History: The Last Things before the Last, the posthumous, unfinished book by Siegfried Kracauer, appeared in paperback for the first time in 1995. For the occasion, Paul Oskar Kristeller, who had presented the first edition in 1969, wrote a new preface. In the twenty-six years that transpired between Kristeller’s two texts, an actual Kracauer renaissance had occurred, with reprintings, translations, and essays of various types in several languages. But for Kristeller in 1995 this late recognition was debased by the attempt to eliminate from Kracauer’s work everything that could not be traced back to the Frankfurt School. As examples of this distorted interpretation, Kristeller cited essays by Gertrud Koch and Inka Mülder-Bach on History: The Last Things before the Last, appearing in the issue which the journal New German Critique had devoted to Kracauer in 1991. Kristeller wrote that the “. . . two papers neither summarize the book nor indicate that its content fundamentally differs from his earlier writings. Their footnotes cite only books and articles unknown to Kracauer and refer to Kracauer’s earlier books as if the books on history were in complete agreement with them. They also fail to indicate that Kracauer, in the footnotes and bibliography of this book, cites for the most part historical, philological, and philosophical sources, never mentions his earlier writings, and very seldom refers to the sociologists that predominate in his earlier works. And worst of all, they imply and even state that history was not his major concern. An adequate scholarly interpretation of Kracauer’s last work is yet to be written.”1
This harsh critique from the great scholar who left us that monument of precision and academic probity, the Iter Italicum, contains a few factual errors. Even a cursory inspection reveals that the notes to the essays by Koch and Mülder-Bach cite virtually exclusively writings by Kracauer or those known to him—with the exception of two or three obvious references to recent articles on his work. Moreover, contrary to what Kristeller says, the piece by Mülder-Bach emphasizes the elements of divergence between the posthumous book on history and some of Kracauer’s previous writings. To what should we attribute this uncharacteristic inaccuracy on Kristeller’s part? Perhaps to indignation. The allusion by Mülder-Bach to the “extreme cultural and scholarly isolation” in which Kracauer allegedly wrote his book on history tacitly ignores Kristeller’s claim (which we have no reason to question) that the book had come into being thanks to intense discussions between the two friends over many years.2 But the point I should like to underline is yet another: the idea of a clear-cut break which, Kristeller argued, separated History: The Last Things before the Last from Kracauer’s earlier writings is totally indefensible.
Kracauer’s posthumous book opens with an autobiographical statement: “. . . recently I suddenly discovered that my interest in history—which began to assert itself about a year ago and which I had hitherto believed to be kindled by the impact of our contemporary situation on my mind—actually grew out of the ideas I tried to implement in my Theory of Film. In turning to history, I just continued to think along the lines manifest in that book.” Kracauer then continued, “. . . I realized in a flash the many existing parallels between history and the photographic media, historical reality and camerareality. Lately I came across my piece on photography and was completely amazed at noticing that I had compared historism with photography already in this article of the ‘twenties.”3
The identification of the parallelism between history (in the twofold sense of process and narration, of res gestae and of historia rerum gestarum) and the photograph (in a broad sense, including the cinema) as an element of continuity between the earlier and later Kracauer, the caesura marked by the exile experience notwithstanding, comes from Kracauer himself. We should not ignore such an assertion, as Kristeller implicitly seems to do when he contrasts the posthumous book to the earlier writings. However, this needs to be confirmed, since the passage I have just quoted assimilates, without undue hairsplitting, history and historicism: a contiguity difficult to reconcile with the critique of historicism repeatedly offered by Kracauer. The continuity as well as the contiguity concentrated in the adverb already are thus debatable. Is this a minute discrepancy perhaps caused by the unfinished state of the manuscript? Or is it a clue suggesting the presence of an unresolved problem in Kracauer’s thought?
2. To settle this our search must begin with some texts, cited by Kracauer himself, around which discussions have shed a little light but also produced many doubts in the last few years. We can begin with the article on photography appearing in 1927 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which Kracauer later included in his collection Die Ornament der Masse (1963).4 Here Kracauer observes that “historicist thinking . . . emerged at about the same time as modern photographic technology,” insinuating that both were the products of a capitalist society. But this coincidence, according to the author, concealed an even more profound parallelism. Representatives of historicism such as Wilhelm Dilthey (a reference which Kracauer omitted when he reprinted the essay in a volume) believe “they can explain any phenomenon purely in terms of its genesis. They believe that they can grasp historical reality by reconstructing the course of events in their temporal succession without leaving anything out. Photography, instead, offers a spatial continuum; historicism seeks to provide the temporal continuum.” To historicism and to photography Kracauer contrasted memory and its images. The latter, by definition, are fragmentary: “Memory encompasses neither the entire spatial appearance of a state of affairs nor its entire temporal course.”5 And here is where the profound significance of the juxtaposition between historicism and photography on the one hand, and memory and its images on the other, made its appearance: “That the world devours them is a sign of the fear of death. What the photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the recollection of death, which is part and parcel of every memory image.”6
Admittedly, in the conclusion of his essay, with a sudden dialectical reversal, Kracauer projected an emancipation of the photograph from the one-dimensional recording of events, from the accumulation of the detritus of nature: a possibility attributed to film, which (alongside the dream and Kafka’s work) would be in a position to reunite in an unforeseeable manner the fragments of reality, bringing to light a superior order. But basically the Kracauer of 1927 condemned photography and historicism equally. He opposed them to “history” in quotation marks: a history to be written, a history that in fact did not yet exist.
3. Is it correct to see these reflections, as Kracauer retrospectively suggested, as the seed of his posthumous book on history? Yes and no: in between there is a discontinuity, which can be summed up, as has been noted, in reference to Proust—or, better yet, to a specific passage in his work. The 1927 photography article does not mention Proust at all, although it discusses memory and the images of memory.7 Instead, in Theory of Film (1960) and in History: The Last Things before the Last, Kracauer analyzed, respectively, the characteristics of film and of historiography, recalling again and again that page in The Guermantes Way (Le côté de Guermantes) in which the narrator, returning home from a trip unexpectedly, sees his grandmother without being seen himself and for an instant does not recognize her.8 Here is a passage from that unforgettable page:
Of myself—thanks to that privilege which does not last but which one enjoys during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being a spectator, so to speak, of one’s own absence,—there was present only the witness, the observer, with a hat and traveling coat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that mechanically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph.. . . For the first time and for a moment only, since she vanished at once, I saw sitting on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and common, sick, lost in thought, following the lines of a book with eyes that seemed hardly sane, a dejected old woman whom I did not know.9
Through the estranged, mechanical gaze which Proust compares to the impassive lens of the camera, the narrator grasps instantly, in spite of himself, what love had hitherto prevented him from seeing: his grandmother was dying. The photograph which for Kracauer in 1927 was the token of the fear of death became, through Proust, the instrument which permitted the overcoming of that fear, of looking death in the face. Furthermore, the premonition of death was already at the heart of that passage of Saint-Simon’s Mémoires which, if I am not mistaken, had inspired Proust. The Duke of Saint-Simon enters to visit the dauphin and finds him “seated on a chair among his gentlemen-in-waiting and two or three of his high officials. I was horrified. I saw a man with a lowered head, his face of a purple, reddish complexion, with an inane air, who did not even notice my approach.”10 Apart from the perception of physical decadence attributed to skin coloring by both writers (rouge pourpre, rouge) the process used in the two passages to convey the lack of recognition is similar: “Je vis un homme” (Saint-Simon), “j’aperçus . . . une vieille femme” (Proust). Behind the altered physiognomy of the individual stands the anonymous destiny of the species, its moral condition.
“The face in the film has no value if it does not bring out the skull beneath it. ‘Danse macabre.’ To what end? This remains to be seen.” In these enigmatic words attempts have been made to see an early reaction on Kracauer’s part to the Proustian text. They are taken from a notebook containing a preliminary version of an introduction to a book on the cinema. It was the project on which Kracauer had begun to work in Marseilles in November 1940 during the agonizing wait for the permit that would allow him to emigrate with his wife to the United States.11 A new version of the project begun at Marseilles, which Kracauer wrote in English in 1949, opens with a direct reference, later developed in the final version of the book, to Proust’s text.12 In the French city Kracauer had met Walter Benjamin, who a few months later fled to Spain and ultimately suicide. We know that during their stay in Marseilles the two friends spoke of Kracauer’s film project.13 There is no risk in supposing that in the course of these conversations Benjamin mentioned the passage in Proust, which some years before he had translated, in collaboration with Franz Hessel.14 The comparison between the look with which the narrator mechanically registers the physical decay of the grandmother without recognizing her, and the indifference of the camera, clarifies the implications of the notion of optical unconsciousness which Benjamin had proposed in his historical essay on photography (1931).15
4. Through Proust, perhaps mediated by Benjamin, Kracauer substituted for the analogy which he had proposed in 1927 between photography and historicism one that was completely different and in some ways the opposite, between photography and history (in the sense of historia rerum gestarum, or historiography), which he fully discussed in History: The Last Things before the Last. But to understand the full significance of the juxtaposition, Kracauer was suggesting, we need to recall that in the page from Proust, the photographer is the final element in a series composed of more or less similar figures: “the witness, the observer, with a hat and traveling coat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again.” For Kracauer the exile, it was natural to identify with the stranger, or actually even with the wandering Jew Ahasuerus, who appears in the title of one of the chapters in his posthumous book on history.16 But the identification, at least on the surface, was not intended to convey pathos. Kracauer emphasized that the stranger, he who is marginalized, he who “does not belong to the house,” is in a position to understand more, and more deeply. The instant in which recognition fails opens to the estranged gaze of the spectator the way to cognitive awareness.17 It is not pure coincidence, Kracauer remarks, that great historians, from Thucydides to Napier, were exiles: “It is only in this state of self-effacement, or homelessness, that the historian can commune with the material of his concern.. . . A stranger to the world evoked by the sources, he is faced with the task—the exile’s task—of penetrating its outward appearances, so that he may learn to comprehend that world from within.”18
All this helps us to understand why Kracauer presented his unfinished book on history as a development of the theses he had formulated in Theory of Film. The identification of the historian with the exile is the destination of his extended reflections on photography. The attitude of active passivity which Kracauer recommends to historians builds on (as Volker Breidecker has pointed out) a page from Theory of Film on the desolate urban photographs of Charles Marville or of Eugène Atget. The “melancholy” which has been recognized in those Parisian scenes, Kracauer notes, “favors self-estrangement, which, on its part entails identification with all kinds of objects. The dejected individual is likely to lose himself in the incidental configurations of his environment, absorbing them with a disinterested intensity no longer determined by his previous preferences. His is a kind of receptivity which resembles that of Proust’s photographer cast in the role of a stranger.” But this is a receptivity which is interwoven with the choice, the construction: the photograph is not a simple mirror image of reality. The photographer could be compared, Kracauer observes, to “the imaginative reader intent on studying and deciphering an elusive text.”19 These words, contained in the first part (by far the most important) of Theory of Film, explain why Kracauer would write to Adorno that the cinema, in that book, was only a pretext.20 Kracauer, who for years had read, along with the young Adorno, The Critique of Pure Reason, wanted to explore a cognitive model using the cinema.21 This research continued in the posthumous book on history—the final phase, destined to remain unfinished, of an intellectual journey that was remarkably single-minded, in spite of the many different research areas it touched.
5. The influence of Kant is identifiable even in Panofsky’s famous essay on film, especially where he mentions “. . . the fascinating spectacle of a new artistic medium gradually becoming conscious of its legitimate, that is, exclusive possibilities and limitations.. . .”22 And yet, as has been convincingly demonstrated by Tom Levin, that essay promptly took a different and less ambitious turn.23 Much more fruitful, according to Levin, are the reflections on the cinema in Panofsky’s essay on perspective as symbolic form published in 1927 in the Warburg Vorträge.24 An oblique allusion to this essay can be found, as noted above, in a 1928 letter from Walter Benjamin to Kracauer.25 But even if Kracauer did not read the essay on perspective, he could have grasped its gist from Panofsky’s other writings. The preparatory material for Kracauer’s History: The Last Things before the Last includes a page of notes to which Volker Breidecker has justly called attention. It is entitled “Emphasis on minutiae—Close-up—micro-analysis.” As an example of “close-up” Kracauer mentioned the “principle of disjunction” illustrated by Panofsky—in other words, the divarication, typical of medieval art, between classical themes represented anachronistically and ancient images Christianized.26 In his History: The Last Things before the Last, Kracauer offers a twofold clarification. Panofsky’s “principle of disjunction” is offered first as an example of a perfect equilibrium between “realistic tendency” and “formative tendency,” together with a photo by Alfred Stieglitz; and second as a paradigmatic example of “microhistory,” or “small-scale histories,” compared to a close-up.27 In both cases the photograph (or the photographic frame) emerges as the object on which to base comparisons; but here it is the latter model that is of interest.28
Without the cinema, without the “close-up,” could Kracauer have spoken about microhistory? Obviously, this is a rhetorical question. It is no accident that Kracauer, to underline the connection between macrohistoric investigation and close-ups based on microresearch, should quote a passage from Vsevolod Pudovkin on the plurality of points of view imposed by film narration.29 The photograph and its extensions (the cinema, television) have opened up, just as linear perspective did in the past, a series of cognitive possibilities: a new way to see, to narrate, to think.30 Kracauer’s reflections collected in his posthumous book on history spring from an awareness of the emergence of a world which, more than ever, is still ours today.
A new world to behold: but to what degree is it really new? As T. S. Eliot wrote, every innovation in expression constructs its own genealogy backwards. The cinema is no exception to this rule. Sergei Eisenstein argued that the early inventions of the film pioneer D. W. Griffith had literary antecedents: the isolated representation of details in the novels of Dickens.31 In another essay Eisenstein used the encounter between Emma and Rodolphe in Madame Bovary as an exceptional example of the alternating editing of dialogues.32 I had failed to notice this when, some years ago, I analyzed a series of devices used by Flaubert in L’éducation sentimentale, especially the famous blanc so admired by Proust, inserting it in a context molded by the photograph, by the panorama, by the train.33 I had also forgotten an early reaction to L’éducation sentimentale, which I should like to address now—a digression which may better help us to understand Kracauer’s way of thinking.
6. In December 1869 a long essay entitled “Le roman mysanthropique” appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes. It dealt with L’éducation sentimentale, which had just appeared.34 In his youth, the author of the piece, Saint-René Taillandier, had written a monograph, Scot Erigène et la philosophie scholastique (1843), with an eye to Hegel and Schilling; later he taught literature at the Universities of Strasbourg and Montpellier, closing out his career in the Académie Française.35 In 1863 he had published, always in the Revue des Deux Mondes, a paper on Salammbô entitled “Le réalisme épique dans le roman.”36 From an academic critic of Catholic background and conservative tastes such as Taillandier one might expect a condemnation of Flaubert’s “immorality” and stylistic audacity. And the expected condemnation did come, but at the center of a critical discussion that holds some surprises, especially for those of us accustomed to reading L’éducation sentimentale as a classic. Taillandier, who read it as a freshly minted novel by an established and scandalous author, conveys to us, unexpectedly, astonishment over what is new: “Imagine an artist who pretends to reproduce reality most faithfully, and who begins by casting over this reality the bizarre veil of his system. Uselessly he proposes to show everything, similar to the ray of sun which traverses the darkroom of the photographer.. . .” (p. 988).
The comparison between Flaubert and a photographer, which may seem banal, actually is not, as we see from what follows immediately:
In vain he tries to be pointed, biting, like a blade that slices through rock, like nitric acid which cuts into copper: wholly concerned with the effect he thinks only of the process, of the equipment, of the instruments, of the acids. Nature’s rich variety is forgotten: here he is secluded in an unsanitary laboratory. The unrefined artisan of realism will rapidly lose the sense of the real world. He has a small number of examples before his eyes, and these examples, fatigued, disfigured, bored and boring, will become for him an image of human destiny. (p. 988)
Taillandier recognizes that Flaubert “certainly is not a mediocre writer . . . he produces little, but each one of his works testifies to intense thought and demanding execution.” But a book such as Madame Bovary “is a knowledgeable dissection executed with glacial aplomb” which has scandalized not because of its subject matter but for “the indifference of the thought” which inspired it (pp. 988–989). “The epic realism of Salammbô had the same characteristic of inhuman fantasy” (in the previous article Taillandier had spoken without mincing his words of “a sadistic element of the imagination”).37 This raised the question: “What was this writer then, who, while devoting such care to his work, nevertheless remained so totally estranged from it? What was the significance of this impassible portrait?” (p. 989).
Impassibilité, impassible: these recurring terms in the article emanate from the initial juxtaposition between writer and photographer. Taillandier sees this impassibility as “the result of a system, the expression of a concealed philosophy,” misanthropy in the broadest sense of the term. “To inflict on man outrages of this sort means offending the world and him who created it, if we admit that the world is someone’s work.. . . A sort of atheism: that is the book’s philosophy” (p. 990). But this philosophical intention is joined by “the desire to write a page of history.” Flaubert seems to have wanted to suggest “the idea of a work in which the public events [of the last twenty-five years] are explained by individual behavior. The education of the protagonist would thus correspond to the education of Parisian society during a period of our history.”
It is difficult not to accept this hypothesis, extravagant as it may be, the moment we realize unquestionably that the author is imitating the style of Michelet in the final volumes of his History of France. We find the same broken, convulsed way of splitting the narration, of passing brusquely from one scene to another accumulating details and suppressing the transitions. A novel has never spoken a similar language; one has the impression of confronting a chronicle, a dry and hurried diary, a collection of notes, of signs, of words. But the difference is this: that in the case of the historian the signs are incisive, the words express, the notes summarize sometimes well, sometimes badly, relevant events, while in the case of the novelist these forms, wisely, laboriously expressed, are applied to totally tasteless adventures. (pp. 993–994)
I shall return presently to the pairing of Michelet and Flaubert. But Taillandier realizes that the antithesis which came to him spontaneously between the “relevant events” described by the former and the “totally tasteless adventures” recounted by the latter is inexact. The reader of L’éducation sentimentale is struck by something quite different from the mingling of private lives and public events: Taillandier perceives in this “the intention of confusing great things with the small, the serious with the ridiculous, so as to establish on this promiscuity the doctrine of universal scorn” (p. 999). Everything is placed on the same plane: “It is no longer the case of a banal indifference, but of a deliberate will to disenchant the world and degrade human nature” (p. 1002). The term désenchanter recurs toward the conclusion: with the book completed, “we tell ourselves that all this is false, that the author has not represented either love or action, that he has slandered humanity, that life is something of value, and that art betrays itself when it persists in disenchanting God’s work” (p. 1003).
7. Dissociation of the author from his work; narrative processes which are their own end; impassibility; indifference; history in which public events and private happenings lacking in importance are interwoven; general irrelevance; disillusionment with the world. It would not be difficult to find in Kracauer’s History: The Last Things before the Last themes similar to those Taillandier identified in L’éducation sentimentale: estrangement, detachment, the interweaving of microand macrohistory, a rejection of the philosophy of history—in other words, of the search for a comprehensive sense in human history. Kracauer may not have read Taillandier’s article; however, he had read Flaubert and, during the Weimar period, regarded Flaubert’s impassibility as an ideal. Toward the end of World War II he contemplated an essay (which he never wrote) on the pessimism of Flaubert and the intellectuals of the Third Republic.38 But these similarities suggest something more complex than the reading of an author by two very different persons, a century apart. Here we are dealing not simply with reception, but with reception and production together. In an extraordinary book which has not received the attention it deserves, Michael Baxandall has shown that Italian Quattrocento painters applied themselves to a public which knew how to understand their work thanks to a series of shared social experiences: the abacus, sermons, the dance.39 The experiment could be repeated with photography, choosing a specific sector: France toward the mid-nineteenth century, Germany in the first decades of the twentieth, Europe in the early years of the twenty-first. Let there be no doubt, however: this research perspective has nothing to do with determinism. If man is (among the many possible definitions) a metaphorical animal, then we could say that the abacus, photography, and such suggest to the artist and to his public experiences that can be treated as metaphors, as worlds als ob (as if ), with respect to the fictional world of which the work is composed. In the present case, the photograph offered Flaubert the possibility of developing a series of cognitive and narrative experiments, and to his readers the possibility of deciphering them. When Taillandier hypothesizes, without providing concrete citations, that Flaubert tried to emulate Michelet’s later style—”. . . it is the same broken, convulsed way of splitting the narration, of passing brusquely from one scene to another accumulating details and suppressing the transitions . . .”—it is impossible not to think of photography and (anachronistically) of cinematic cutting and splicing.
Let us try to test Taillandier’s hypothesis on a passage taken, almost haphazardly, from the final volume of Michelet’s Histoire de France. It is the description of an episode from the revolt of the nobles which preceded the great revolution itself: the so-called journée des tuiles, an uprising at Grenoble on 7 June 1788. Michelet had direct access to numerous accounts of that event: “The best, provided by a monk, is of an enchanting simplicity.” It would be worthwhile to see how he reorganized this material (beginning with the punctuation). But let us listen to Michelet:
It was noon. At that sinister rumble, which resounded throughout every nook and cranny of that high valley, the rough peasants of Tronche and surrounding villages, with a terrible surge, grabbed their firearms and began to run. But the gates were nailed shut. They search for ladders. Unfortunately, they were too short. They end up opening a breach in a wall which blocked a fake door. It took a long while: but their presence sufficed to convey the idea that the countryside was as one with the city.40
To this succession of visual and auditory sensations, articulated with brief phrases, interrupted by photographic frames, which go on page after page, we could compare the splendid scene of the killing of Dussardier in L’éducation sentimentale.41 Instead, I shall quote a passage written in the plain prose of a manual for film directors: “In order to receive a clear and definite impression of a demonstration, the observer must perform certain actions. First he must climb upon the roof of a house to get a view from above of the procession as a whole and measure its dimensions; next he must come down and look out through the first-floor window at the inscriptions carried by the demonstrators; finally, he must mingle with the crowd to gain an idea of the outward appearance of the participants.”
This is the passage in Pudovkin quoted by Kracauer to support his thesis about the reciprocal implication between macro-and microhistory, between long shots and close-ups.42 I, in turn, would quote certain pages in Kracauer in support of the thesis of the cognitive implications (and not just rhetorical or ornamental) in any narrative.43 On this point Kracauer stands out, more than ever, as an essential protagonist in the discussion.
8. “There is no cosmos on the screen” wrote Roger Caillois. Kracauer, who quoted these words with emphatic approval, went so far as to say that “art in film is reactionary because it symbolizes wholeness.”44 This obstinate refusal of totality, which fed Kracauer’s diffidence toward the philosophy of history, sheds an ironic light to words which he penned in Marseilles in November 1940: “The face in film has no value if it does not allow the skull beneath it to surface. ‘Danse macabre.’ To what end? This remains to be seen.” “Zu welchem Ende?” The question mark leaves open the possibility that, along with the end, which is a given, there also exists a telos, a purpose. But the title—it, too, ironical—of the unfinished book, History: The Last Things before the Last, evokes the world of contingency, the disenchanted world for which Flaubert (as Taillandier wrote) and Max Weber had contended.45 All this, it seems to me, counsels against enrolling Kracauer, as has been done on occasion, among the devotees of messianicism, even in a paler version.46 The emphatic “NO” which Kracauer applied to his copy of Benjamin’s writings published in 1955, next to the last sentence of the seventh thesis on the philosophy of history, attests to a dissent which his friend’s tragic death had not extinguished.47 It may be worthwhile to reread what Benjamin had written:
Addressing himself to the historian who wishes to relive an era, Fustel de Coulanges recommends that he blot out everything he knows about the later course of history. There is no better way of characterizing the method with which historical materialism has broken. It is a process of empathy. Its origin is indolence of the heart, that acedia which despairs of appropriating the genuine historical image as it briefly flashes up. Among medieval theologians, acedia was regarded as the root cause of melancholy. Flaubert, who was familiar with it, wrote: “Few will guess how much sadness it took to resuscitate Carthage” (Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour resusciter Carthage). The nature of this melancholy becomes clearer if we ask: With whom does historicism actually sympathize? The answer is inevitable: with the victor.48
Kracauer, who thought of himself as a champion of lost causes and associated the theme of David and Goliath with the close-up—namely, the conviction that the most significant forces reveal themselves in what is small and insignificant—could not accept Benjamin’s conclusion.49 Nor could he accept what preceded it: the condemnation of melancholy, of empathy, of Flaubert assimilated into historicism. As for historicism, Kracauer was of two minds. But faith in the notion of progress, as expressed by Dilthey with reservations, seemed unacceptable.50 Flaubert’s pessimism was much more congenial to him. And yet in the antimessianical idea of the redemption of physical reality one discerns, in spite of everything, a subdued utopian accent.51