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DecentricPerspectives: racauer'sEarlyWritingson Film and Mass Culture

Miriam Hansen

Reviewing Karl Grune's The Street for the FrankfurterZeitung inFebruary 1924, Kracauer describes the introductory sequence of thefilm. The protagonist (Eugen Klopfer) is lying on the sofa "in a petty-bourgeois living-room which is supposed to be home [Heimat]yet failsto be just that." Fascinated with the play of light and shadow on theceiling, the dreamer gets up to look out of the window. While his wifeonly sees the street as it is, his look "unveils to him the senselesslytempting jumble of reeling life which, alas, is no more a home [Heimat]than the living-room but, instead, adventure and untasted possibility."'The configuration of a double homelessness - between the sham ofthe bourgeois interior and the anonymous otherness of the modemstreet - was to become emblematic of Kracauer's own position, of hisself-definition as an intellectual. As a number of critics have noted, hisexile did not begin in 1933, and his later plea for a personal "extra-territoriality" (in a letter to Adorno on November 8, 1963) merelymade explicit a persistent motif in his writings from the beginning.2 In

* My thanks to Karsten Witte, Hauke Brunkhorst, Heide Schliipmann, MaryDouglas, and especially to Albrecht Wellmer for inspiring discussions and criticalcomments. The researchand writingof this essay was made possible by the generoussupport of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung.1. [rac.],"Die Strage,"Frankfurtereitung,Stadtblatt Feb. 1924. Unless otherwisenoted, translations are mine.2. MartinJay,"TheExtraterritorialife of SiegfriedKracauer," almagundi1-32 (Fall/Winter1975-76),reprinted n Permanentxiles New York:ColumbiaUP, 1986) 152-197;InkaMulder-Bach,"'MancherleiFremde':Paris,Berlinund die Extraterritorialitatieg-fried Kracauers,"Juni:MagazinfiirKultur& Politik(Monchengladbach) .1 (1989):61-72.47


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48 Kracaueron Film and Mass Culture

the following, I will trace configurations of exile in two overlapping as-pects of Kracauer's work: (1) the constitution of mass culture as an ob-

ject, from the intersecting perspectives of a philosophy of history andthe critique of ideology; and (2) the writer's relationto that object, theconstruction of mass-cultural phenomena in the tension between criti-cal distance and personal experience. This discussion will have impli-cations for an understanding of his later writings on film, especiallyTheory fFilm: TheRedemption fPhysicalReality(1960), by revising the nar-row reading of Kracauer's concept of "reality" that has produced inEnglish-language criticism the prevailing reception of Kracauer as a"naive realist." Beyond restoring Kracauer's complexity as an intellec-tual figure, a complexity that has been reduced by the vicissitudes ofexile and the academic marketplace, I also hope to elucidate the rele-vance of Kracauer's early writings for current debates. For in their veryhistoricity, their contradictions and ambivalences, they raise questionsthat touch on the dilemmas of mass culture in a postmodern age.As Kracauer returned to TheStreetrepeatedly in the course of his ca-reer, his commentaries on the film mark something of a red threadthrough the critic's own theoretical itinerary. He began reviewing filmsfor the Frankfurter eitungin 1921 and in subsequent years wrote closeto a thousand reviews, covering just about every film that was shown inGerman (and, later, in French) theaters.3 Although TheStreet was notthe first film that moved him to develop what he then called "an as yetunwritten metaphysics of film" (efforts in this direction crop up in hisreviews beginning in the fall of 1923), the film became something of aprooftext in subsequent years.

Kracauer's first reviews of TheStreetbear witness to the birth of hisfilm theory from the spirit of a philosophy of history or, more precise-ly, a theology of history. While his review of The Street on February 3,1924, largely consists of an enthusiastic paraphrase through the eyes ofthe film's wandering protagonist, the review in the evening edition ofFebruary 4 assumes a more general tone, introducing Grune's film as

3. See Thomas Y. Levin, SiegfriedKracauer:EineBibliographieeinerSchrifen(Marbach amNeckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft,1989). The majorityof Kracauer'sarticlesin theFrankfurterZeitung,many of which were published under pseudonyms or even anony-mously, can be found in his own scrapbooks,KracauerPapers,Deutsches Literaturar-chiv,Marbacham Neckar.All subsequentreferences o the Frankfurtereitungwillappearin the text with the abbreviationFZ. Since completion of this essay, the majorityofKracauer'swritings ortheFrankfurtereitung,xcept his film reviews,have been reprintedin Schriften. 1-3, ed. Inka Mulder-Bach(Frankfurt/Main: uhrkamp,1990).


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Miriam Hansen 49

"one of the few works of moder film production in which an object isshaped in a manner of which only film is capable and which realizespossibilities that only film can realize." The affinity between the me-dium and its presumed object is grounded not only in film's photo-graphic capability to render an external reality, but also in its syntacticprocedures, in the possibilities of montage.

Film patches together shot after shot and from these successivelyunfurling images mechanically recomposes the world - a muteworld in which no word passes between human beings, in whichthe incomplete speech of optical impressions is the only language.The more the represented object can be rendered in the succes-sion of mere images, the more it corresponds to the filmic tech-nique of association.

The process of filmic representation thus captures something of theessence of modern life - "a life deprived of substance, empty as a tincan, a life which instead of internal connections [statt des innerlichenZusammenhangs]knows nothing but isolated events forming ever newseries of images in the manner of a kaleidoscope." Kracauer conceivesof film as a material expression - not just a representation - of a par-ticular historical experience. The solitude of the individual in a frag-mented, empty world that the critic finds evoked in Grune's film ringswith the pathos of personal experience; the film lends this pathos anallegorical significance, a collective resonance.

What intrudes upon the lonesome wanderer in the voraciousstreets of the night is expressed by the film in a vertiginous se-quence of futuristimages, and the film is free to express it this waybecause the pining inner life releasesnothing but fragmentary de-as. The events get entangled and disentangled again, and just asthe human beings are living dead, inanimate things participateinthe playas a matter of course. A lime wallannounces a murder, anelectricsign flickers ike a blinking eye:everythinga confused side-by-side [Nebeneinander],chaos [Tohuwabohu]f reified souls andseemingly waking things.4

4. In the reviewpublished the previousday, the figureof "the lonesome wanderer"is referred o as "denSehnsiichtigen,"he subjectof longing. Also, it is no coincidence thatin the lastphraseof the quotation Kracaueruses the Hebrew word Tohuwabohu,prom-inent image in Genesis used in German as a vernacularterm for chaos.


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50 Kracauer n Filmand Mass Culture

Suchimageryis familiarto the reader of Kracauer'searly prose, suchas his epistemological inquiry Soziologiels WissenschaftSociologys Sci-ence),his philosophical treatise on the detectivenovel, or his program-matic essayof 1922, "Die Wartenden"("ThoseWho Wait").5Kracauersees the historical process which culminates in modernity as an in-creased withdrawalof meaning from life, a dissociation of truth andexistence; the world is disintegrating nto a chaotic multiplicityof phe-nomena. This process is synonymous, in the economic and socialrealm, with capitalistrationalizationand the concomitant alienationofhuman life, labor, and interpersonalrelations.The subject is "throwninto the cold infinityof empty space and empty time," a statesummedup in Lukacs'sphrase of a "transcendentalhomelessness."6Fora largenumber of individuals living in the "loneliness of the big cities" -Kracauer includes among "those who wait" scholars, businessmen,doctors, lawyersand intellectualsof any kind - this state,to the extentthey are aware of it, results in a sense of isolation, of exile from theworld in which they live and act.While still resonatingwith the rhetoric of "transcendentalhomeless-ness," "Those Who Wait" also marks a turning point away from thecultural pessimism and nostalgia of Kracauer'searliest writings. Di-rected against premature attempts to restore meaning (from anthro-posophy through religious mysticism to the George circle, but alsoagainst the "desperado" skepticism of someone like Max Weber), theessay advocates an alternativeattitude of self-conscious, active "wait-ing," a "hesitantopenness" (zigemdesGeoffnetsein)OdM116).The rejec-tion of panaceas for the modern malaise is accompanied by a shift offocus from the "theoretical I" to the "I of the entire human being,"

5. Soziologiels Wissenschaft:ineerkenntnistheoretischeUntersuchung1922), reprintedinSiegfried Kracauer,Schriften, ed. Karsten Witte (Frankfurt/Main:Suhrkamp, 1971);Der Detektivroman:inphilosophischerraktat(1922-1925), first published in Schriften;"Die Wartenden,"FZ 12 Mar. 1922, reprinted in Kracauer,Das Ornament erMasse(Frankfurt/Main:Suhrkamp, 1963). Citations from OrnamenterMassewill appear inthe text with the abbreviation OdM.6. Kracauer,Soziologiels Wissenschaft3. Georg Lukics's notion of transcendentalhomelessness (transzendentalebdachlosigkeit)s elaborated in TheTheoryftheNovel, rans.Anna Bostock (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1968). Kracauerreviewed TheTheoryftheNovelin NeueBldtterfiirKunstund Literatur .1 (4 Oct. 1921): 1-5. Also see Inka Milder,SiegfriedKracauer GrenzgdngerwischenTheorie ndLiteratur:einefriihenSchriften913-1933 (Stuttgart:. B. Metzler, 1985) 19ff. On the notion of Weltzerfalldisintegrationofthe world), see MichaelSchr6ter,"Weltzerfallund Rekonstruktion:ZurPhysiognomikSiegfriedKracauers,"Text+ Kritik 8 (issue on Kracauer) Munich:Beck, 1980): 18-40.


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from "the unreal world of formless forces and high values depleted ofmeaning" to "the world of reality and its domains." Because of theonesidedness of theoretical thinking, Kracauer warns, a "terrifying"gap has opened up between thinking and a contemporary realitywhich is "filled with corporeal things and people and therefore de-mands to be seen concretely" (OdM 118).Kracauer's cautious opening toward the untheorized domains ofmodem experience entails a simultaneous shift in attitude towards that"surface" (Oberfldche)which has taken the place of any "real" sub-stance. As Inka Miilder-Bach has shown, by 1924/25 the metaphor ofthe surface takes on a new meaning in Kracauer's writings, marking aturn or switch (Umschlag) rom a locus of sheer negativity, the atomizedworld of mere appearances, to a site in which contemporary realitymanifests itself in an iridescent multiplicity of phenomena.7 Althoughthe very trope of the surface still implies the vertical topography ofidealist philosophy (essence/appearance, the hierarchy of truth andempirical reality), in Kracauer's critical practice the Ober-fldchencreas-ingly loses its prefix and becomes a Fldche,a plane of preliminary con-figurations that require investigation and interpretation. No longermerely tokens of metaphysical decline, such configurations offer cru-cial insights into the historical dynamics of the present, that is, into thepresent as part of history. As Kracauer says in the often-cited methodo-logical preface of the essay "The Mass as Ornament" (FZ 9 June 1927),"an analysis of the inconspicuous surface manifestations of a periodcan contribute more to determining its place in the historical processthan judgments of the period about itself."8 Hence Kracauer's shift intheoretical focus from the great metaphysical questions of the age tothe phenomena of daily life, to the ephemeral, culturally marginal anddespised spaces, media, and rituals of an emerging mass culture.Yet I think that Kracauer's theoretical interest in film, as it takesshape in the reviews of 1923/24, to some extent precedes this shift intone, focus, and attitude; that it has rather specific roots in Kracauer'searlier, theological construction of history and the peculiar form of

7. Inka Mulder-Bach, "Der Umschlag der Negativitat:Zur VerschrankungvonPhaenomenologie, Geschichtsphilosophie und Filmaesthetik in Siegfried KracauersMetaphorikder 'Oberflache,"'DeutscheVierteljahresschrift1.2 (1987):359-373; also seeMiilder, Kracauer 6-95.8. "The Mass Ornament" trans. BarbaraCorrell andJack Zipes, New GermanCri-tique5 (Spring 1975):67; translation modified.


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materialism that construction ordains. If we take the essay "Those WhoWait" as typical of that construction, it is not difficult to recognize in it avariant of the modem, secular Jewish Messianism which Anson Rabin-bach has traced in the writings of Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin.Kracauer's relation to Jewish Messianism is a complex issue, all the moreso since that tradition persisted in a variety of radical sensibilities,hermeneutical motifs, and combinations with other discourses (psycho-analysis, Marxism, libertarian anarchism, Zionism, etc.).9 Raised in aconsciously Jewish environment and briefly active in the FreiesJiidischesLehrhaus (a Frankfurt circle of learning and debate surrounding RabbiNehemiah Nobel), Kracauer began to criticize vehemently the revival ofMessianic thought. He rejected the "Messianic enthusiasts of communistcoloring" (messianischeSturm- und DranggeisterkommunistischerFdrbung),along with other movements of religious renewal, as irrational, romantic,and ultimately idealist because they eclipsed the real world as well as thedivine world they presumed to know so well (OdM 110).10What cearlyset Kracauer off from a writer like Bloch was his attempt to salvage con-cepts of "truth" and "reason," and his belief in the possibility of a "gen-tle" transfiguration of nature in the name of reason (although he recog-nized the complicity of the Enlightenment with the devastating changeswrought by capitalist forms of rationality)."

9. Anson Rabinbach, "Between Enlightenment and the Apocalypse: Benjamin,Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism," New GermanCritique 4 (Winter1985): 78-124; Leo Lowenthal,Mitmachen olltechnie:Einautobiographischesesprdch itHelmutDubiel(Frankfurt/Main: uhrkamp, 1980) 19ff., 27, 59, 156; MartinJay, "Poli-tics of Translation:SiegfriedKracauerand WalterBenjaminon the Buber-RosenzweigBible," LeoBaeck nstituteYearBook21 (1976), reprintedin Permanentxiles 198-216. OnJewish Messianism in general, see Gershom Scholem's canonical essay, "The Messi-anic Idea inJudaism," in TheMessianicdea nJudaismandOtherEssavs nJewishSpiritual-ity (New York:Schocken, 1972).10. Also see Kracauer'spolemical review of Ernst Bloch's book ThomasMiinzer,"Prophetentum," FZ 27 Aug. 1922; and his letters to Leo Lowenthal from 1921 to1924. The letterof 4 Dec. 1921 is reprintedin Ltwenthal, Mitmachen44-47; the lettersof 19 Dec. 1921, 31 Aug. 1923, and 12Apr. 1924 arepartiallyreprintedin IngridBelkeand Irina Renz, eds., Siegfried racauer889-1966,MarbacherMagazin47 (1988):36, 39,40. Kracaueralso resented Benjamin'sversion of Messianism,though he responded toit far less violentlythan he did to Bloch's;see Kracauer'setterto Adoro, 7June 1931,and the letter he wrote to Lowenthal (6Jan. 1957) upon reading the firstcollection ofBenjamin's writings:"Much has paled and suffers from a Messianicdogmatism whichon the level that I dwell on appears abstruse and arbitrary"(Kracauer Papers,Marbach).Also see Milder, Kracauer 5ff.11. Kracauerelaborates on the link between Jewish Messianism and the traditionof Enlightenment in a (to my knowledge) unpublished essay entitled "Conclusions"


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Nonetheless, Kracauer participates in the discourse of moder Jew-ish Messianism in significant ways. Even as he replaced metaphysicalcategories with concepts indebted to the Enlightenment and to the ear-ly Marx, a distinctly apocalyptic undercurrent continued to character-ize his observations of contemporary life, specifically, a perception ofmodernity as traumatic upheaval which will lead to catastrophe. LikeBenjamin and Bloch, he could not envision change as immanent inhistory, as in bourgeois-liberal notions of progress and reform, butonly as a total break. Therefore, the function of the intellectual was to"wait" rather than intervene: "We must remain hidden, quietistic, in-active, a thorn in the side of others, driving them (and ourselves) todespair rather than giving them hope."'2 At the same time, the intel-lectual should engage in the work of redemption - redemption hereconceived of in the utopian sense of a restoration of all things past andpresent and linked to the cabalist concept of tikkun.13Kracauer's affinity with the discourse of secular Jewish Messianismemerges less in his conceptual constructions than in recurring motifsand interpretive tropes (as, for instance, the image of an imminent Um-schlagor switch). As Michael Schroter observes, an "aura of eschatolog-ical longing" emanates from the "luminous metaphors" of Kracauer'stexts, whether in the seemingly straightforward genre of cultural cri-tique and sociological analysis or in more literary works like his autobi-ographical novel Ginster(1928). Betraying the intensity of shock-like ex-perience, these metaphors often exceed the overt construction ofKracauer's argument and take on a theoretical life of their own.14On this connotative level, Kracauer's account of the disintegration ofthe world also resonates with the legacy of Jewish Gnosticism, although,(KracauerPapers,Deutsches Literaturarchiv,Marbach am Neckar),which he wrote foran anthologyon the Jewish contributionto German culture,probablybefore he knewabout the Holocaust. For Kracauer's vant-la-lettrenalysisof the dialecticof Enlighten-ment, see for instance "The Mass Ornament"and "Aufruhrder Mittelschichten:EineAuseinandersetzungmit dem 'Tat'-Kreis,"FZ 10 and 11 Dec. 1931, OdM87f.12. Letterto Leo Lwenthal, 12 Apr. 1924, reprintedin Belke and Renz 40.13. Scholem, "MessianicIdea"4. The motif of redemptionruns throughKracauer'sentirework and becomes eponymic notablyin the subtitleof TheoryfFilm:TheRedemptionofPhysical eality.Discussingthe Germantranslationof thatsubtidewith RudolfAmheim(whohad proposed "Riickgewinnung"),racauerwrites:"I still think'Erloesung'ould notbe bad, preciselybecause of its theologicalconnotation"(letter,30 Nov. 1960, KracauerPapers,Marbacham Neckar).Accordingto KarstenWitte,the eventualtranslationof"re-demption" as "Errettung"as suggestedby Adoro.14. Schroter25, 28. For an example of the stylisticstrategies n Kracauer's arlyes-says, see the closing pages of this essay.


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as a doctrine, Jewish Gnosticism was just as suspect to him as other va-riants of religious mysticism. Drawing on Weberian concepts of ration-alization and disenchantment, his analysis echoes other contemporarycritiques of reification from Simmel to Lukacs. Like Lukacs, if onlymore so, Kracauer evokes the fallen world through images of petri-fication and mortification, of detritus, fragments, empty shells, larvae,and masks.15 Even with their anti-metaphysical thrust, such images re-call the Gnostic tradition: they mark the negative traces of the with-drawal of God. As material evidence of the negativity of history, thesetraces have to be preserved and interpreted so that, when the greatbreak occurs, the world can be redeemed in as complete a shape aspossible, and the sparks encrusted in even the most fallen matter canbe released. As Kracauer says in another programmatic essay, "Gestaltund Zerfall" ("Shape and Disintegration"), "the new shape [das Gestal-tete]cannot be lived unless the disintegrated particles are gathered andcarried along" (FZ 21 August 1925). What is more, since the originalorder of things is irrevocably lost and truth cannot be restored in anyimmediate and immanent sense, the process of disintegration has tobe advanced so as to lay bare "the preliminary character of all givenconfigurations" (OdM 39).16It is in this Gnostic vision of Weltzerfalldisintegration of the world)that film assumes a two-fold function for the early Kracauer, a key rolein the "all-out gamble of the historical process [Vabanque-Spiel esGeschichtsprozesses]"OdM 37). In one sense, film shares this role withphotography, which Kracauer theorized in his great essay of 1927. AsHeide Schlupmann has pointed out, Kracauer's concept of photogra-phy goes beyond a mere opposition of the photographic image to the"memory image," beyond the ideological effect of banishing time intothe eternal present of illustrated magazines and newsreels.'7 Rather, as

15. Adorno, in his 1931 inaugurallecture, uses similar imagerywhen he approv-ingly quotes Freud and the epistemological turn to the "Abhub der Erscheinungs-welt" ("refuseof the phenomenal world"), "Die Aktualitatder Philosophie," Gesam-melteSchriften (Frankfurt/Main: uhrkamp,1973):336. On literaryGnosticism,specif-ically in Kafka,see Harold Bloom, TheStrongLightof the Canonical:Kafka,FreudandScholems RevisionistsofJewishCulture ndThoughtNew York:City College, 1987) 1-25.16. The categoryof the preliminaryor provisional in historyreappears,as part ofan extended analogy between historiographyand photography, in Kracauer'sposthu-mously published History:TheLastThingsBeforeheLast(New York: Oxford UP, 1969).17. Heide Schliipmann, "Phenomenology of Film: On SiegfriedKracauer'sWrit-ings of the 1920s,"NewGermanCritique0 (Winter1987):97-114; also see Schriter 26-27. Kracauer's ssay,"Die Photographie,"FZ 28 Oct. 1927, is reprintedin OdM21-39.


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both symptom and agent of the petrification of the world, photo-graphy also gathers the detritus of history and reveals it in all itsnegativity.Thus it functions as an archiveof "the last elements of na-ture alienatedfrom intention" - "the world of death in its independ-ence from human beings" (OdM38). If the contingency of the photo-graphic image undermines bourgeois fictions of the autonomous sub-ject, it also offers human consciousness the chance to fully recognizeand engage with the "foundations of nature"(OdM36-37). If film, likephotography, is to assume such a cognitive, archivalfunction, it has tostickto the world of appearances,to "the mute, external surfaceof theworld." The manner in which it relates to that world, however, is notthat of an iconicrepresentation(which would conflict with the BiblicalBilderverbot)ut, rather,thatof an indexicalimprint of the historicalpro-cess, displaying the state of aggregationof the present.'8The second function of film in Kracauer'shistoricalproject derivesfrom specificallycinematictechniques not sharedwith photography,inparticularmontage, superimposition, and other special effects. If pho-tographyreflects the detritus of history in mere disorder, film has thepossibility of advancing this disorder by systematically suspending"everyhabitualrelationship among the elements of nature" and by "as-sociating parts and segments so as to produce strangeconfigurations"(OdM39). Kracauer'searliest attempts to define "the essence" or the"spirit"of film emphasize the anti-naturalistaskof film to "thoroughlybreak to pieces the natural contexts of our life," to promote the "con-tinual transformationof the externalworld, the crazy displacement ofits objects [dieverriickteerriickunghrerObjekte]"FZ4 November 1923).Accordingly,the criticfavorsgenres of the fantastic,the fairytale, andthe burlesque (Groteske),hat is, slapstick comedy. In its systematicun-folding of chaos and discontinuity,slapstickcomedy exposes the com-pulsive and narrowlogic of capitalistrationalization:"one has to handthis to the Americans: with slapstick film they have created a formwhich offers a counterweightto their reality: f in that realitythey sub-ject the world to an often unbearable discipline, the film in turn dis-mantles this self-imposed order quite forcefully"(FZ29 January 1926).

18. This claim to some extent recallsPhilip Rosen's argumentabout Andre Bazin,except that for Kracauer he filmic preservationof a transientmoment can never be apositiveemanationof creationbut, rather,capturestime only in its negativity, n its drifttowardcatastrophefrom which alone redemption can come. See Rosen, "History ofImage, Image of History:Subjectand Ontology in Bazin," WideAngle9.4 (1987):7-34.


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56 Kracauern Filmand Mass Culture

Finally,film's capabilitiesof displacementand disjunction,of figura-tion and disfiguration,harbor a utopian possibility, true to the Messia-nic tradition."Genuine film drama,"Kracauerwrites in 1923, "has thetask of ironizing the phantom quality [Scheinhaftigkeit]f our life byhyperbolizing its unreality so as to point toward true reality"(FZ 16December 1923);that realityitself, however, has to remain unknown.The model for this hidden utopian dimension in Kracauer'searlyfilmtheory is Franz Kafka, ust as Marcel Proustfiguresas the patron saintof his later TheoryfFilm. Kafkaappears near the end of the photogra-phy essay at the crucial transition from the provisional dis/order ofphotography to the possibilities of film:

It is therefore ncumbentupon consciousnesso laybarethepre-liminary haracter f all given configurationsnd,perhaps,evenstirup anintimation f therightorderof thestateof nature. n theworksof FranzKafka, liberated onsciousness bsolves tselfofthisresponsibility y destroyingnatural ealityandjumblingthefragments gainsteachother(OdM 9).Kracauer's eview of TheCastle year earlier could be said to containthe blueprint of a utopian film aesthetics.Although Kracauer nevermentions the cinema by name, he situates Kafka'snovel within thesame parametersfrom which, during those years, he had been ap-proaching film: (1) a Gnostic vision of history, centeringon the abyssbetween human existence and truth ("dieAbgesperrtheites MenschenonderWahrheit");2)the genre of the fairytale,which prefiguresthe mirac-ulous victory of truth over the blind forces of nature (the unfulfilledprojectof the Enlightenment);and (3)psychoanalysis, n particular heFreudian notion of negation, and the discourse of the unconscious inhorror and dreams.Thus he reads TheCastle s a negativefairytale, "dieMatrizedesMdrchens[the stencil of the fairy tale]," in which the mutefragmentsof habitual life areorganized againsteach other in a series ofdisplacements and inversions whose hidden order only appears fromthe perspectiveof the absent, unrealized truth. Instead of Mdrchenglick(the fortune, luck, happiness of fairytales), however, Kafka'snovel is

submerged in fear, in the horror that truth may be buried for good.Kracauercompares this horror,on the one hand, to the experience ofthe dreamer, to "the disintegrationof the human being in the dreamwho surrendersto elements of existence displacednot only by the play


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Miriam Hansen 57

of the drives." On the other hand, he invokes the myth of the Medusa,which he would later take up in TheoryfFilm, and gives it a gnostic twist:"the Jew Kafkabrings horror into the world because the countenance oftruth is withdrawn from it. Were this countenance to reveal itself, theworld would go mad with happiness" (FZ 28 November 1926).19The Gnostic-Messianic capability of film assumes a political edge inKracauer's relationship to bourgeois art and culture. With his discov-ery of film as a cognitive medium, Kracauer turned his back on the in-stitutions of German high culture from which he had been exiled bymore than just personal intention. As for other Weimar intellectualsand avant-garde artists, the cinema figured for Kracauer as a practicalcritique of the remnants of bourgeois culture, of anachronistic at-tempts to conceal the actual state of disintegration and upheaval bymeans of what in Benjaminian terms would be called a false restora-tion of the aura. Kracauer had persistently criticized such attempts,from the closed form of historical biography through the George circleto Buber and Rosenzweig's translation of the Bible. It is in this constel-lation that Kracauer valorizes the term "Zerstreuung" distraction, diver-sion), invoked by cultural conservatives to decry the audience's aban-donment to glittering surfaces and glamorous appearances:

It is not externalitythat poses a threatto truth. Truth is threatenedonly by the naive affirmation of cultural values that have becomeunreal and by the carelessmisuse of concepts such as personality,inwardness,tragedyand so on, terms which in themselves certainlyreferto loftyideas but which, due to socialchanges,have lost muchof their scope along with their supporting foundations. Further-more, many of these concepts have acquireda bad aftertaste odaybecause they deflect an inordinate amount of attentionaway fromthe externaldamagesof societyonto the private ndividual.... In aprofound sense, Berlin audiences act truthfullywhen increasinglythey shun these artevents (which, for good reason, remain caughtin mere pretension), preferringinstead the surfaceglamor of thestars, films, revues and production values.20

19. For a slightly different elaboration of the myth of the Medusa see Kracauer'sTheoryf Film (New York:Oxford UP, 1960) 305-6. Also see the articles by GertrudKoch and Heide Schliipmann in this issue.20. "Kult der Zerstreuung:Uber die Berliner Lichtspielhauser,"FZ 4 Mar. 1926,OdM314; trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New GermanCritique0: 94, translation modified.


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The traumatic nature of social change not only challenges aestheticclaimsto truth and generality,but callsinto questionthe traditionalhier-archywhich the institution of art has relied on to exclude and suppressother, i.e., lower-classand more physical,forms of culture.Reviewingabook on the circus (which, incidentally,rehearseskey thoughts of the"Photography" ssay),Kracauerwrites: "With the decine of the old so-cial order,the boundariescollapseby which classicalaestheticshad anx-iously segregated the art of the ring from high art.. ." (FZ26 July 1926).Benjamin, elaboratingKracauer'sconcept of "distraction" n his es-say "The Workof Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"drawsa parallel between mass culture's challenge to traditional aestheticsand the avant-garde'sassaulton the institution of art from within (asinthe manifestations of Dada).21For Kracauer, he artisticavant-garde snot only a criticalmodel (one that, when Benjamin was writing the"Workof Art" essay, already belonged to the past), but also itself asymptom of the growing distance between the sphere of truth andmoder existence, and of the dilemma resultingfrom that distance forthe contemporaryartist.In an essaystillwrittenin the earlytheologicalmode, "The Artistin This Time" (published in theJewish journal DerMorgen),Kracauerdescribes that dilemma as a problem of connection(Verkniipfung),f bridging the gap between the principles of aestheticcreationand the need to confront contemporaryreality.Beforehe citesexamples from poetry, art,and music (and then only briefly,contrast-ing Expressionism with variantsof Neue Sachlichkeitand Constructi-vism), he again returns to Grune's film, TheStreet.He resumes his earlierreadingof the film as an allegoryof the fallenlife, yet takesit further to identifyits attitudeas one sharedby "humanbeings who seriously engage with realityand hence are doubly affectedby the power of the forces which today deform the world into a citystreet." These people are no longer patiently "waiting,"but have be-come impatient with any "romanticattempt to gloss over the realitiesof technology and economy."

Theywilldo anythingn theirpower o make he worlddisclose tsphantomcharacter,o let nothingnessreignas it may. Theyarenihilistsor the sake of the positiveand hastentoward he end of

21. WalterBenjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction,"second version (1936), in Illuminations,d. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (NewYork:Schocken, 1969) section 14.


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despairlest a "yes"might impede thatprocess halfwayand ineffec-tively. . . . Therefore, they hyperbolize the negation, stretch theemptiness and reject soul where it is only make-up. They believethat America [a contemporary metaphor for disenchanted mod-ernism]will disappearonly when it discovers itselfcompletely .. 22Clearly, Kracauer sees himself as one of these "nihilists," even as heurges them not to abandon hope for the revelation of the absent di-vine; otherwise they will merely reproduce the gap between "film im-age and prophecy."23Kracauer's radical gesture in the essay is his movement from meta-physical and philosophical questions to a discussion of the film withoutapology, justification, or explanation. He does not take up the issue ofwhether film in general, or this film in particular, is art. In a modernworld which, to paraphrase Rabinbach on Benjamin, "was not simplydisenchanted, in Weber's sense of the term, [but] infinitely impover-ished and lacking in a discourse hat could adumbrate he natureof experi-ence,"24he significance of film as such a discourse was far more urgentto Kracauer than the question of its aesthetic value. Thus, a film like TheStreetserves Kracauer as a diagnostic tool or, more precisely, as a visionthat he identifies with and appropriates into his own historico-philo-sophical discourse. The film's function in the context of contemporaryart and culture is to expressthe dilemma, not necessarily to solve it.

By 1926, however, Kracauer was well aware that the average filmproduction did anything but advance the negativity of the historicalprocess. Rather, the cinema seemed bent on outdoing bourgeois cul-ture in patching up the effects of disintegration and petrification. AsKracauer remarks with gentle sarcasm at the end of his essay "CalicoWorld" (FZ 28 January 1926), an enchanted tour through the surrealsets of the Ufa studio, the task of the director consists of:

shaping the cinematic material,as beautifullychaotic as life itself,into that unity for which life is indebted to art ... In most cases,there is a happy end. Clouds made of glass threaten and dissolveagain. One believes the fourth wall. Everythingis guaranteednat-ural [AllesgarantiertNatur] (OdM 278).

22. "Der Kunster in dieserZeit,"DerMorgen.1(Apr.1925):105, 106. The section onTheStreetwasreprinted,under the title"Filmbildund Prophetenrede,"nFZ 5 May1925.23. Kracauer,"Der Kiinstler" 106.24. Rabinbach 102.


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60 Kracauer n Film and Mass Culture

Around this time, Kracaueralso begins to criticizethe gentrificationoftheatersand exhibition practices, contrastingearlier,anarchic forms ofdistractionwith the cultivated entertainment which is takingits place,"a scopophilia linked to actual experience" with the "amusement"dispensed by the averageproduction.25Kracauer'sassessment of film from the perspectiveof a philosophyof history increasinglygives way to an approach committed to a cri-tique of ideology - which anticipatesin crucialways Horkheimer andAdorno's indictment of the culture industry.This shift, to some extentreflecting his reading of Marx the previous year, is signalled inKracauer's review of BattleshipPotemkin ited "Die Jupiterlampenbrennen weiter"("The KlieglightsAre StillOn," FZ 16 May 1926). Hehails Eisenstein's film as a major breakthroughvis-a-vis the bulk ofAmerican and European films, not for aesthetic reasons but because,for the first time, a film has taken on a "real" subject and speaks of"the truth" that matters. This truth is "the struggle of the oppressedagainst the oppressors"; it is "the moment of revolution."26With hisreview, Kracauerjoined Herbert Ihering, Lu Marten, Benjamin, andother critics in the campaign to defend Potemkinagainst the threat ofcensorship and political abuse. In terms of his emerging film theory,however, the politicalmandate for film to express "truth" as a positiveterm displaces its earlier function of capturing and hyperbolizing thenegativityof history, the phantom realityof a fallen world.Conversely, Kracauerbegins to elaborate on the systematicconnec-tion between the cinema as a capitalistenterprise and the social mes-sages of the films, on the collusion between industryand public. From1927 on, his reviews and essays explore the ideological formulas bywhich films transmute social and economic contradictions into fablesof individual success, exotic adventure and sentimentality. In theanonymously published series, "The LittleShopgirls Go to the Mov-ies" (FZMarch 1927), Kracaueroutlines a whole spectrum of "typicalmotifs" that recur in the average production. These motifs indicate"how societywishes to see itself' and thereforeepitomize the range of

25. "Das Geheimnis von Genf," FZ 29 March 1928. Also see "Kult derZerstreuung";"Kino in der Miinzstrage"(FZ2 Apr. 1932, reprintedin StrafiennBerlinund AnderswoBerlin: Arsenal, 1987] 69-71); and, especially, "An der Grenze desGestem: Zur Berliner Film- und Photoschau," FZ 12July 1932.26. "Die Jupiterlampen brennen weiter: Zur Frankfurter Auffihrung desPotemkin-Films," FZ 16 May 1926, reprinted in Kino: Essays, Studien,Glossenzum Film,ed. Karsten Witte (Frankfurt/Main:Suhrkamp, 1974) 73-76.


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currentideology (OdM282). Whatmakes these fables so objectionableis not their fantasticcharacter, for Kracaueragain and again defendsthe improbabilities of adventure Kolportager detective films againstthe pretensions of the artfilm, the historicaldrama, or his betenoire, he"society film" (Gesellschaftsfilm).ather, it is their specific way oftapping, embellishing, distorting, repressing the social realitythat de-mands to be filmed. "What should be projectedon the screen is wipedawayand images cheating us out of the image of existence fill the sur-face." The averagefiction film, claims Kracauer n a scathingattackon"The Contemporary Film and Its Audience" of 1928, is nothing butan "attempt to escape" from the problems of the present (OdM296).This approach predominates in Kracauer'swritings on film through1933; it returns, from a historicallychanged perspective, in his "psy-chological historyof German film" writtenin exile, FromCaligarioHit-ler (1947).27In this book, Grune's film reappears as an "unpolitical product ofthe avant-garde."The film, accordingto Kracauer,was fairlysuccessfulwith a wide audience "which, however, consisted primarilyof intellec-tuals."While he still praisesthe "realistic"effortin the everyday quali-ty of the (studio)setting, TheStreetnow figures as an allegoryfor the re-gressivemovement from rebellion to submission. The wanderingpro-tagonist is reduced to a social type, a philistine acting out historicallyspecific and - in retrospect, politicallyfatal - psychological mecha-nisms.28 With this analysis, Kracauer not only shifts the frameworkfrom philosophy of historyto critiqueof ideology; he also disavowshisown earlier fascination with the film, his critical identificationwith theexperience of the doubly exiled wanderer.It would be naive to ignore the reasons for that shift. By the end ofthe 1920s, the political situation in Germany (of which Kracauerwasmuch more acutely aware than his friend Adorno) required a morespecific interventionon the partof intellectuals than theories of ration-alization, reification and alienation grounded in a negative theology.If, ironically,the theological angle had enabled Kracauer o leave the

27. For reviews in which Kracauerdevelops a critique of ideology from the per-spective of spectatorialeffects see, for instance, "Eine Berliner Range," FZ 23 Apr.1927 (which begins with the sigh, "Ach diese BerlinerGesellschaftsfilme!"); Kiki,"FZ1 Apr. 1927; "Klettermaxe,"FZ 10 Mar. 1927; "Eine Dubarrvvon heute," FZ 19 Feb.1927; "Heut' tanzt die Mariett',"FZ 14 Apr. 1928.28. FromCaligario Hitler:A Psychologicalistorv fthe German ilm(Princeton:Prince-ton UP, 1947) 119-123. Also see TheoryfFilm72.


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domain of bourgeois culture and philosophical idealism and to turnhis materialistgaze to the media of mass consumption, the increasedsocial complicityand politicalcontestationof these media demanded adifferentlanguage. The "waiting"that Kracauerhad deemed the onlyadequate attitudefor intellectualswas now being done involuntarilybythe thousands, if not millions, waiting in breadlines, unemploymentagencies, all-daymovie theaters,or heated shelters.29By the time FromCaligario Hitlerwas written, the apocalyptic implications of Kracauer'searlywork had been realized with a vengeance: the all-out gamble ofthe historicalprocess had been lost in an unimaginable catastrophe.Itwould be misleading, however,to present the relation between hisearly, theologically grounded film theory and his increased commit-ment to a critiqueof ideology beginning in 1926 as if they were chron-ologically distinctphases in a linear development. Rather,the two dis-courses continue side by side and remain interwoven, with varyingemphasis and degrees of contradiction, throughout Kracauer's aterwork. This is nowhere more evident than in his concept of "reality,"which oscillates among metaphysical and material, perceptual, social,psychoanalytic, ideological, and political meanings.30Alreadyin the essay "Those Who Wait,"Kracauer'snotion of "reali-ty" begins to slide from the "spiritualsphere," depleted of meaning, tothe sphere of existence, the alienated, confusing, contradictorymulti-plicityof modern life. Kracauer oosens the linkageof the real with theabsent "truth"in favor of an affinitywith the phenomenal, the "con-crete," the "profane": "The place of truth itself is ... present in themidst of the 'common' [gemeinen'] ublic life" (OdM178). Kracauer'suncompromising rejection of metaphysical forms of renewal forcedhim to plunge into the fallen world, seeking involvement with its un-known shapes, movements, and ornaments. To some extent, this in-volvement was strategic,a means to transformreality by wayof mimet-ic subversion. As he writes in "Shape and Disintegration,""real life"(still committed to the absent "truth")must don "the mask of thederealizedand basein orderto affecta reality hatcontinues to dominate

29. "Arbeitsnachweise,"FZ 17 June 1930; "Warmehallen," FZ 18 Jan. 1931;"Kino in der Minzstrage," FZ 2 Apr. 1932; all reprinted in StrajSen.30. On Kracauer'sconcept of realitysee Leo Haenlein, DerDenk-GestusesaktivenWartensim Sinn-Vakuumder Moderne:Zur Konstitution und Tragweitedes RealititskonzeptesSiegfriedKracauers in speziellerRiicksichtauf WalterBenjamin (Frankfurt, Bern, and NewYork:Lang, 1984).


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where it is vulnerable. It may be that, in order to change thatrealityde-cisively,one would have to apply a lever in its own medium.. ." (FZ21August 1925).The critic'ssuspension between truth and existence, the two poles ofreality,is encapsulated in the paradox of a "de-realizedreality,"a ma-terialpresence without ostensible substance or origin. From the mid-1920s onward, Kracauerattempts to set this paradox into motion, torelease its paralyzingcontradiction into the possibility of political ac-tion. Analyzing the social topography of Paris, for instance, he dis-solves the double bind of class and consumer culture into a configura-tion of center and periphery.31He contraststhe Faubourgs,as the siteof poverty and use value, with the Boulevards' abundance of com-modities, images, signs, lights, and publicity, and then concludes:"Broad streets run from the Faubourgs into the glamorous center.This center is not the one intended. The happiness envisioned for theshabby periphery is subject to a different radius than the availableones. But we must takethe streetsto the center because today its emp-tiness is real" (OdM17).The migration of reality into the empty center challenges the verydistinction between real and unreal, between a prior essence and a su-perficialrealm of images. Kracauertranslates the Wildean apothegmabout nature imitating art into the observation that social life has be-come indistinguishable from the cinema. Comparing the guests in aluxury hotel with their two-dimensional counterparts in the societyfilms, he wonders "whether they descended into an ephemeral exist-ence from the screen or whether those films were modelled on them.It almost seems as if they were living by the grace of an imaginarydi-rector."32Already in his essay "The LittleShopgirls," he notes a con-vergence between cinematic and extra-cinematic levels of reality, as-cribing this effect to the gullibility and conformism of female specta-tors. "Film drama and life usually correspond to each other, becausethe typists [Tippmamsells]ashion themselves after the models on thescreen; but perhaps the most spurious models are stolen from life"(OdM280).Kracauer'sobservation seems to anticipatethe postmodern topos ofthe implosion of realityinto images, of the shift from representationto

31. Mulder-Bach,"'Mancherlei Fremde"' 63.32. "Im Luxushotel," FZ 14 Sept. 1928. Kracauer himself invokes Wilde's apo-thegm in an article on "BeautifulActresses,"FZ 8 Dec. 1928.


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64 Kracauern Film andMassCulture

simulation. But Kracauercan no more be reduced to a Baudrillardianhyperrealistthan he can be dismissed as a naive realist.To the extentthat historical developments warranted such an analysis, he was nodoubt more disposed than, say,Adorno, to recognize the fundamentaltransformationof relations of representationand reception occurringin the areaof mass and consumer culture.This does not mean, howev-er, that he would have described, let alone endorsed, that process un-critically.For Kracauer,fascination with the cinema's surface effectsand its ideological function are inseparablyrelated: realityassails theboundaries between the two.33As problematicas the approachof "The LittleShopgirls"may be, es-peciallywith regardto its gender politics, the essay extends Kracauer'sconcept of realityto include a psychosocialdimension: "The idiotic andunreal film fantasies are the daydreamsofsocietyn which its true realitycomes to the fore and its otherwiserepressedwishes takeshape."Whilethese fantasies urnon the imbricationof romance and upwardmobility,their discourse transcends class boundaries in a mise-en-abymeof thesocial imaginary:"In realityit may not happen easily that a scrubgirlmarriesthe owner of a Rolls Royce;yet, is it not the dream of the RollsRoyce owners that the scrubgirlsdream of risingto their level?" In as-sessingthe force of such fantasies,Kracauerplaystwo notions of realityagainsteach other: "The more [the contemporary films] misrepresentthe surface,the more correctlythey represent society, because they re-flect its secret mechanism" (OdM280). Within this basicallyFreudianmodel of culturalanalysis,realityresides both in the mechanisms of re-pression and in what is repressed;in other words, realitycan only begraspedin its contradictions.The objects of collective repression are not only the "secretwishes"that occasionally erupt into film fantasies but, more effectively, whatthe viewers wish to escape from: "normal existence in its impercepti-ble horror [das normaleDasein in seiner unmerklichenchrecklichkeit]."34While Kracauer s fascinated with the luxury hotel as a space of simula-tion, he leaves no doubt about the exclusive characterof that spaceand its inhabitants ("they resemble the lilies in the field: instead of

33. I differ here from Thomas Elsaesser,who charges that Kracauer'scritique ofideology obscures and thereby "falsifies" his proto-postmodern "concern with thecinema as a marginal sphere of life and its fascination as an experience of surfaceef-fects." "Cinema - The Irresponsible Signifier or 'The Gamble with History': FilmTheory or Cinema Theory?" New GermanCritique0 (Winter 1987): 82.34. Kracauer, Die Angestellten (1929), in Schriften1: 298.


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worriesthey have yachts").If for a postmodernist like Baudrillardtheimplosion of reality s universal and complete (whatever he subjective-pragmaticexperience of individuals may be),35 or Kracauer t is still amatter of perspective, a question of the social, i.e. class-specific,hori-zon of thatexperience. Thus he reads even the "spatialimages" of un-employment agencies as "dreams of society," "hieroglyphs"to be de-ciphered in terms of social reality.36The analogybetween the spaces offantasy and the areas of exigency they repress only underscores thecontradiction:these areas are partof society'sself-representation,evenas - and because - they remain hidden from public view. Therefore,Kracaueragain and again relates the reality of contemporary imageproduction and circulation to the realityof its limit terms: injustice,poverty, suffering, and death. "The flight of the images is the flightfrom revolution and from death."37It could be arguedthat Kracauer's nsistence on the discrepancybe-tween the realityof the new media of consumption and a more authen-tic realityof human sufferingassumes the function of the transcenden-tally grounded concept of truth in his earlier, theologicallymotivatedwritings. In a strict epistemological sense, this may be the case, al-though in practicethe relationbetween the two kinds of realitymore of-ten takes the form of a constellationthat the critic constructs from thecontradictorymake-up of contemporarysocial life.38What seems more

35. See, for instance,Jean Baudrillard,"The Ecstasyof Communication," trans.John Johnston, in Hal Foster, ed., TheAnti-Aesthetic:ssays nPostmodernulture(Seattle:Bay Press, 1983) 133, n. 4.36. "Arbeitsnachweise,"Strafien2. Also see the discussion of the notion of "spatialimages" (Raumbilder)s dreams of society, and the Benjaminianimplicationof the cityas a "dreamingcollective," n Adoro's letterto Kracauer, 5July 1930, and Kracauer'sresponse, 1 Aug. 1930 (KracauerPapers,Marbach).37. DieAngestellten89, also 248. The chapteron the leisure culture of the white-col-lar workers s entitled"Asvlfir Obdachlose" (Asylumfor the Homeless) which alludesto the experience of "transcendentalhomelessness," now a mass phenomenon, butalso refers to the structuralinseparabilityof mass-culturalglamor and the misery it triesto make people forget.In a similarvein, the execution of Sacco and Vanzettibecomes arunning theme in Kracauer'sreviews of 1927, e.g., "Amerikaim Film," FZ 24 Aug.1927: "the other America, not the real one which executed Sacco and Vanzetti."Andhe finds the sentimentalityand sadism of Universal's1927 version of UncleTom'sCabinespecially objectionable "because it reminds us of the blacks' struggle for liberationwhich has notbeen filmed" (FZ6 May 1928).38. Methodologically, Kracauer'scriticalpractice during this period correspondsto his endorsement of montage in film aesthetics,which emphasizes constructionrath-er than a one-to-one representation of reality. Criticizing a social-democratic reviewthat complains about the absence of the work force from a special newsreel program,


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problematic is the economic logic which necessitates that the expansionof one reality can proceed only at the expense of the other ("the flight ofthe images is the flightfrom. . ."). Kracauer first develops this thesis inthe "Photography" essay in the opposition between photographic im-age and memory image, and in the concomitant notion that the prolif-eration of photographic images (in newsreels and illustrated magazines,for example) reduces human beings' capacity for (involuntary) recollec-tion. Like Benjamin in his essay on Baudelaire, Kracauer invokes Berg-son and Proust, and with them a Jewish tradition in which memory ispitted against the forward momentum of history.39In an article on theFrankfurt premiere of two sound films he concludes:

The sound film is so far the final link in the chain of a series ofpowerful inventions which, with blind certaintyand as if guidedby a secret will, push toward the complete representationof hu-man reality.This would make it possible, in principle, to wrest thetotalityof life from its transitorinessand transmitit in the eternityof the image.

However, he immediately qualifies this proto-Bazinian adage. The to-tal cinematic grasp on reality extends only to that aspect of life whichmanifests itself in spatial terms and corresponds to the measurable,chronological time denounced by Bergson - as opposed to the timeof experience, the time of Proust's recherche.

The realitypreservedin the sound film correspondsso little to thereality Prousthad in mind that the two exclude rather than com-plement each other. ... It almost seems as if human beings werelosing the intensive life thatresistsimagingin the measurein whichthey become capable of capturingthe extensive, spatiallife.40

Kracauerobjects that the point is rather to "change the arrangement":"Were themeaningless chatterreplaced by a construction [Anordnung]n which one image couldcomment upon the other, the workforce would not necessarilyhave to performin theflesh but could, as it were, appear between the lines." FZ 22 Sept. 1931, reprinted inKino 15.39. Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"(1939),Illuminations87ff;and hisessay on Nicolai Lesskow, "The Storyteller"(1936/7), Illuminations3-109. Also seeKracauer,History 2-86, 160-163, and passim. On the opposition of historyand mem-orv in theJewish traditionsee Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,Zachor:ewishHistory ndJewishMemorySeattleand London: U of Washington P, 1982).40. "Tonbildfilm:ZurVorfuhrungim FrankfurterGloria-Palast,"FZ 12 Oct. 1928,reprinted in Schriften (Frankfurt/Main: uhrkamp, 1979): 411.


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No doubt thereis a connection between the historicexplosion of me-chanically - or electronically - produced images and the decline ofcertain kinds of remembering, but this need not lead to culturallycon-servative conclusions. Nor would Kracauer and, for that matter,Benjamin, want to occlude the possibility that film and photographyhave also enabled new forms of memory and experience (which forboth are almost synonymous terms).41n the same articleon the soundfilm, Kracaueractuallypursues this possibility,draftingthe technologyof sound for the projectof redemption: "To redeem the unintentionaldin of the street for an interventioninto our world is the preserveof thenew technicalprocedure,just as it was that of previous film techniqueto make the life of light and shadows accessible to consciousness."42More than the formal play of light and shadows, cinematic devices likethe close-up, camera movement, and editing can capturethe world ofthings in its habitual, unconscious interdependence with human life,with the traces of social, psychic, and erotic relations. Writing onJacques Feyder's ThereseRaquin,Kracauerextols the representationofthe petty-bourgeoisParisapartment,"which is populated by ghosts":

everypieceof furnitures chargedwiththe fates hatunfurledherein the past.There s the doublebed, the higharmchair,he silverdishes all thesethingshave hesignificancefwitnesses:heyarepalpablynfusedwith humansubstance nd nowtheyspeak,oftenbetterhanhumanbeingsmightspeak. nhardly ny ilm- exceptfortheRussianilms- thepowerof deadthingshas been forced othe surface as activelyand fully as here [FZ29 March 1928].42a41. On Benjamin'sconcept of experience, see MarleenStoessel,Aura,dasvergesseneMenschliche:uSprachendErfahrungeiWalterBenjaminMunich: Hanser, 1983);on therole of cinema in relation to that concept, see my essay, "Benjamin, Cinema and Ex-perience: 'The Blue Flowerin the Landof Technology,"' NewGermanCritique0 (Win-ter 1987): 179-224.42. "Tonbildfilm" 410-11. The paragraphconcludes: "Sound film will achieve itsreal significanceonly when it opens up an existence unknown before, the sounds andnoises surroundingus which never communicated with visual impressions and alwayseluded the senses." In a number of reviews following the introduction of sound,Kracaueroutlines something like a cinematic phenomenology of noise - against thedominanceof the voicequadialogue reminiscent f similardirectionsn modemmusicfromRussolo hroughSatie o Cage.On thesignificancef sound n Kracauer'sfilm theory, see the recent articleby Helmut Lethen, "Sichtbarkeit:KracauersLiebeslehre,"in Siegfried racauer: eueInterpretationen,ds. Michael Kesslerand Thom-asY. Levin Tubingen: tauffenburg erlag,1990)195-228;205-14.42a. Reprintedn Witte136f.


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68 Kracauern Film and Mass Culture

Kracauer'sascription of a new form of anamnestic capabilityto filmtouches on Benjamin's well-known metaphor of an "optical uncon-scious," referringto the camera's abilityto explore an "unconsciouslypermeated space."43Like Benjamin and, before him, Bela Balazs, Kracaueradapts themethod of physiognomy, the interpretationof characterfrom imper-ceptible facial features, to the realm of film aesthetics and itspsychosocial parameters.But more emphaticallythan Balazs he insistson the role of language in film's relation to reality. In a review ofBalazs's book, VisibleManorthe CultureofFilm(DersichtbareMensch derdie KulturdesFilms,1924), he paraphrasesthat book's argument in de-cidedly linguistic terms: "as people on the screen remain mute . . .things are endowed with a tongue. For the first time ever, perhaps,they speak. Film retrievesthe 'small life' of things and insertsit into theworld of symbols" (FZ10July 1927). Since language is the medium ofredemption (here too Kracauer s true to Messianic thought),44 ilm'srelation to realityentails a double work of transcription:on the level ofproduction, in the selection and construction of the material throughcinematic techniques; and on the level of reception, in the interpretiveactivityof spectatorsand critics. Balazs's denial of verbal (i.e. written)language, according to Kracauer a "serious blunder" (schlimme nt-gleisung),eads him to a romantic conflation of physiognomy and classstruggle, a confusion of mere visibilitywith genuine concreteness.ForKracauer,he naturethat returnsthe gaze of the physiognomistofmodern life is neitherpreverbalnor pristine.The "materialdimension"explored by the camera "atthe expense of the intentional one" is still asocialand historicalspace,by no means a space ostensibly exempt from,or opposite of, "ideology,"as he later seems to suggestin the epiloguetoTheoryfFilm.It is the alien landscapeof a fallenworld that confronts thebeholder with its fragmentarydebris and new configurations.OnceKracauerabandons the metaphysical premises under which the fallenworld means nothing but "transcendentalhomelessness," he "calmly"(or perhaps not quite so calmly) "embarks on adventurous travels"

43. Benjamin, "The Work of Art," Illuminations 36f. Also see Hansen, "Benja-min" 207-212.44. Rabinbach, "Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse": "Thought focuses onthe restorationf lost meanings, suppressed connotations, and is often linked to a senseof redemption through language and through the reading of texts which reveal thehidden presence or traces of a Messianic epoch" (84-85).


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through the "far-flungruins" as which modem life presents itself inBenjamin'sfamous passage,afterfilm has "exploded [theurban-indus-trial]prison-worldwith the dynamiteof one-tenth seconds."45He doesso in a progression of guises and roles, from theflaneur to the detective tothe chiffonnieror Lumpensammler an image bestowed upon him byBenjamin), a ragpicker gathering the detritus left behind by the storm ofprogress, refunctioning found objects into allegories of modem experi-ence.46 For Kracauer, as for Freud, there is meaning in everything, ineven the most insignificant, worthless detail, though we may be cut offfrom its original context; everything therefore demands interpretation.Like Benjamin fascinated with the Surrealists, Kracauer sought to re-deem the possibility of auratic experience as a cognitive mode in apostlapsarian, secularized world. This project is epitomized in a Denk-bildentited "Ansichtspostkarte" ("Picture Postcard," FZ 26 May 1930),which oddly literalizes and at the same time allegorizes what Benjaminhad called a year earlier, in reference to Surrealism, "profane illumina-tion."47 Kracauer describes the "gentle glow," "as calming as it is inex-plicable," that seems to emanate from the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedacht-niskirche at night. The glow is in reality a reflex - a "reflex of the fac-ades of light" by which the picture palaces of the Berlin Kurfursten-damm, with their pillars of light, glaring posters, and mirror-glassshowcases, "turn night into day in order to banish the horror of thenight from the working day of their patrons." Yet even the aggressiveideological effort, which goes beyond the purpose of advertising, scin-tillates in oxymoronic, ambiguous terms: "a flaming protest againstthe darkness of our existence, a protest of a thirst of life which flows, asif by itself, into the desperate embrace of the pleasure business." Add-ing another twist to Kracauer's conceit, the church displays "the unin-tentional reflection of this sinister glow":

45. Illuminations36.46. Benjamin refers to Kracaueras a Lumpensammlern an early review of DieAngestellten"EinAuRenseitermacht sich bemerkbar,"GesammelteSchriften [Frankfurt/Main:Suhrkamp, 1982]). Kracauer ater recalled this epithet with great pride; see let-ters to Adorno of 28 Aug. 1954 and 16Jan. 1964 (KracauerPapers).Benjamin com-ments on the figure of the chiffonniern Baudelaire in Das Passagen-Werk,esammelteSchriften.1: 441f.47. "Surrealism:The LastSnapshot of the European Intelligentsia,"in Reflections,ed. Peter Demetz, trans. EdmundJephcott (New York:Harcourt, 1978) 192. Also seeJiirgen Habermas, "Consciousness-Raisingor Redemptive Criticism:The Contempo-raneityof WalterBenjamin" (1972), New GermanCritique 7 (Spring 1979): 30-59; 45-46; and Hansen, "Benjamin" 193. "Ansichtspostkarte" s reprinted in Strafien 7-38.


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What the spectacle of light leaves over and what business has castout is preserved by bleak walls. The outside of the church, whichis no church, becomes the refugeof what has been spilled and for-gotten and shines as beautifullyas if itwere the Holy of Holies. Se-crettearsthus find their place of memory [Geddchtnisort].ot in thehidden interior- in the middle of the street the neglected and in-conspicuous is gatheredand transformed until it begins to radiate,a comfort for everyone.A waste product of the relentless glare of modem simultaneity and pres-ence, the luminous facade of the obsolescent site of interiority becomes asurface for remembering (Kracauer puns on the name of the church), apublic screen or, less grandiose, a picture postcard inviting us to projectwhat is being eclipsed, however undefined and unspectacular.While Kracauer the moralist confronts his readers with the contra-dictions of everyday reality, a number of his writings before 1933 re-veal a surrealist streak: they are propelled by a wide-eyed marvelling atmodernity's strange new sights and juxtapositions, by an indomitablecuriosity for the unknown, preliminary, and as yet undefined, for in-congruous configurations and spaces of improvisation. Like Keaton,the silent knight, Kracauer roams through the magic forest of the mod-ern urban landscape, but with Kafka he knows that this fairy tale can-not have a happy ending, because the spell is real.48 The flipside ofKracauer's willingness to immerse himself in the thicket of the fallenlife, however, is his pragmatic stance as the daily reviewer of the so-called average production. Thus, even Kracauer's most routine reviewsof the most routine films, often no more than increasingly nonchalantif not parodistic plot summaries, may contain a saving remark about"beautiful nature scenes" or "city shots," about acting and perform-ance style, acrobatic, dancing or riding stunts, or well-handled cine-matic techniques. Moreover, as Kracauer is as much a cinema critic as

48. See,forinstance,"Kalikowelt"nd"Abschied onderLindenpassage"FZ21Dec. 1930),both reprintedn OdM.Benjamin xtols thepolitical orceof Kracauer's"surrealistsuperimpositions" in his review of DieAngestellten,n GesammelteSchriften:226.ForKracauer'sescription f Keaton s a fairy-talenight ee hisreview f Steam-boatBillJr,FZ27 Nov. 1928,reprintednKino 83-84.Forhisadvocacy f"improvisa-tion"see,forinstance: Zirkus arrasani,"Z13Nov. 1929;"StehbarsmSuden,"FZ8 Oct. 1926,reprintednStrafienn Berlin ndanderswo,nded. (Berlin:Arsenal,1987)51 ("Thevalueof cities s measuredby thenumberof placeswhichtheygiveovertoimprovisation");DerEisenstein-Film"Z5 June 1928,reprintedn Witte79; and"An der Grenzedes Gestern," Z 12July 1932.


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a film reviewer, he frequently comments on the quality of the screen-ing as performance, the theater experience rather than the film experi-ence, occasionally praising the musical accompaninient or (more rare-ly) the behavior of the audience.The issue of Kracauer's "redemptive critique," to borrow Habermas'sterm for Benjamin, is linked to the question I will address in the remain-der of this essay - a question of methodology and critical self-percep-tion. For I think that the Gnostic-Messianic bent of Kracauer's early writ-ings on film and mass culture not only motivated his turn to mass cul-ture as an object,but that it also shaped his approacho that object. This ap-proach is characterized by a peculiar way of entwining experience andcritique - a mode of interpretation which is significant not only in conm-parison with Adoro's theoretical purism, and his blindnesses towardmass culture, but also in view of the critical quandaries of contemporaryfilm theory and theories of postmoder culture.As is well known, Adorno took Kracauer to task for his lack of dialec-tics, a charge that crops up early on in their lifelong correspondenceand appears in published form in Adorno's ambivalent homage toKracauer on his 75th birthday. The charge is that Kracauer stops half-way in battling the antinomy of theory and experience. On the onehand, Adorno accuses Kracauer of overwhelming the phenomena ofexperience with his own critical subjectivity: "In the gaze which issucked into the object the place of theory is always already taken up byKracauer himself."49 On the other hand, Adorno attributes the "prior-ity of the optical" in Kracauer to his psychobiographical affinity withthe damaged world of things, a complicity which, in Adorno's view,leaves no space for "resistance to reification." Adorno stops short ofsaying, although in a complex way insinuates, that Kracauer's inmmer-sion in the fallen world amnounts to a collaboration with the statusquo.50 What eludes Adorno's critique - and what seenis symptomaticin these two conflicting charges - is that Kracauer could see himself atonce as part of the fallen world and as advancing its transformation.A number of Kracauer's essays from the mid-1920s onward display aremarkable shift in perspective, within one and the same text, towards

49. Theodor W. Adoro, "Der wunderlicheRealist:Uber SiegfriedKracauer,"Notenzur Literatur (Frankfurt/Main: uhrkamp, 1965):92.50. Adomo, Noten 107. On the lifelong friendshipbetween Adomo and Kracauer,see MartinJay,"Adomo and Kracauer:Notes on a Troubled Friendship,"Salmagundi0(Winter1978), reprintedin Permanentxiles217-36.


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the mass-cultural object under discussion. Similar to his program-matic reading of the Grune film, yet with inverse emphasis, these es-says tend to build up an impersonal distance by way of a sociological,culturallycritical,or philosophical reflection, only to switch, at a par-ticularpoint, to the voice of personal experience, to identificationandparticipation.The shift is often stagedthrough a rhetoricalswitchfroma third person account to the firstperson, mostly plural or, in anothervariant,even to second person singular.To take an example from the"Photography" essay, Kracauerdescribes the photograph of a grand-mother largelythrough the reactionsof the grandchildren: they laughat the old-fashioned dress, and, "at the same time, it gives them theshivers. For seeing through the ornament of the dress from which thegrandmother has vanished they think they see a moment of elapsedtime - time which passes without return" (OdM23). Severalsectionslater, toward the end of the essay, the critic assumes the shivers as hisown: "This once clung to uslike ourskin, and this is the wayourproper-ty clings to us even today. Weare contained in nothing and photogra-phy gathers fragmentsaround a nothingness." Hence "the shiver feltby the beholder of old photographs" (OdM32; emphasis added). Thisgesture of identification is significant because of its tension with thesurfaceargument of the text, which asserts thatphotography,especial-ly as it proliferates through the illustratedmagazines, is an attempt torepressthe fear of death, in contrast with the memory image in whichthe thought of death is still present (OdM35). By granting the photo-graph of the grandmother the power to inspire a reflection of - andon - mortality,the writerpreparesfor the turn of the argumentat theend of the essay, when photographic negativityis allocated a functionin the project of redemption.Kracauer'srhetorical shifts in perspective are especially interestingwhen he, by switchingto the firstperson, identifies with types of socialbehavior, in particularwith forms of consumption, which he had pre-viously criticized from what seemed like a culturally superior point ofview. In an essay on "Travellingand Dancing" (FZ 15 March 1925),Kracauer eads the rise of tourism and modern forms of socialdancingas symptoms of mechanization and rationalization,of the implemen-tation of "an impoverished omnipresence in all dimensions that canbe calculated"(OdM45). Accordingly,these leisure activitiesare symp-tomatic of the "double existence" imposed on human beings who arecut off from the spiritual sphere. And yet, this Ersatz s not only "real"


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in its negativitybut also offers the "possibility of an aesthetic ehaviorvis-i-vis the organized drudgery"(OdM48). The turn from critiquetoredemption is again accompanied by a switchof the grammaticalsub-ject: "Weare like children when we travel,weplayfully delight in a newspeed, a relaxed roaming and roving.... Likewise,when wedance, wescan a rhythm that did not exist before, a time prepared for us by athousand inventions.... Technology has taken us unawares and hasopened up regions still looking at us with a blank stare"(OdM49; em-phasis added).It is hard to imaginethatAdomrowould have writtenanythingcompa-rable,although Kracauer'spreceding critiquein no way lacksthe devas-tatingacumen with which the former would have viewed thesephenom-ena. The methodologicaldifference, n thiscase,comes down to an issueof class. By acknowledgingsociallystereotypicaland alienated behavioras partof his own experience, Kracauer efusesto let his intellectualpriv-ilegedeceivehim as to his actual social status- which, unlikeAdoro's,was all too close to the urban employees whose habits of consumptionand leisure he studied. In his essay series on that new cass, DieAngestelltenTheWhite-CollarEmployees, 1929),he actsas a "participantobserver"not only for the sake of sociologicalmethod, but because heknew how little security separatedhim from their fate.51The subject that moves between the outside and the inside of mate-rial is obviously not unified, not the identical, sovereign subject oftranscendentalphilosophy and bourgeois culture. It is a subject"with-out skin," to modify Adorno's characterizationof Kracauer;and itknows itself to be fragmented and precarious.What is more, it seems

to seek situationsin which its very possibility is threatened.Such situa-tions are familiar in Kracauer's prose pieces on his wanderingsthrough urban streets and squares (as in his "Memory of a ParisStreet"),and they are at the core of the other variant of the rhetoricalswitch, the shift to second person singular. In his beautiful essay on"Boredom" (FZ16 Nov. 1924), for instance, the act of listening to theradio, with its boundless imperialism of imposing the world upon us,is compared to "one of those dreams one dreams on an empty stom-ach": "a tiny ball rolls towardsyou from a great distance, grows intoclose-upand finallycrashesoveryou; you can neitherstop it nor escape,51. For an example of this attitude see DieAngestellten21-22. On Kracauer'scon-cept of the intellectual as white-collarworker, see Hans G Helms, "Der wunderlicheKracauer,"pt.l, NeuesForum18 June/July 1971):28.


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74 Kracaueron F,ilmand Mass Culture

you are lying there like a powerless little doll. . ." (OdM323). In the es-say entitled "The Forbidden Gaze" (fZ 9 April 1925), the figure of thedoll or puppet reappears in a similarly masochistic and paranoid sce-nario and is again introduced by a switch from third-person descrip-tion to an emphatic "you." The source of overwhelming anxiety in thiscase is a pianella, a musical clock with a feerie of dancing puppets,which constitutes the centerpiece of a shabby restaurant. The textbuilds up to the point where the beholder, entranced by the magic ofmrrrrors, ight, and movement, is seized by a shock: "you are suddenlyawakened from a dream; but you don't wake to reality, rather, a veil istorn and now, in that very moment, the phantom appears." The phan-tom arises from the dancing figures of a past century, but it is an ema-nation of the forbidden gaze belonging to the limbo of the unre-deemed dead. "This is it: that an encounter takes place between beingsthat do not really exist, that you, who are a phantom too in the emptynothingness, are haunted by bewitched figures which deny you pas-sage and instead pull you down into the realm of loss."52Such crossings mark Kracauer's own passage through the "emptycenter," to resume his troping of the Paris map. For the deliberatelyinduced violation - to the point of annihilation - of the bourgeoisego is not merely the whim of a masochistic sensibility; rather, it is forKracauer the very condition of experience. Even in lheoly of Film,Kracauer makes the camera's discovery of "the material world with itspsychophysical correspondences" contingent upon the abdication ofthe unified subject: "we are free to experience it [i.e. the world in itsdormant statej because we are fragmentized."5" Kracauer's concept ofexperience owes at least as much to Freud as to Simmel and Scheler,much as he perceives the fragmentation of the subject in theologicaland historical terms. In that regard too, his concept of experienceoverlaps with Benjamin's notion of the "aura," especially in the impli-cation of an uncanny, destabilizing self-encounter that has beenspelled out by Gershom Scholem.54

52. StraJSen4. Thepianelladescribedby Kracauerncannilyprefigures similarobject and similar ffects in FedorOzep's1928film,Der ebendeeichnam,hichKracauereviewed ortheFrankfurtereitungn 28 Feb. 1929.53. TheoryfFilm 00.Earliernthatbook,Kracauerinks his"fragmentized"ecep-tivityo a psychicdisposition f melancholyndself-estrangement16-17).Alsosee hisdefenseof passivenessnd self-effacements epistemologicalirtuesnHistory4-86.54. Scholem,"WalterBenjamin nd HisAngel" 1972),OnJewsndJudaismnCri-sis(NewYork:Schocken,1976)236.


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Miriam liansen 75

The subject in Kracauer's redemptive critique is both fragmented andisolated, isolated in a transcendental sense and in its exile from thecrumbling bastions of bourgeois culture. But in this precarious state thesubject is not alone, at least not on the level of rhetorical construction.Just as the emphatic "you" in the passages quoted above appeals to thereader to recognize the experience, Kracauer often invokes a communityof contemporaries who share his sense of alienation and his investmentin the preliminary - from "Those Who Wait" to the "genuine flaneur,"the "vagabond" who understands the Lindenpassage as "a passagethrough the bourgeois world" which is at once critique and postmortem(lZ 21 December 1930). And just as Kracauer included himself aniongthe consumers of mass culture (though not consistently, as the genderedpolemics of the "The Little Shopgirls" shows), he also proceeded on theassumption that, in principle, the capacity for critical reflection was avail-able to others as well - even those who were the subject of capitalist ma-nipulation. If, in practice, the consumers are largely complicit, theboundaries between them and the critical intellectual are not fundamen-tal but gliding and relative. A redemptive critique, after all, has to be ableto become public and general, or it is not truly redemptive.551will concude with a Denkbild n which Kracauer evokes the possibilitythat the consumer could relate to the glamor of the surface in a sinulta-neously receptive and reflective manner. In an artice from the irankfurterZeitungtided "Berg- und Talbahn" ("Rollercoaster"), published, signifi-cantly, on Bastille Day in 1928, Kracauer describes a roller-coaster at theBerlin Lunapark. The facade of the rollercoaster shows a painted skylineof New York: "The workers, the small people, the employees who spendthe week being oppressed by the city, now triumph by air over a super-Berlinian New York." This facade, however, is incomplete; once the carhas reached the summit, it gives way to a bare skeleton:

So this is New York- a paintedsurfaceand behind it Nothingness?The small couples are enchanted and disenchanted at the sametime. Not thattheywould dismissthe grandiose citypaintingas sim-ply humbug, but they see through the illusion, and the triumphover the facades no longermeans thatmuch to them. They lingeratthe place in which things show their double face; they hold the di-minished skyscrapersn theiropen hand;they are liberatedfrom aworld whose splendor they nonetheless know.56

55. Scholem, "The Messianic Idea" 16.56. StraJfen5-36. For a more skeptical sequel to this Denkbild, ontrasting the


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76 Kracauern Film andMassCulture

This vision belongs to the moment, to be sure, but the double con-sciousness Kracauersketches as a possibility, as a point of departure,differs strikinglyfrom the singleminded expertise that Horkheimerand Adorno attribute to the peons of the Culture Industry.Kracauer'sDenkbildimplies the vision of a modernity whose spell asprogressis broken, whose disintegratedelements have become availa-ble for an emancipatory practice.When the roller coasterridersshriekinvoluntarilyas they plunge into the abyss, theircry expresses not onlyan existential fear but also ecstasy (Seligkeit),he bliss of "traversingaNew York whose existence is suspended, which has ceased to be athreat." Once reality is made to show its "double face," its two-di-mensional images can be reappropriatedas a discourse of experienceto be negotiatedwithin a public context of interpretation.America, theincarnation of a disenchanted modernity, can be overcome only"when it discovers itselfcompletely," that is, when it radicalizesits his-toricalpromises and puts them into social and cultural practice.If the tradition of secularJewishMessianism and literaryGnosticismcan be redeemed despite its metaphysicalpremises, then in this sense:that it enabled the self-consciouslymarginalintellectual to analyzemo-dernity as an already disintegrating, yet still incomplete project - aprojectthat, for Kracauerat least, necessarilyentailedthe democratiza-tion of culture. Driven by a powerful impulse of interpretation,he di-rected his critical-redemptivegaze at the material configurationsandtransformationsof everydaylife, seeking realitywhere it seemed mostcontradictory, ambiguous, and provisional. In this endeavor, he him-self inevitably remained on the threshold of ambiguity, if not ambi-valence - between a critique of reificationgrounded in a theology ofhistoryand a recognition of new, specificallymodern forms of experi-ence and relations of representationand reception. Wherever the mes-sage does not immobilize the method, he throws into reliefan imman-ent modernity in which disintegration and emancipation are inex-tricablyentwined, in which the contradictions between them have tobe negotiated in terms of the concrete horizons of language, institu-tions, and the public sphere.

organized pleasures of the Berlin Lunaparkwith the unruly adventures of the ParisFoires, see Kracauer's article of the following year, "Organisiertes Gliick: Zurdes FZ 8 1930.

hansen, early kracauer

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