Siegfried Kracauer

Graeme Gilloch

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745629629, 9780745629612
• eBook ISBN: 9780745689494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This major new book offers a much-needed introduction to the work of Siegfried Kracauer, one of the main intellectual figures in the orbit of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. It is part of a timely revival and reappraisal of his unique contribution to our critical understanding of modernity, the interrogation of mass culture, and the recognition of both the dynamism and diminution of human experience in the hustle and bustle of the contemporary metropolis. In stressing the extraordinary variety of Kracauer's writings (from scholarly philosophical treatises to journalistic fragments, from comic novels to classified reports) and the dazzling diversity of his themes (from science and urban architectural visions to slapstick and dancing girls), this insightful book reveals his fundamental and formative influence upon Critical Theory and argues for his vital relevance for cultural analysis today.

Kracauer's work is distinguished by an acute sensitivity to the 'surface manifestations' of popular culture and a witty, eminently readable literary style. In exploring and making accessible the work of this remarkable thinker, this book will be indispensable for scholars and students working in many disciplines and interdisciplinary fields: sociology and social theory; film, media and cultural studies; urban studies, cultural geography and architectural theory; philosophy and Critical Theory.

Part I
From Inner Life: Sociological Expressionism

1
Small Mercies: The Spirit of our Times

1 A View from the Bridge

A despondent, drunken young bank employee, Ludwig Loos, abandons his fickle friends in a Munich bar one night and, after wandering aimlessly through the nocturnal city streets, eventually finds himself standing on a bridge over the river. Into the swirling waters below he throws the small flask of poison he has been carrying around with him. Chance has brought him here and now suggests a better way to put an end to it all: ‘Then he wanted to go down and slowly make his way into the river, as if to bathe, and wanted to swim bold and brave for as long as he had strength. And then – he would grow faint and would be united at last with the elements from which he had issued at that unhappy hour’ (WK 7: 568). But he is not alone. He spots a young woman who is obviously there with the same desperate purpose. She begins to climb the railings of the bridge, but Ludwig, startled into action, is able to grab her before she can jump. They struggle; he refuses to let her go; exhausted, she collapses to the ground. It is then that he recognizes in her a mysterious female figure that has haunted him in strange prophetic dreams. As she weeps, he coaxes her into relating her sad story: ‘the age-old tale of misspent youth and life on the streets he had often read about in newspapers’ (WK 7: 570).

As he tries to console and cheer her, a mutual tenderness grows between them. They go to her room. And there she realizes that he was on the bridge for the very same morbid purpose. So, she gently insists on hearing his tale. As Ludwig begins to speak: ‘It was as if he was finally stepping out of the false world of shadows into the dazzling light of the sun. And he spoke words in which was contained his being, this poor tormented, helplessly fearful self [Ich] in all its need’ (WK 7: 572–3).

They kiss. They sleep together. He awakes to find her gone, but there is a note: she has taken the money he wished to give her and gone out to look for a job, to make a new start. ‘She thanks him from the bottom of her heart. But he should leave and not wait for her: it would be better for her if she were not to see him again’ (WK 7: 574).

And so Ludwig leaves and ventures back to the river but in a wholly different mood. There, imbued with a quiet joy:

He grasped what delusion his longing, his passion for life and his despair had been. How he had been dreaming away, awkward and only ever injurious to himself, and thus how distorted the reflections of all things had been for him. But he also became keenly aware of the sources of such a sorrowful way of being. He recognized them in the mistrust of his own body, in that dull fear of the new, of the real, which he had borne with him from his childhood days. (WK 7: 575)

And then, in this sudden epiphany of self-realization: ‘Spontaneously, he joined his hands as if to give thanks for the mercy which had so transformed him, for the new zest for life, which seemed to him as lasting and definite’ (ibid.).

The curious events outlined above constitute the climax of ‘The Mercy’ (‘Die Gnade’), Kracauer's novella, a text planned in 1911–12 and written ‘between Easter and Whit’ 1913. It would be all too easy to dismiss this tale as a banal piece of literary juvenilia,¹ peopled as it is with stock characters and clichéd figures² and steeped in sentimentality and angst-ridden male narcissism. But such an uncharitable reading would overlook how the key motifs of the novella encapsulate and express some of the wider critical themes which preoccupy Kracauer's earliest philosophical and sociological writings and which thereafter take on more direct and pithy form during his journalistic career with the Frankfurter Zeitung in the 1920s.³

Firstly, there is the fundamental perception of the emerging modern world, exemplified here by the last years of imperial Germany, as the time and space of cultural and spiritual ‘disenchantment’ (Entzauberung), to borrow Max Weber's famous characterization.⁴ It was a capitalistic world increasingly marked by the abstraction of modern scientific knowledge and the instrumentalism of technocratic rationality, a world then increasingly shorn of profound spiritual and transcendent values and experiences and geared ever more to calculation, quantification and monetary accumulation. In a number of sometimes substantial unpublished studies from 1917 onwards, Kracauer gives voice to his painful preoccupation with the fate of the modern human subject and the ‘inner life’ of the individual as she/he struggles to find meaningful modes of self-expression and self-realization in this bleak and dispirited world bereft of religious faith and existential consolation.

According to such a view, we moderns endure an overwhelming sense of collective frustration and disappointment, of immersion in a quotidian realm imbued with an intense anxiety coupled with the interminable boredom of waiting. The fate of our young protagonist, Ludwig Loos, is unmistakably representative of these conditions and afflictions, for they are typically endured most intensely and acutely by a fresh generation and a newly ascendant class (the emerging urban petty bourgeoisie of white-collar workers – clerks, bank employees, secretaries, office staff). Inspired by philosophical reflections and reveries, aspiring to bohemian and artistic circles, Loos is nevertheless condemned by parental injunctions, despite his entreaties, to a secure job and conventional career with the Versicherungsbank – in short, to a life more ordinary. The notion of Beruf as a passionate, compelling inner calling to use one's God-given talents has here been transformed into mere bureaucratic advancement and petty promotion in the world of pen-pushing and paperwork. For Kracauer, this is a world best captured not so much by Weberian thought as by the Lebensphilosophie which came to imbue the writings of his former tutor in Berlin, Georg Simmel: indeed, it is Simmel who, as we will see, both analyses and embodies the distinctive features of the modern ‘personality’ and the diminished ‘spirit’ of modern times.⁵

Secondly, in the context of this rather gloomy Weltanschauung, one can appreciate Kracauer's fascination with particular forms of experience which promise to go beyond the tedium of mundane modern existence, moments which still seem capable of imbuing life with profound meaning and vital purpose. One of these is the possibility of an ever greater disclosure and convergence of individual inner selves that constitutes and defines genuine friendship. Central to the novella is the inner loneliness experienced by Loos as he feels himself betrayed by ‘friends’ who no longer share his views and values, who would now rather devote their time and energies to new-found lovers and other acquaintances. It is the very failure of friendship that leads Loos to the bridge. As we will see later in this chapter, Kracauer distinguishes different levels and forms of intimacy in interpersonal relations in a trilogy of essays on the theme of friendship written between 1917 and 1923, works clearly influenced by the experience of solidarity and camaraderie forged in the face of death by those serving in the trenches during the Great War. The promise and possibilities of true friendship take on a particular significance in the modern epoch as a source of inspiration, consolation and, most importantly, mutual self-actualization.

And there is also another domain of life and activity which, like genuine friendship, points beyond the bitter emptiness of everyday routine and convention: the aesthetic, the realm of art. It is in works of art that the otherwise unfulfilled yearnings and desires of the individual may find a conduit or channel of expression, something of which young Loos is only too well aware as he looks to cultivate his connections with artistic and musical circles. For Kracauer, the very task of contemporary art is to give colour and shape to the modern condition itself – that is to say, to the very struggle of individual inner life with the vast overarching apparatus of industrial technologies, teeming cities and impersonal bureaucratized systems. And the artistic or rather cultural movement which brings such irreconcilable conflicts and intense contestations into sharpest relief for Kracauer visually, dramatically and poetically is that of Expressionism, an aesthetic avant-garde to which he accordingly devotes a critical eighty-page treatise in 1918 (discussed in chapter 2).

Far from being a mere marginal work which can be passed over as immature fiction, Kracauer's little novella, then, not only seeks to encapsulate the spirit of the times but also points to forms of experience and moments which may transcend the stultified modern bourgeois world. Friendship and art are the small mercies which compensate and console us in our disenchantment.

2 Georg Simmel and the Berlin of His Time

The contradictions and conflicts between the precious ‘inner life’ of the (youthful) individual – that manifold of human aspirations, desires, impulses, interests and yearnings, passions and potentialities, strivings and sufferings – and the exacting external world of capitalist modernity provide the central theme of a number of criss-crossing studies penned in the course and aftermath of the Great War but first gathered together and published only recently as volume 9 of the Works (Werke) under the collective rubric of Early Writings from the Archive (Frühe Schriften aus dem Nachlaß).⁶ In this chapter, I will focus on one of these with its own untimely publication history: ‘Georg Simmel: A Contribution to the Meaning of the Spiritual Life of Our Times’ (‘Georg Simmel: Ein Beitrag zur Deutung des geistigen Lebens unserer Zeit’) (1919).⁷ This major monograph exploring the writings of the renowned and recently deceased⁸ philosopher and sociologist (and Kracauer's erstwhile teacher in Berlin) is profoundly Janus-faced. In many respects it harkens back to the writings of the war years on the sufferings and frustrations of inner life and the fate of the spirit. At the same time, in its identification of tendencies and tensions of a particular time and place – the contemporary city of Berlin – as they manifest themselves in the life and (most significantly) works of one particular representative individual, the Simmel study not only anticipates the semi-autobiographical novels (Ginster and Georg) but, perhaps most importantly, prefigures the intriguing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgements
• Our Companion Introduced: An Intellectual Schwejk
• Part I: From Inner Life: Sociological Expressionism
• Part II: From Our Weimar Correspondent: The ‘Newest Germany’ and Elsewhere
• Part III: From the Boulevards: Paris of the Second Empire in Kracauer
• Part IV: From the New World: Monstrous States, Mental Images
• Part V: From the Screen: Redeeming Images, Remembered Things
• Inconclusive: Penultimate Things
• References and Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement