Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Many of the essays gathered in this volume were ‹rst presented at the 2008 conference “Looking After Siegfried Kracauer” at Dartmouth College, which laid the foundation for Culture in the Anteroom. We are grateful to the many individuals and institutions that made this event possible. These include, foremost, the Leslie Center for the Humanities, its director Adrian Randolph and its chief administrator Isabel Weatherdon; the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD); the Max Kade Foundation in New York City; the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany at Boston; the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding ; Provost Barry Scherr; the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professorship in the Humanities; and the Dartmouth Professorship in German Language and its holder, Bruce Duncan. At the University of Michigan Press, we are indebted to our editor, Tom Dwyer, who supported the project from its ‹rst stages onward, and to Alexa Ducsay who led the manuscript expertly and ef‹ciently through production . At Michigan, we also had the assistance of Marc-Niclas Heckner, currently a doctoral student in German and Screen Arts & Cultures; we are grateful for his diligent help in preparing the manuscript. Like all Kracauer scholarship, work on this collection has bene‹ted enormously from the expertly maintained collection of his Nachlass at the German Literary Archive in Marbach; we are grateful to its director and staff for their assistance with research questions and illustrations. We would like to use this opportunity also to thank Susan Bibeau in Humanities Resources at Dartmouth for her layout work, as well as Karola Gramann, who curated the Asta Nielsen program that accompanied the conference. Nia Perivolaropoulou graciously made time for a stimulating conversation over coffee in Paris about the past and present French reception of Kracauer. In our introduction, we make a case for both the canonicity and the contemporaneity of Kracauer’s cultural critique; if this argument has any plausibility today, it is thanks to the tireless work of Miriam Hansen. Well before the rediscovery of Kracauer’s Weimar work in the wake of his centennial , Hansen consistently championed Kracauer’s writings as theorizations of modernity, of cinema’s public sphere, and as contributions to Critical Theory; her research on the “Marseille Notebooks” single-handedly shifted the ossi‹ed debates on Theory of Film onto a new, historical ground that brought into view the book’s lasting relevance and its contemporaneity . At the time of this writing, Miriam’s late work Cinema and Experience is still forthcoming, a poignant temporal suspension in which we recollect her forceful presence, her sharp wit, her meticulous attention to nuance, and her capacious vision of cinema’s role in modernity as much as of its shifting functions alongside various new media today. At the conference where this volume originated, we all bene‹ted from this presence and wit: consistently engaged in every discussion, Miriam would raise the speakers’ contributions to a higher level through her probing questions that could be gentle and forceful at once, a model of constructive , erudite critique that future scholars of Kracauer, the Frankfurt School, Cinema and Media Studies, and in the humanities at large can only hope to emulate. We dedicate this volume to Miriam’s memory. x Acknowledgments ...