Siegfried Kracauer
German cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) is known principally for his
later writings on film theory, such as Theory of Film and From Caligari to Hitler. Recent
attention to his earlier work, however, has revealed him as wide-ranging cultural theorist,
prominent within intellectual circles of Weimar Germany. Educated under Georg
Simmel, Kracauer himself taught Theodor Adorno, and was a close acquaintance of
various associates of the Frankfurt School, notably Walter Benjamin. Kracauer
abandoned a career in architecture to become a journalist with the Frankfurter Zeitung.
Forced out in 1933 under the growing anti-semitism, he subsequently fled to America
where he made a name for himself as a film theorist.
Under the influence, no doubt, of Simmel, Kracauer focused his early articles on
phenomena of everyday life, such as hotel lobbies, shopping arcades, cinemas and dance
halls. Kracauer’s observations of seemingly mundane subjects were under-pinned by a
thoroughly considered philosophical position. As Kracauer himself commented, ‘The
surface-level expressions...by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated
access to the fundamental substance of the state of things. Conversely, knowledge of this
state of things depends on the interpretation of these surface-level expressions.’^1 Above
all, architectural space, for Kracauer, was a medium through which to understand society.
‘Spatial images are the dreams of society. Wherever the hieroglyphics of any spatial
image are deciphered, there the basis of social reality presents itself.’^2 Thus, for example,
Kracauer reads the employment agency, the barren space which acts as a warehouse for
the temporary rejects of society, as the embodiment of the empty despair of the
unemployed, who are reduced to the level of objects of hygiene.
A central theme within Kracauer’s work was the impoverishment of contemporary
existence, which had been emptied of all meaning. For Kracauer modernity was
characterized by a form of transcendental homelessness, which was embodied in the hotel
lobby, the space where silence reigns and where guests bury themselves in their
newspapers to avoid exchanging glances. Kracauer blames this condition on the
ascendency of capitalist ratio. This was not reason itself, but ‘a murky form of reason’.
Ratio ‘is cut off from reason and bypasses man as it vanishes into the void of the
abstract’.^3 In his famous analysis of the Tiller Girls, Kracauer expands on how capitalist
ratio was expressed in the mass ornament of the synchronized cabaret dance routine, an
abstracted form of rationality that had taken on various mythic traits. However, Kracauer
was not critical of rationality per se. Rather he saw that rationality had been ‘robbed of its
progressive potential’. The problem of the contemporary condition for Kracauer was not
an excess of rationality. In fact he believed that more rationality was required in order to
complete the disenchantment of the world. Kracauer therefore offered a qualified
endorsement of modernity.