Siegfried Kracauer has been misunderstood as a naïve realist,
appreciated as an astute critic of early German film, and noticed as the
interesting exile who exchanged letters with Erwin Panofsky. But he is
most widely thought of as the odd uncle of famed Frankfurt School
critical theorists Jürgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and
Max Horkheimer. Recently, however, scholars have rediscovered in
Kracauer's writings a philosopher, sociologist, and film theorist
important beyond his associations--and perhaps one of the most
significant cultural critics of the twentieth century. Gertrud Koch
advances this Kracauer renaissance with the first-ever critical
assessment of his entire body of work.
Koch's analysis, which is concise without sacrificing thoroughness or
sophistication, covers both Kracauer's best-known publications (e.g.,
From Caligari to Hitler, in which he gleans the roots of National
Socialism in the films of the Weimar Republic) and previously
underexamined texts, including two newly discovered autobiographical
novels. Because Kracauer's wide-ranging works emerge from no rigidly
unified approach, instead always remaining open to unusual and highly
individual perspectives, Koch resists the temptation to force
generalization. She does, however, identify recurring tropes in
Kracauer's lifetime effort to perceive the basic posture and composition
of particular cultures through their visual surfaces. Koch also finds in
Kracauer a surprisingly contemporary cultural commentator, whose ideas
speak directly to current discussions on film, urban modernity,
feminism, cultural representation, violence, and other themes.
This book was long-awaited in Germany, as well as widely and well
reviewed. Now translated into English for the first time, it will fuel
already growing interest in the United States, where Kracauer lived and
wrote from 1941 until his death in 1966. It will attract the attention
of students and scholars working in Film Studies, German Studies,
Comparative Literature, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Philosophy,
and History.
