Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer

This Pen for Hire, Siegfried Kracauer as American Cultural Critic

This Pen for Hire Siegfried Kracauer as American Cultural Critic Noah Isenberg Over the span of a decade, from roughly 1941 to 1951—or from the moment that the former editor and lead critic of Weimar Germany’s Frankfurter Zeitung ‹rst managed to relocate himself from Vichy France to New York City to the time that his writing became more exclusively focused on his Theory of Film (and on his posthumously published History: The Last Things Before the Last)—Siegfried Kracauer contributed some two dozen freelance essays and reviews to the American popular press. He wrote literary and ‹lm criticism for such magazines as the Nation, the New Republic, Commentary, and Harper’s; he contributed pieces to the New York Times, the Saturday Review of Literature, and the Kenyon Review; and he published a few longer, more scholarly articles for Social Research, the ›agship journal of the New School for Social Research (then still appropriately known as the University in Exile) and for Public Opinion Quarterly. The ‹rst half of Kracauer’s extended stint as an American freelancer overlapped with the writing of his famous study of Weimar cinema, From Caligari to Hitler— and there are some obvious links in subject and method—but the diversity of assignments was such that Kracauer did not always have the leeway or the authority to treat subjects of his own choosing. The predicament of the freelancer, fending off heavy-handed editorial input while staying in good standing with magazines and assigning editors and trying to eke out a living in a competitive marketplace, prompted the exiled Kracauer to take on a variety of assignments that came his way. In what follows I shall examine Kracauer’s work as American freelancer within the context of his career trajectory, recognizing various links to his past, present, and future undertakings, while also placing the work within the larger context of German-Jewish exile. There has often been a ten29 dency in Kracauer scholarship to see each phase of his career, and his manifold pursuits, in a separate light. As Gertrud Koch has noted in her trenchant analysis, “Kracauer exists either as a ‹lm theorist or as a distant relative of the Frankfurt School, either as a journalist or as a philosopher, either as an essay-writer or as a novelist.”1 (Kracauer himself demonstrated considerable awareness of this problem, suggesting late in life that he should not be viewed merely as “a ‹lm man” but as a “philosopher of culture , or also a sociologist, and as a poet.”)2 His work as a freelancer gives us the chance to reevaluate Kracauer for the polymath that he was. My remarks are based largely on the body of writing that Kracauer published in the American popular press, in magazines and newspapers with a wider readership, though I will also draw on some of his spirited contributions made during the same period to trade and academic publications. At the time of his departure, in spring 1941, on one of the last ships to leave the port of Lisbon bound for New York harbor, Kracauer expressed a profound awareness of the predicament he faced as an exile in his early ‹fties, needing to start all over again. In a letter to his friend Theodor W. Adorno, written just days before he boarded the SS Nyassa, he lamented, “It’s terrible to arrive like us—after eight years of an existence that doesn’t deserve the name. I have grown older. . . . Now comes the ‹nal station, the last opportunity, which I can’t squander or else it’s all over.”3 The stakes of the freelancer were unusually high. Not long after arriving in the United States, Kracauer landed his ‹rst assignment for an American publication, a short ‹lm review of Walt Disney’s Dumbo. Commissioned by the Nation magazine, and published in early November 1941, the one-page review afforded him the chance to demonstrate his ‹rm grasp of Hollywood ‹lm practices (of those put into operation by Walt Disney, in particular) and to weigh in on the new cartoon introduced by Disney at this otherwise inauspicious moment in time. As the Europe that he had narrowly escaped became further engulfed by the fascist storm, Kracauer was free to focus his attention on “a ›ying baby elephant.”4 Of course, there is nothing terribly unusual about Weimar-era-trained intellectuals ruminating on Disney (we have, among many examples, Walter Benjamin’s poignant re›ections on Mickey Mouse from the early...