Siegfried Kracauer

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Siegfried Kracauer (before 1925)

Siegfried Kracauer (born February 8, 1889 in Frankfurt am Main , † November 26, 1966 in New York ) was a German journalist , sociologist , film theorist and philosopher of history . Kracauer is the author of the sociological study The Employees and is considered one of the founders of film sociology .

Life

Childhood and youth

Siegfried Kracauer comes from a petty-bourgeois Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main. His father Adolf Kracauer (1849-1918), who came from Silesia , had given up studying in favor of his younger brother and worked as a traveling salesman. The mother Rosette (1867–1942), née Oppenheim, also came from a humble background. She was the more important reference person for Kracauer, but was always in the shadow of her father. In 1942 she was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and murdered. Siegfried Kracauer was the couple's only child.

The young Siegfried Kracauer received his first spiritual stimuli in the house of his uncle Isidor Kracauer and his aunt Hedwig. Isidor was a history teacher at the Realschule of the Israelite Community in Frankfurt and also head of the Fersheim Foundation , which looked after Jewish orphans. His two-volume history of Frankfurt's Jews from the Middle Ages to the 19th century is considered a standard work.

Education

Siegfried Kracauer wanted to become a writer or philosopher from an early age. At the insistence of his parents, who warned him against “breadless art”, he initially studied architecture from 1907 to 1913 in Darmstadt, Munich and Berlin . In addition, Kracauer attended lectures in philosophy and sociology. In this way he came into contact with the sociologist Georg Simmel in Berlin , whose idea of ​​the multidimensionality of perspectives was decisive for Kracauer's later method of knowledge. He completed his architecture studies in 1914 with a doctorate . The subject of his dissertation was the development of blacksmithing in Prussia. From 1915 Kracauer worked for the Frankfurt architect Max Seckbach .

Frankfurt years

When the First World War broke out, Kracauer, like Thomas Mann , Gerhart Hauptmann and many others, was initially not free from the general enthusiasm and hope for a “cathartic turn”. In the course of the war experience he processed in his first novel Gorse , this initial approval gave way to complete disillusionment and rejection. In 1918, Kracauer initially got a job as an architect at the municipal building authority in Osnabrück . Only in 1921 did Kracauer return to Frankfurt am Main, which quickly developed into the second intellectual center after Berlin during the Weimar Republic . He initially worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung as a freelancer and local reporter.

The Frankfurt years were formative for Kracauer's development in several ways. Here factors included Karl Mannheim , Erich Fromm , Max Horkheimer , Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Leo Lowenthal , so he with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research came into contact. In 1921 Kracauer got to know Adorno, who was only eighteen years old, with whom he read philosophical writings and who in 1964 confessed that it was Kracauer who first "made Kant speak" for him. The friendship between the two intellectuals, however, was not free from tensions and jealousies from the beginning, which intensified massively in the course of political differences in the 1930s. The most important document of the relationship is the correspondence published in 2008.

In addition, Kracauer visited the Free Jewish Teaching House with the group around Rabbi Nehemia Anton Nobel , to which Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig also belonged. Kracauer later distanced himself from both institutions, but the encounter with them helped to sharpen his own intellectual profile. At the Institute for Social Research in 1925 he met the librarian Lili Ehrenreich (1893–1971), whom he married in 1930 and who, particularly during the difficult years of exile, became his most important spiritual support. From 1922 Kracauer worked for the feature section of the Frankfurter Zeitung, one of the most respected daily newspapers of the Weimar Republic. Editors of the Frankfurter Zeitung, including Paul Sethe , helped found the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1949 . In Frankfurt am Main a street and a plaque commemorate Kracauer.

Berlin years

Berlin memorial plaque on the house at Sybelstrasse 35, in Berlin-Charlottenburg

In 1930 Kracauer went to Berlin as head of the features section of the Frankfurter Zeitung. He had stayed in the capital again and again throughout the 1920s. After several subleases, he and his wife lived in an apartment on the fourth floor of Sybelstrasse 35 in Charlottenburg until 1933. At the instigation of a citizens' initiative, a commemorative plaque was also attached to the Berlin house by the Berlin Senate on June 10, 2010 and the previous Holtzendorffplatz was renamed Kracauerplatz after him and his wife Lili . The Berlin years were among the most productive in Kracauer's work. This is where his employee study was made, where he wrote his astute observations of everyday life in Berlin, where he discovered film as an analytical medium for society. The social mood analyzed here before the Nazis came to power also forms the background of the strongly autobiographical novel Georg .

Immediately after the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Kracauer fled to Paris with his wife. His article about the event appeared in the FZ: “An endless procession of people goes around the isolated building. [...] What is strange about them is their persistent silence. But it is so strangely touching because cases of public misfortune as a rule arouse the need for communication among the masses. [...] This fire, on the other hand, silences the crowd. […] New squads of schoolboys mingle with the adults. [...] Once they grow up, they will learn from history what the Reichstag fire really meant. "

exile

In Paris in 1934, Kracauer began working on a biography of the composer Jacques Offenbach , which he hoped would provide a way out of his extremely difficult financial situation. He also published further journalistic articles, some under a pseudonym , for example in L'Europe Nouvelle , in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and in the National-Zeitung ( Basel ). In 1936, on behalf of Adorno, who had meanwhile emigrated to England, he prepared a study on the propaganda of the Nazi state, which, although lost, can be reconstructed through letters, contemporary texts and handwritten notes. In it, Kracauer provides an extremely sharp analysis of National Socialism , which corresponds with the findings of today's historical scholarship: He saw the cause of the “Third Reich” in a complex network of specifically German requirements - weak bourgeois self-confidence, weak parliamentary tradition, sudden collapse of the monarchy 1918 - whereby, unlike in Marxist theory, the decisive role in Hitler's rise is ascribed not to capital and the “bourgeoisie”, but to the uprooted middle classes. Kracauer also differentiates between fascisms, for example in Italy or Spain, and National Socialism in Germany as a particularly aggressive variant of right-wing extremism; he thus recognizes the singularity of the Nazi state.

With the attack on Poland by the Wehrmacht and the beginning of the Second World War, the situation for emigrants in many European countries worsened. Like many other German refugees in France, Kracauer was briefly interned in 1939. One year after the German occupation of France in 1941, he and his wife Lili managed to escape to Lisbon and emigrate to the USA via southern France and with the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee . From 1941 to 1943 Kracauer worked as a research assistant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At the same time, with the help of grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, one of his main works in film sociology was created by 1947 : From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of the German Film . Theory of Film was published in 1960 . The Redemption of Physical Reality . His last work History - The last things before the last remained unfinished; Nevertheless, it is one of his most important and most informative books for his thinking, because it “completely corresponds to his lifelong thinking gesture” (Momme Brodersen).

In the 1950s, Kracauer and his wife traveled eight times to Europe, including Germany; In 1956 they visited their former apartment in Berlin on Sybelstrasse. Unlike Adorno, however, Kracauer did not receive an invitation to return to a scientific institute or to a newspaper editorial office in Germany. A return would also have been questionable from Kracauer's perspective: the experience of the Holocaust had severely disrupted his relationship with his home country, including the language, so that he only wrote English since the end of the war. In a letter to Leo Löwenthal, in view of a visit to Germany in the 1950s, it says: “The reason why we shuddered to have to be there is […] the fact that there was never a society in Germany. […] The people are all completely shapeless and uncanalized, they have no outside (and a disordered inside). Everything is there, but nothing in place. Hence the fake, artificial behavior, the stilted language, the complete insecurity. [...] In short, I don't trust them. "

Kracauer, who had no children, died unexpectedly in New York in 1966 of complications from pneumonia .

plant

Early work

In 1922 the book Sociology as Science was published , in which Kracauer tried to position the then still young sociology as empirical science. Even if the writing appears immature in its structure and argumentation, its intention already points to Kracauer's later thinking: It is about "the problem of abstract theoretical systems of order that alienate thought from phenomena". In the third part of the text in particular, Kracauer already comes to the conclusion that it is the objects that produce the concepts and not the other way around. The discussion with Edmund Husserl and his phenomenology, according to which a “pure consciousness” does not exist, but only arises through “bracketing” into real reality, as well as the influence of Simmel with his “possibility thinking and method pluralism” (Momme Brodersen) are unmistakable. “One can still get into the center of human being through the smallest secondary gate”.

This attitude also characterizes the so-called detective novel from 1925, in which Kracauer also distances himself from an intellectually well-constructed world model that is embodied here by the figure of the purely rationally operating detective, who can lawfully solve the constructed criminal case like a mathematical problem. For Kracauer, however, reality is not a closed building, which is why it cannot be systematically deciphered like the detective riddle of a detective story, but only through a multi-dimensional view that includes even the most seemingly incidental objects.

Middle creative phase

Kracauer became famous in the second half of the 1920s with two essays: The Bible in German from 1925 and The Ornament of the Masses from 1927. Both texts show contact with both historical materialism and the Frankfurt School and are one reason why Kracauer was later repeatedly assigned to their environment.

In the Bible in German is primarily a voice criticism and not a complete rejection of theological content. In the essay, Kracauer calls Luther's translation of the Bible “unchanged valid”. The final sentence “The truth is now in the profane” rather aims at the fact that for Kracauer, according to his empirical method, everything, be it theology, literature or philosophy, has to be linked back to the realities of the people in their respective epochs. Martin Buber's and Franz Rosenzweig's attempt to transpose the Hebrew language melody into German led to a text that, regardless of the good intentions, appears too aloof for the normal individual in modern industrial society to be able to target his everyday social situation.

Even before Adorno and Horkheimer, the ornament of the mass formulated motifs from the dialectic of the Enlightenment , i.e. the observation that modern technology as a product of the Enlightenment is not automatically coupled with reason , but can enter into a connection with pre-modern content ( myths ). The entertainment industry with their revues is a template that can be "filled with any content" for Kracauer - even with dangerous as nationalism. The same ambivalent possibilities are offered by film, which consequently is of great interest: Numerous film reviews and reflections on cinema emerge, which later lead to his writings on the sociology of film. The Historical Materialism is for Kracauer it but only a retrospective description pattern, definitely not a prospective future description in terms of a legitimate running "historical process".

Kracauer affirmed this position in 1930 in his study The Employees , whose leisure behavior and relationship to culture is characterized as "escape from the world", which causes a susceptibility to political doctrines of salvation . While the work was received by the democratic public as a constructive contribution to the debate, there were wild anti-Semitic attacks on the part of the right-wing extremist Hugenberg press, so that in May 1933 it was one of the writings that the National Socialists publicly burned when they burned books on May 10, 1933. "In Siegfried Kracauer's journalistic work, the monograph on the employees marks the climax of his transition from a philosophically interpreting cultural criticism to an observation and analysis of modern cultural phenomena oriented towards everyday life and sociology."

In the 1920s, innumerable so-called “street texts” were created ( streets in Berlin and elsewhere , Berlin side by side ); short, concise observations in which Kracauer, as a stroller, reads out fundamental statements about time and epoch from everyday occurrences and objects - subway stations, railway underpasses, Christmas stalls, department stores, circus performances, lunaparks, cafes, which he describes as "surface phenomena". They differ from the “statements of the epoch about themselves”, such as statistics, comments or political debates, precisely in that they are “less controlled, less organized, less intended” (Inka Mülder-Bach).

The situation shortly before the National Socialists came to power is reflected in the Georg novel from 1932, which was also written against the background of Kracauer's increasing isolation in the FZ editorial team, which was becoming more adapted and conservative. The triumphant advance of ideologies in the declining Weimar Republic is illustrated in masterly ironic language. In anticipation of his later philosophy of history, Kracauer distances himself from the idea of ​​a lawful concept of history: After the communist Neubert drafted a historical panorama for Georg in the sense of historical materialism - economic crisis → social crisis → world war → world revolutionclassless society - he reflects with great skepticism: “This panorama [...] was the bare reality, which necessarily had to run like this and not another. Only one thing surprised him: that it should develop independently of human will, as it were. What if people changed their minds and didn't flow into the panorama? ”It is the individuals and their“ meaning ”that, according to Kracauer, represent the actual factors of historical development.

This conviction is continued in the work Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of his time of 1938, written in exile in Paris. It represents the attempt to create a biography of the Second Empire under Napoleon III through the biography of a single person . to tell with its intoxicating world of operettas and festivals: history as a story of individual lives, biography as a social biography.

Late work

After the Second World War, From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Theory of Film from 1960 were published as sociological films .

From Caligari to Hitler uses film history to examine the social structure of German society from the beginnings of the medium (1895) to the Nazis' seizure of power (1933). The thesis is that there were certain “collective dispositions” in Germany, namely a tendency towards the morbid and macabre with simultaneous political and cultural uncertainty, which must be taken into account for a deeper understanding of National Socialism. In a review for the Frankfurter Zeitung on May 18, 1931, he wrote about the director of Metropolis , Fritz Lang , and his first sound film M - a city seeks a murderer : “He should have brought his accusation to an end in a sense that corresponds to our social reality. Instead he turns away from her and heroizes criminality. ”On Metropolis it says:“ The paralyzed collective consciousness [talks] with unusual clarity in sleep ”. Kracauer does not understand this “collective consciousness” in the sense of a negative national character of the Germans, but rather as a consequence of certain historical developments and deficits that were already mentioned in his analysis of Nazi propaganda in 1937.

Theory of Film , on the other hand, tries to categorize the film and its function in principle: For Kracauer, film is not an illusory world, on the contrary, "the thought of a privileged relationship between film and material reality [...] permeates the book in all imaginable variations" ( Brodersen). For Kracauer, the film is almost a way to get back to the essence of being - a position that may be questionable today in view of the omnipresence of visual media and the increasingly perfect possibilities of post-processing, montage and anonymization of the authorship of images. But "in his late major work, Kracauer envisions cinematic works of art which, thanks to the mimetic abilities of the medium, cling to our everyday reality and elicit its secrets: film can open up a phenomenology of our everyday reality to us" (Johannes Riedner)

The history-philosophical work History - The last things before the last remained a fragment . When Kracauer died (1966) it was so advanced that it could be published posthumously as a book. In the essay, which is extremely important for understanding his thinking, Kracauer brings together positions on the philosophy of history that have already been put forward: the philosophies of history and social models of the 19th century that determine the present - both the Smith model of a free play of forces and Marx ' Conception of a historical materialism - suffered from the fact that they held on to the transfer of scientific thinking to social processes as well as to idealism with the Hegelian principle of a controlling "world spirit" and therefore only viewed history from the "macro perspective".

In contrast, Kracauer affirms that without the sum of the relationships between individual people and things - he speaks of the “microfactors” - history cannot be explained. But because individuals are free, history is ultimately not predictable but open. For him, historiography is more the telling of many individual stories than a theoretical-scientific observation from a distance: “The historian must be able to tell a story.” As a result, he repeats his thesis in the book that the film with its possibilities Bringing seemingly insignificant details and shades onto the canvas shows a parallel to the writing of history.

Kracauer's principle of real immersion in the world in all of its multi-dimensionality as a prerequisite for knowledge finds its logical conclusion here. He therefore always thinks of historiography as "counter-history, which should rightly give names, recognition and thus liberation from the exclaves of oblivion to what has been ignored, misunderstood and suppressed in previous history" (Johannes Riedner). The title, The Last Things Before the Last, reveals once again that a theological dimension in Kracauer's thought was retained until the end.

Classification and reception

Kracauer's versatility as an author - sociologist, critic, essayist, columnist, film historian, philosopher of history - makes classification difficult. In terms of method and content, his thinking moves beyond delimited scientific disciplines. Consequently, its classification is also controversial in reception. While some locate it at least in a “common constellation” with the Frankfurt School (Rolf Wiggershaus) and, due to the contact with historical materialism in the broader sense of the 1920s, attribute it to Marxism (Helmut Stalder), others argue for its own place in intellectual history beyond all schools (Georg Steinmeyer).

Different priorities in the interpretation result from the long history of publications. The essay collections Das Ornament der Masse (1963) and Straßen in Berlin and elsewhere , the employee study and the film history work were initially the only texts available in post-war Germany. The history book (1971), the Georg-Roman (1977) and numerous other articles (1990, 1996, 1997) published as part of the first, incomplete edition of the work initially received less attention.

It can be considered undisputed that Kracauer, at a time when one-dimensionality and thinking in closed theories were the rule, placed openness and multi-dimensional perspective at the center of his considerations. He himself uses the term “mosaic” to describe his understanding of reality. His focus is on individuals, to whom he still gives the opportunity to act and take initiative even in the age of highly complex industrial societies.

His sharp criticism of capitalism gains weight precisely because of its freedom from ideology. Kracauer was also the first in Germany to discover mass culture, and in particular film, as the subject of sociological research. It is noteworthy in this context that he does not reject modern mass culture across the board in the sense of an elitist-radical cultural criticism; rather, his analyzes always resonate with fascination and understanding of the human need for diversion: “The process of enlightenment goes right through the mass ornament”. This modern culture also has its right and its necessity for him.

Kracauer's approach is integrative, not dissociative. It aims to take the whole person and the whole world with you: “Nothing can ever be forgotten and nothing that is unforgotten can remain unchanged” (Kracauer to Bloch 1926). At a time when, in view of the many crises, the temptation to seek simple answers in the form of closed systems of thought and exclusion could grow again, differentiated voices like the Kracauers play an important role. The complete edition published by Suhrkamp between 2004 and 2012 and several new scientific publications demonstrate a growing interest in his work.

Appreciation

Kracauer's Star on the Boulevard of Stars (2011)

In 2010, the Holtzendorffplatz in Berlin-Charlottenburg, where Siegfried Kracauer lived from 1931 to 1933, was renamed Kracauerplatz.

In 2011, Kracauer was posthumously honored with a star on Berlin's Boulevard der Stars .

On July 13, 2011, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published three articles by Kracauer from the 1920s and 1930s, along with an acknowledgment of the scientist in the humanities section . They dealt with the period of inflation titled Der Tausch from 1923, the Frankfurt old town ( Die non-existence of the old town , 1925) and Jews in Germany under Hitler from the magazine Cahiers Juifs from 1933.

In the spring of 2013 his hometown dedicated a city-wide reading campaign to the early work of Ginster in the series Frankfurt reads a book .

Since 2013, the Baden-Württemberg Film Funding together with the Association of German Film Critics has awarded a prize for film criticism, the Siegfried Kracauer Prize . This prize, endowed with € 3,000.00, will be awarded annually from 2018 onwards at the Biberach Film Festival and the Lünen Cinema Festival for the "Best Film Review".

In the 2013 theme year of Destroyed Diversity Berlin 1933-1938-1945, a portrait column, a city marker and two readings were dedicated to him in Berlin.

Font directory

  • Thomas Y. Levin: Siegfried Kracauer - A bibliography of his writings . German Schiller Society: Marbach am Neckar 1989.

Fonts

Total expenditure

  • Works [nine volumes with z. T. several volumes]. Edited by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2004 ff. The complete edition has been completed.
    • Vol. 1: Sociology as Science. The detective novel. The employees, 2006.
    • Vol. 2,1: From Caligari to Hitler, 2012.
    • Vol. 2.2: Studies on mass media and propaganda, 2012.
    • Vol. 3: Theory of the film. External Reality Salvation, 2008.
    • Vol. 4: History - Before the Last Things, 2009.
    • Vol. 5: Essays, feature articles, reviews (4 volumes), 2011.
    • Vol. 6: Small writings on film (3 volumes), 2004
    • Vol. 7: Novels and Stories, 2007
    • Vol. 8: Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of his time, 2008
    • Vol. 9: Early writings from the estate (2 volumes), 2004
  • Writings [planned were nine volumes, canceled and replaced by the works ]. Edited by Karsten Witte , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1971–1990.
    • Vol. 1: Sociology as Science. The detective novel. The employees, 1971; again in 1978
    • Vol. 2: From Caligari to Hitler. A psychological history of German film. Translated by Ruth Baumgarten and Karsten Witte, 1979 (new editions 1993 and other, most recently 6th edition 2002).
    • Vol. 3: Theory of the film. The salvation of external reality. The author's revised translation by Friedrich Walter and Ruth Zellschan, 1973 (new editions 1975 and 1979).
    • Vol. 4: History - before the last things. From the American by Karsten Witte, 1971.
    • Vol. 5: Essays 1915 - 1965. Ed. Inka Mülder-Bach, 1990, in three volumes:
  1. 1915-1926
  2. 1927-1931
  3. 1932-1965
    • [Vol. 6: Writings on the film - not published ]
    • Vol. 7: Gorse. Georg, 1973.
    • Vol. 8: Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of his time, 1976 [licensed edition for the GDR: Berlin: Henschel-Verlag, 1980].
    • [Vol. 9: Writings from the estate - not published ]

Writings published during his lifetime

  • The development of blacksmithing in Berlin, Potsdam and some cities in the Mark from the 17th century to the beginning of the 19th century . Worms: Verlags- und Druckereigesellschaft, 1915 [reprint with an afterword to the new edition by Lorenz Jäger, Berlin: Mann, 1997].
  • Sociology as science. An epistemological study, Sibyllen-Verlag: Dresden, 1922.
  • Broom. Berlin: S. Fischer, 1928.
    • as an abridged reading by Michael Rotschopf : Verlag Osterwold Audio, 2013, 4 CD, 261 min.
  • The employees . From the newest Germany, Frankfurt a. M .: Frankfurter Societäts-Druckerei, 1930.
  • Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of his time . Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1937.
  • Propaganda and the Nazi War film . New York: Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 1942.
  • The Conquest of Europe on the Screen. The Nazi Newsreel 1939-1940, Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1943.
  • From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of the German Film, New York: Princeton University Press, 1947 / London: Denis Dobson Ltd, 1947.
  • Attitudes Toward Various Communist Types in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia . New York: Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University o.J.
  • Satellite mentality. Political Attitudes and Propaganda Susceptibilities of Non-Communists in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. A Report of the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University. With a Foreword by Henry L. Roberts, Russian Institute / Columbia University, New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1956.
  • Theory of film . The Redemption of Physical Reality, New York: Oxford University Press 1960.
    • German-language edition under the title: Theory of the film . The salvation of external reality, Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp 1964.
  • The ornament of the crowd . Essays, Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1963.
  • Streets in Berlin and elsewhere , Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp 1964.

Works published posthumously

  • History. The Last Things Before the Last , New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.
  • George . Roman, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1977.
  • Totalitarian propaganda , edited and with an afterword by Bernd Stiegler. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-29683-7 .
  • George . Roman, English translation by Carl Skoggard. Troy, New York: Publication Studio Hudson, 2016, ISBN 978-1-624-62140-6 .

estate

Kracauer's estate is in the German Literature Archive in Marbach . Individual items from the estate can be seen in the permanent exhibition of the Modern Literature Museum in Marbach.

Correspondence

  • In constant friendship. Correspondence between Leo Löwenthal and Siegfried Kracauer 1922–1966. Edited by Peter-Erwin Jansen and Christian Schmidt. With an introduction by Martin Jay , Zu Klampen: Jump 2003.
  • Siegfried Kracauer - Erwin Panofsky. Correspondence between 1941 and 1966. Edited by Volker Breidecker , Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996.
  • The rift in the world goes through me too. Theodor W. Adorno - Siegfried Kracauer: Correspondence 1923–1966. Edited by Wolfgang Schopf, Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main 2008 (on this review by Eva Geulen in Die Zeit of December 16, 2008).

literature

  • Jörn Ahrens u. a. (Ed.): "But if the real is also forgotten, it is therefore not erased." Contributions to the work of Siegfried Kracauer. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Heidelberg 2017, ISBN 978-3-658-13238-5 .
  • Alfons Maria Arns : “Ex Kino lux!” Siegfried Kracauer, Frankfurt am Main and the cinema. In: Living Pictures of a City. Cinema and film in Frankfurt am Main. German Film Museum (ed.). Frankfurt am Main 1995, pp. 90-117.
  • Henri Band: Middle Classes and Mass Culture. Lukas, Berlin 1999.
  • Stephanie Baumann: In the anteroom of the story. Siegfried Kracauer's 'History - The Last Things Before the Last' . Konstanz University Press, Paderborn 2014, ISBN 978-3-86253-034-2 .
  • Ingrid Belke and Irina Renz: Siegfried Kracauer 1889–1966 . Marbacher Magazin 47/1988. German Schiller Society, Marbach am Neckar 1989, 1994.
  • Christoph Brecht, Ines Steiner: In the realm of shadows: Siegfried Kracauer's "From Caligari to Hitler" . German Schiller Society, Marbach am Neckar 2004.
  • Momme Brodersen : Siegfried Kracauer. Rowohlt Taschenbuch, Reinbek 2001.
  • Michael Kessler, Thoma Y. Levin: Siegfried Kracauer. New interpretations. Stauffenburg, Tübingen 1989.
  • Gertrud Koch : Siegfried Kracauer for an introduction. 2nd, revised edition. Junius, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-88506-669-9 .
  • Tobias F. Korta: History as a project and projection. Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer on the crisis of modern thought. With a foreword by Wolfgang Eßbach. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2001.
  • Till van Rahden: collecting rags. With Siegfried Kracauer in the thicket of the 19th century. In: Historical magazine . Volume 307, 2018, pp. 319-340, doi : 10.1515 / hzhz-2018-0027 .
  • Jörg later: Siegfried Kracauer. A biography. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-518-42572-5 .
  • Rolf Wiggershaus : The Frankfurt School. History, Theoretical Development, Political Significance. DTV, Munich 1991.
  • Maria Zinfert (Ed.): Kracauer. Photo archive. With photographs by Elisabeth and Siegried Kracauer, diaphanes, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-03734-671-6 .

Documentaries on radio and television

  • With an eye for the visible - Siegfried Kracauer . Documentary by Rainer KG Ott and Ralf J. Egert. SFB television 1986.
  • Theodor W. Adorno : The Whimsical Realist . Radio essay on the occasion of Kracauer's 75th birthday. Hessischer Rundfunk 1964 (printed in Theodor W. Adorno: Collected writings in 20 volumes . Volume 11: Notes on literature. Section III. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag: Frankfurt am Main 2003).

Web links

Commons : Siegfried Kracauer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Isidor Kracauer: History of the Jews in Frankfurt am Main 1150-1824. Published by the board of the Frankfurt am Main Israelite Community: Frankfurt am Main 1925, 1927.
  2. ^ Siegfried Kracauer: The development of the blacksmithing in Berlin / Potsdam and some cities of the Mark from the 17th century to the beginning of the 19th century. Gebrüder Mann Verlag: Berlin 1997 (new edition).
  3. Wolfgang Schopf (ed.): “The rift of the world also goes through me.” Theodor W. Adorno-Siegfried Kracauer: Correspondence 1923–1966. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main 2008. See also Stefan Müller-Doohm: Correspondence between Adorno-Kracauer: One of the two was always deeply offended. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of January 17, 2008.
  4. ^ After the constitutional lawyer Franz von Holtzendorff, the adjoining street is still called Holtzendorffstrasse.
  5. ^ Siegfried Kracauer: Writings. Edited by Inka Mülder-Bach. Volume 5.3. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main 1990. pp. 211f.
  6. Cf. Georg Steinmeyer: Siegfried Kracauer as a thinker of pluralism. Lukas Verlag: Berlin 2008. p. 48, note 37.
  7. Gestures of Humanity. During the Second World War, many helpers looked after the refugees in southern France , NZZ, October 27, 2018
  8. Marbacher Magazin 47/1988. P. 116.
  9. ^ Inka Mülder-Bach: Siegfried Kracauer: Crossing the border between theory and practice. Metzler: Stuttgart 1985. p. 29.
  10. Quoted from Momme Brodersen: Siegfried Kracauer. Rowohlt Taschenbuch: Hamburg 2001, p. 45
  11. See Hans-Christoph Askani: The problem of translation - presented to Franz Rosenzweig. Mohr-Siebeck: Tübingen 1997.
  12. See also List of Burned Books 1933 .
  13. ^ Henri Volume: Middle Classes and Mass Culture. Lukas Verlag: Berlin 1999. S. 219.
  14. ^ Siegfried Kracauer: Works. Edited by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. Volume 7. Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main 2004. S. 461.
  15. ^ Udo Leuschner: Metropolis and M. Faschistoide Tendencies in two films by Fritz Lang. In: Udo Leuschner: Alienation - Neurosis - Ideology. Bund-Verlag: Köln 1990. pp. 269-273.
  16. Johannes Riedner: The Truth of Images - Siegfried Kracauer's late work as a contribution to an ontology of becoming visible . Dissertation at the Institute for Religious Studies at the Free University of Berlin, 2010.
  17. ^ Rolf Wiggershaus: The Frankfurt School . German paperback published by Munich 1991.
  18. ^ Helmut Stalder: Siegfried Kracauer. The journalistic work. Königshausen & Neumann: Würzburg 2003.
  19. ^ Georg Steinmeyer: Siegfried Kracauer as a thinker of pluralism. Lukasverlag: Berlin 2008.
  20. Frankfurt is reading a book
  21. ^ Siegfried Kracauer Prize ( Memento from July 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  22. ^ French selection: Politique au jour le jour 1930-1933. Article v. a. from the Frankfurter Zeitung. Collection Pensée allemande et européenne. Translated by Jean Quétier, avec la collaboration de Katrin Heydenreich. Presses universitaires de Montreal , PUM 2017
  23. The DLA's inventory of Siegfried Kracauer.