Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer

Siegfried Kracauer’s Two Art Histories

Siegfried Kracauer’s Two Art Histories Elizabeth Otto The work of art holds a mirror up to the world that not only re›ects it, but makes it see. —Siegfried Kracauer, “The Artist in These Times” (“Der Künstler in dieser Zeit”), 19251 The wide-ranging and revolutionary nature of Siegfried Kracauer’s critique of interwar visual culture has only begun to come to light decades after he was working. His status in the history of critical cultural theory as the “odd uncle” of the Frankfurt School has slowly given way to an understanding of the depth and breadth of his subject matter as his writings have again become increasingly available. Kracauer’s engagement with the visual ‹eld was lifelong and always multifaceted. He studied with Georg Simmel, a thinker whose importance for art history has also only recently been rediscovered, and Kracauer’s education included courses on the decorative arts and in “ornamental drawing.”2 His ‹rst book was art historical in nature; it was his doctoral thesis on wrought iron work, which he published in 1925.3 This interest in decoration and architecture as organizing forces for modern experience never left him, and his subsequent training and work as an architect only furthered his eclectic interest in the visual. Beginning in the early 1920s, his essays published in the Frankfurter Zeitung and elsewhere often took up visual themes and contributed to a program of “the readability of the world.”4 In addition to his nearly one thousand ‹lm reviews, he wrote on ornament, architecture, and symbols; these essays suggest the power of the visual to come to grips with the trappings , diversions, and classed experience of modernity.5 A number of scholars have identi‹ed signi‹cant ideas that animate Kracauer ’s approach to the visual. Miriam Hansen points to the shift in his in128 terwar writings from “the great metaphysical questions of the age to the phenomena of daily life, the ephemeral, culturally marginal, and despised spaces, media, and rituals of an emerging mass culture.”6 Frederic Schwartz traces the origin of Kracauer’s self-expressed interest in the mass ornament as among “surface-level expressions” that reveal “the position that an epoch occupies in the historical process.”7 Schwartz argues that, through his studies with Simmel, Kracauer absorbed the work of Heinrich Wölf›in and Alois Riegl, both of whom were fundamentally rethinking art history during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and reinventing it as a Geisteswissenschaft, or humanities discipline. For both Wölf›in and Riegl, art, decoration, architecture, and fashion are aspects of a culture’s particular style or its Kunstwollen. As Schwartz shows, Kracauer deepens this approach by not only seeing even the mundane aspects of cultural production as indicative of a period’s style but also reading “content, indeed the ‘basic content of an era,’ in form, not merely its manipulation as a sign.”8 Much of what has been written on Kracauer focuses on his rejection of traditionally valued arts and culture in order to write on ‹lm and mass spectacle. Yet there are still many aspects of Kracauer’s astute analyses of art, photography, and urban visual spaces to be explored in order to make overt his understanding of representation as a powerful cultural force. While Kracauer did not complete any longer art-historical texts after the dissertation, in shorter essays he developed a set of premises and ideas about the function of art and the visual in society. These writings are signi‹cant both as case studies and as examples of the development of his theoretical methods, methods to which we are only now returning in what has often been referred to as the “Visual Turn” in history or in the rise of academic departments of Visual Culture and Visual Studies. Further, these texts demonstrate Kracauer’s critical engagement with Germany’s avantgardes , including Expressionism, Dada, International Constructivism, and the Bauhaus, and they reveal how these movements paralleled Kracauer’s own interests and ideas. In this essay I focus on a selection of Kracauer’s interwar texts, many of which have never been translated, in order to bring out the art-historical nature of his work. The “two art histories” of my essay’s title point to a strong shift from the early years, when he wrote directly on art, to his subsequent focus in the later 1920s on photography, mass media, and spectacle . My title also traces a shift in Kracauer’s art writing from...