Gaines Jeremy - Siegfried Kracauer: an introduction

Siegfried Kracauer

Siegfried Kracauer

AN INTRODUCTION

Gertrud Koch

Translated by Jeremy Gaines

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright 2000 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Koch, Gertrud, 1949

[Kracauer zur Einfhrung. English]

Siegfried Kracauer : an introduction / Gertrud Koch ;
translated by Jeremy Gaines.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-01613-5 (cloth : alk. paper).

ISBN 0-691-04992-0 (pb : alk. paper)

1. Kracauer, Siegfried, 18891966Criticism and interpretation.
2. Motion pictures. 3. GermanyIntellectual life20th century.
I. Gaines, Jeremy. II. Title.

PT2621.R135 Z7613 2000

834.912dc21 99-089189

This book has been composed in Bitstream Caledonia

Originally published as Kracauer zur Einfhrung Junius Verlag, 1996.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper)

www.pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

(pbk.)

Contents

Preface

USUALLY, introductions are written about those authors (and works) who have been so widely discussed that a summarizing overview of the various interpretations of his or her work appears desirable. It would therefore seem high time to introduce readers to Siegfried Kracauer the author. Having said this, it is still too early to write an introduction. This book can only claim to be a provisional attempt. Although the collected edition of his works is not yet complete, his estate, housed in the Marbach Literary Archive near Stuttgart, is well cataloged, and on both sides of the Atlantic there have been significant attempts to bring Kracauer out from behind the shadows cast by his friends of the Frankfurt School.

About a decade ago I held a seminar where I presented texts by Kracauer and I later mentioned the course to Leo Lowenthal, a close friend of his. Lowenthal, who was at the time besieged by scholars writing histories of the Frankfurt School, was somewhat astonished. He had hardly imagined that his friend Friedel would suddenly emerge as a big name on the academic scene. Years later it was he who opened one of the very first conferences devoted to Kracauer, held at Columbia University. Yet the distance with which the friends of his youth in Frankfurt eventually treated Kracauers work was still evident in Lowenthals response. With the benefit of hindsight, distances can shrink into differences within a common overall project. The room that Kracauer has been allocated in the Frankfurt School is sparse. There are, however, other reasons, too, why I am not quite clear whether Kracauer was ever really at home in it or whether in some phases of his life he would not have liked to take his seat there. Kracauers notion of exterritoriality can perhaps magically be brought to bear here; yet he did not have much more or much less luck than others associated with the Frankfurt School. The extent to which he distanced himself from it can be gleaned from his own writings. The historians and philologists will do their part in measuring what joint space these thinkers occupied and will then be able to reassess it, invoking the inheritance of the Frankfurt School in his name, too.

I by no means wish to take part in this Brechtian Caucasian Circle into which Kracauer has been dragged, like Benjamin before him. To my mind, not only the zeal of battling critics, but also the contents of his works are responsible for such a circle having been chalked around him. With all due respect, his oeuvre is not borne by some systematic philosophical construction, but instead lives from many, often highly contradictory motifs. They are mainly held together by one thing: his name. And I mean this quite literally. Kracauers texts, his philosophical treatises, his essays, reviews, and glosses are all linked by a literary style that weaves them into one infinite, simultaneous fabric. Their precise literary character allows us, indeed compels us, to interpret them by studying the rhetoric of the metaphors rather than the structure of the concepts.

Introductions tend to presume that the primary texts of an author form a canonical body and then reconstruct them in as elegant a manner as possible. In the case of the present book, I have inverted this strategy. I am interested more in revealing Kracauers qualities through the texts themselves and their specific literary substance. For this reason, I wish to nurture the same enthusiasm for his novels as exists for those pieces of his extensive oeuvre that are already canonized, namely his analyses of film, his history of film, and his theory of film. These already have a firm place in film studies, even if they are often completely misunderstood or sharply rejected.

Time Line of Kracauers Life