the Free University of Berlin and the author of numerous studies of film and cultural theory, wisely avoids the trap of reducing the multiplicity of Kracauer's corpus to a unity. Unlike previous commentators who understand notions such as the mass cultural "surface" or his evolving notion of photography as his master concepts, she concentrates upon local readings, a strategy that acknowledges the heterogeneity of his work and frequently leads to arresting insights and novel readings.

For example, finding a hermeneutic key in the "rhetoric of the metaphors rather than the structure of the concepts," Koch shrewdly identifies a characteristic prose strategy of Kracauer's novel Ginster (1928) as a peculiarly distanced relation to language: "Words do not depict objects; instead words evoke a certain perception of things, they are the perspectives on things. . . . Words can function as points of spatial perspective or, by dint of the images they contain, be used to interpret perspectives" (viii, 53, 55). He incorporates the three-dimensionality of objects into his very writing, eschewing linguistic transparency in favor of multiperspectival descriptions that create distance between subject and object, author and reader. Citing his training as an architect and "special talent and inclination for spatial thought and imagination," she effectively reveals the significance of spatiality in Kracauer's style as well as in his subject matter (7).

Challenging the prevailing psychological interpretations of his famous 1927 essay on the truncated rationality of industrial capitalism, "The Mass Ornament," Koch relates the notoriously opaque notion of the surface developed by Kracauer to the ideas contained in a book he sympathetically reviewed at the time, a 1926 study on the philosophy of science by...