Central to Kracauer’s understanding of film is the recognition that movies are never the product of any one single individual – the fallacy of the director-as-auteur – but rather collaborative product of numerous different specialists: script and screenplay writers, set and costume designers and makers, casting directors, camera and lighting crews, make-up specialists, sound and soundtrack engineers, musical directors and composers, production assistants and technicians of all kinds, editors and many many others. The seemingly endless credits that roll after each and every film today attests to this collective effort. The same is true of the book, of this book. Without the author of these texts, Kracauer, there would be no anthology. But he is only one of many contributors to the publication and production of this volume. And so we, the editors, without shirking any responsibility for this book, would like to thank all those who have collaborated on this project.
This anthology would not have been possible without the kind and continuous support of the staff of the DLA. Our sincere thanks to you all for your help. And special thanks are due to Janet Dilger for her kind assistance in locating and reproducing manuscripts that would not have been included here otherwise. The archivist Herr Jochen Stollberg at the Literaturhaus in Frankfurt was extremely helpful with the manuscript for “Below the Surface.” We thank you and wish you a long and happy retirement. Preparatory archive work was undertaken with the generous support of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung and the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst).
We are deeply grateful too to Suhrkamp Verlag and in particular Dr. Petra Hardt and Nora Mercurio for their wholehearted support of this anthology. We would like to thank and express our deep appreciation for the editorial team who worked on the Suhrkamp publications of Kracauer’s “Totalitäre Propaganda” in both the paperback edition (2013) and the Werke 2.2 (2012): Christian Fleck, Bernd Stiegler, Joachim Heck, and Maren Neumann. We are particularly indebted to them not only for the text itself but also for the accompanying “Notes” (Anmerkungen) which provide remarkable detail on so many of the figures and events mentioned in Kracauer’s texts, materials that we précis here in our own endnotes for part 1. We would also like to extend our thanks to the editors of the Kracauer Werke, Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke, for their work, support, and encouragement. We are grateful to Clare Wellnitz of the University of California Press for her help in clarifying the issue of copyright.
Our thanks also go to the Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme in Paris for giving us permission to republish John Abromeit’s essay, “Siegfried Kracauer and the Early Frankfurt School’s Analysis of Fascism as Right-Wing Populism.” The essay first appeared in 2020 in their volume Theorie Critique de la Propagande, edited by Pierre-François Noppen and Gérard Raulet. Henrik Hjört kindly allowed us to use his striking painting of Kracauer for our book cover. Thank you, Henrik! We love your artwork!
We would like to thank Nicholas Baer for kindly allowing us to include his translation of the Exposé; Bernadette Boyle for her meticulous and attentive work as translator of several texts in part 1; and Doh-Yeon Kim for her scrupulous archival and bibliographical research and careful transcription work.
We are also very grateful to Amy Allen, Stefano Brenna, Vinayak Chaturvedi, Gerd Gemünden, Noah Isenberg, Hans Lind, Johannes von Moltke, and Marcos Nobre. Your kind interest in and support for our project throughout has been most welcome. Thank you!
We are indebted to a number of scholars who were inspirational for us in this project: Nancy Fraser, the late David Frisby, Jeffrey Goldfarb, the late Miriam Hansen, Axel Honneth, Andreas Huyssen, Anton Kaes, Elihu Katz, Ruth Katz, Martin Jay, Thomas Levin, and John B. Thompson.
Finally, we would to thank the editorial, production, and marketing teams at Columbia University Press for all their amazing work and enduring support: Emily Shelton, Lowell Frye, Susan Pensak, Zachary Friedman, and Noah Arlow.
Above all, we would like to thank our editor from the start, Wendy K. Lochner, whose unwavering support and endless patience have been amazing. Wendy, you have been wonderful!
The editors of this anthology first met in Frankfurt many years ago while each was working on a different project. Ulrich Oevermann acted as host and “supervisor” (Gastgeber und Betreuer) for Graeme’s Humboldt Research Fellowship in the Fachbereich Soziologie at the Goethe Universität. Without his kind and generous support, we three may never have met, and this book would not exist. Professor Oevermann (28.02.1940–11.10.2021) was a unique and inspirational scholar; he was also a dear friend who will be greatly missed. This book is dedicated to him.