This anthology brings together for the first time a specific selection of the writings by the German Jewish social and critical theorist Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966), a figure who is now widely regarded as one of the most original and insightful cultural theorists of the twentieth century and, in particular, a genuine pioneer in the critical analysis of modern popular culture and film. Its publication just as the third decade of the twenty-first century begins is especially timely—for the best of reasons, and for the worst.
For the best: our anthology appears in the context of an increasing recognition of Kracauer’s writings by a new generation of contemporary scholars working in a variety of interdisciplinary fields across the social sciences, arts, and humanities—a renewal of interest attested to by a wealth of recent publications, including new volumes of his Werke by Suhrkamp Verlag.1 The last few years have seen the appearance of new Anglophone collections2 and other translations of his key texts3 and correspondence.4 These new and newly available primary sources have been accompanied by the welcome proliferation of scholarly books and journal articles exploring his studies, themes, and concepts,5 including a major biography.6 Moving beyond earlier misreadings and misunderstandings of Kracauer as primarily a “realist” film theorist, there is now a significant and ever-increasing appreciation of, for example, his carefully differentiated and highly nuanced accounts of mass cultural forms during the Weimar years, studies that, while taking due account of the popular appeal and the pleasures of distraction afforded by these everyday entertainments, nevertheless remain resolutely critical of their ideological role. To be sure, popular movies were indeed part and parcel of the profit-driven capitalist “culture industry,” but, for Kracauer, the medium of film was at the same time something much more. It could be a symptomatic expression of prevailing unconscious predispositions among audiences and hence a diagnostic or interpretive tool for cultural analysis; it could serve as an innovative and privileged research instrument for the social-psychological study of prejudices and anti-Semitism; and it could constitute an aesthetic medium that promised through its envisioning of the world around us a revitalized, rejuvenated sensitivity to physical reality, an enrichment of human experiences, and a new sense of our everyday urban environment as “home.”
This continuing renewal of interest is certainly pleasing to see and bodes well, but it is also long overdue, and there is much still to be done. Kracauer’s diverse and provocative writings generally have attracted considerably less scholarly attention and critical acclaim than the works of his friends and colleagues associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), the so-called Frankfurt School, such as, most notably, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. The relative neglect of Kracauer’s work is a condition of neglect nonetheless.
In bringing together here a selection of Kracauer’s diverse materials on propaganda and political communication—texts hitherto unavailable in English or strewn among different (sometimes now obsolete or obscure) journals, periodicals, and magazines—we hope that his numerous and varied analyses of the manifold and complex relationships between power, mass culture, spectacle, and different media (film, newsreels, radio) in modern society will stimulate further academic interest and provoke fresh scholarly debate. Our anthology is therefore intended as a contribution to the development and diversity of the Anglophone reception, perception, and appreciation of the intellectual scope and critical insights of Kracauer’s work.
Our collection is also timely for the worst of reasons: the prevailing social, economic, and political circumstances in so many countries today mean that the critical interrogation of authoritarian and totalitarian propaganda and the refutation of forms of prejudice and intolerance are more urgent tasks than at any time in the last half-century. We see today populist support for chauvinist, misogynist “strongmen” as leaders, even within long-standing liberal democratic societies; established legal frameworks and systems of safeguards increasingly challenged or circumvented by regimes invoking “states of exception” and the need to “get things done”; the incitement of prejudice and xenophobia in numerous pernicious guises (misogyny, racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia) and the vicious stigmatization of vulnerable minorities as political expediency and petty nationalist rhetoric; the proliferation of a new generation of “prophets of deceit” peddling pernicious lies, mythologizing the past (“Make America Great Again”), spewing forth vacuous and tautological slogans (“Brexit means Brexit”), vilifying their opponents (“traitors,” “enemies of the people”); the posturing of media-savvy, digitally adept demagogues who accuse their accusers of “fake news” and “project fear” as they decry expert analysis, scorn scientific research, disdain reasoned argument, and either contemptuously consign universities and intellectuals to the role of paid lackeys, or scorn them as parts of “liberal metropolitan elites,” or both. These and many more aspects of twenty-first-century global neoliberalism are evidence that the “dialectic of Enlightenment” thesis formulated back in the 1940s by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (and heavily indebted to Kracauer) was not so very wide of the mark as to the catastrophic trajectory of the West when “instrumental reason” in the service of capital and hegemonic elites reigns triumphant. When we first published our work on Kracauer’s long-forgotten “test film” project back in 2007, we noted how a particular set of themes once central to Critical Theory—namely, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, anti-Semitism, prejudice, fascist agitators and personality structures—had become sidelined in the reception of the Frankfurt School, albeit unintentionally. Perhaps these numerous studies, primarily written in the 1940s and 1950s, were viewed with some discomfort and as writings very much of their time—as exercises, expedients, and experiments now only of interest to a few intellectual historians. This is no longer the case, if indeed it ever was. These writings—a small selection of which appear in this anthology—are all too relevant, actual, pertinent, and prescient. They speak to us today in a way that is clear, critical, and compelling. They illuminate our world here and now; not just their world there and then. That they do so is no cause for celebration.
Siegfried Kracauer was part of a generation of European intellectuals that lived through one of the most catastrophic periods of human history: from the mechanized carnage of World War I; through the chaos of revolution, civil war, and the descent into brutal totalitarianism and Stalinist terror; through the catastrophic rise and fall of Fascism and Nazism and the horrors of total war, genocide, and the Holocaust; and through the paranoid machinations of the Cold War, the perverse logic of mutually assured destruction, and the atrocities of saturation bombing, napalm, and Agent Orange. Accordingly, it should be no surprise that, as one of the most original and astute critics of Western modernity, Kracauer should write extensively and repeatedly on the themes of propaganda, ideology, and political communication. It is rather puzzling that this central aspect of his work has been so neglected by scholars and commentators. These particular writings can be understood not simply as attempts to understand and learn from some of these calamitous moments in recent Western civilization, but also as elements of an intense interrogation and a thoroughgoing critique of modernity itself. As such, they may be interpreted within the constellation formed by—or, indeed, at the very convergence point of—three principal themes which might be seen as leitmotifs of his entire oeuvre.
Firstly, at the very heart of Kracauer’s work is an enduring preoccupation, indebted to the works of his erstwhile tutor Georg Simmel, with the fate of the modern individual as s/he seeks to give meaning and expression to the inclinations and yearnings of their “inner life” amid the constraints and impositions of the wider society, outer or “objective culture.” Kracauer largely shared Simmel’s pessimistic vision, encapsulated in his famous 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” of the modern large-scale urban environment as the preeminent site of abstraction—of value (money) and of time (the clock)—wherein the individual is compelled to be ever on guard against, and feigning indifference toward, the multiplicity of fleeting sensations and stimuli that otherwise threaten to overwhelm her/him. Even the adoption or cultivation of a characteristically metropolitan, blasé personality may prove insufficient, however, to stave off the neurasthenia and other pathological psychological conditions induced by the intense and relentless demands of living at such an accelerated tempo and among so many equally indifferent strangers. Atomized and alienated, the once autonomous individual is increasingly subject to the rationalizing and homogenizing tendencies of the modern city, such that s/he is eventually engulfed by the multitude itself, absorbed into the anonymous masses. Simultaneously, and paradoxically, just as the individual is threatened with such eradication, the very notion of “individuality” itself, of being a distinctive and unique individual subject, is lauded as the defining principle and ultimate good of such a society. The individual is thus celebrated in theory in the very same moment as it is abolished in practice. Individualism thereby serves as the very ideology of a deindividualized mass existence.
Secondly, and much to his credit, Kracauer was the Critical Theorist who took mundane popular culture and the mass media seriously as objects of scrutiny and interrogation. Popular culture was not merely to be dismissed as the domain of ideology and the pacification of the masses, as all those banal and commodified products spawned by the “culture industry” (Kulturindustrie), identified by Horkheimer and Adorno in their 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment, that served to stultify and stifle the critical imagination. For Kracauer, as journalist and sociologist, even the seemingly most trivial aspects of mass culture could provide invaluable insight into those conditions of modern metropolitan existence already described. In his 1930 essay “The Biography as an Art Form of the New Bourgeoisie,” for example, he astutely interprets the growing popular interest in life histories as forms of compensation and consolation.7 The tedium and routine of ordinary lives stimulate an escapist demand for narratives of extraordinary ones. In a world in which the individual has actually been reduced to a minimum of significance, the biographical form serves to propagate the mythological potency of the exceptional individual. Politicians, sovereigns, generals, artists, scholars—these appear as inspired and inspiring figures who fashion history, who change the course of world events. In their celebration of supposed genius, heroism, and charisma, such hagiographies of national figures, along with self-serving autobiographies, all played their part in encouraging authoritarian dispositions and inducing the cultic adoration of demagogues as extraordinary personalities, as we will see in due course.
Importantly, Kracauer’s work demonstrates a lasting preoccupation with the proliferation and prevalence of new forms and technologies of cultural production—in particular, of course, the rise of the mass media themselves as corollaries of this emergent mass society. His interest is a complex and multifaceted one. Visual media in general, and the significance and promise of the camera in particular, prove of enduring fascination for him. The technological capacity of camera—both photographic or cinematic—to capture and record everything that stands before the lens at a given moment leads him in contrasting directions: writing in 1927, he laments photography as the banal inventorying of the world of appearances, a superficial stock-taking that, unlike the images borne in human memory, have no particular significance or meaning. Photography makes for banal indifferent pictures for banal indifferent times. By 1960, in Theory of Film, it is precisely this same ability to record what was present but perhaps went unnoticed at the time that promises a revitalization of an otherwise ever-more-impoverished human perception, counteracting and perhaps even overcoming Simmelian indifference. Kracauer, then, is not only at pains to identify the inherent logics, tendencies, and possibilities of these new media for representing and reshaping this modern world, but also, as we will see, comes to consider how film itself may provide a distinctive research instrument for the disclosure of collective social-psychological states and predispositions.
Thirdly, one finds in Kracauer’s work an ongoing concern with dialectical analysis and forms of critique which, while antithetical to the instrumental, scientized, quantifying technocratic systems of our contemporary world, nevertheless resolutely reject any reactionary relapse into irrationalism, prejudice, religious mysticism, or political fanaticism. As Kracauer points out as early as 1927 in his key “The Mass Ornament” essay, it is not that capitalist modernity has rationalized society too much, but that it has done so too little. Indeed, this essay is in many ways the fundamental point of intersection of Kracauer’s three overarching concerns set out here: the masses, popular culture, and the practice of dialectical critique. It opens with an insistence upon a depth hermeneutic, one in which what might be dismissed as merely superficial phenomena of an epoch are not simply privileged as the best mode of reading a prevailing social formation, but are deemed the only truly dialectical way of doing so. Kracauer writes:
The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’s judgements about itself. Since these judgements are expressions of the tendencies of a particular era, they do not offer conclusive testimony about its overall constitution. The surface-level expressions, however, by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things. Conversely, knowledge of this state of things depends on the interpretation of these surface-level expressions. The fundamental substance of an epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other reciprocally.8
The specific “surface-level expression” Kracauer identifies and explores in his essay is the Tiller Girls, the internationally popular English “kick and tap” dance troupe famous for their tightly choreographed routines in which up to thirty-two dancers combined to form complex geometrical figures and patterns with precisely synchronized movements. Of similar build and appearance and dressed identically to the others, the individual performer became one functioning part of a total mechanistic assemblage—not a distinctive dancer, but a subset of “indissoluble girl clusters” (1995, 76) composed of heads, arms, and legs set in perpetual motion. As for these endlessly evolving and dissolving patterns and configurations themselves, they were devoid of any actual meaning as such, existing instead simply as ends in and of themselves. This is ornament for its own sake, as pure spectacle by the masses, for the masses, a spectacle of the rationally ordered and organized, of obedient and compliant de-eroticized, de-individualized, dismembered bodies. This is the aestheticization of abstractness. The Tiller Girls thus serve as a perfect expression of both the disappearance of the autonomous subject and the triumph of the technocratic reason of the machine age (or the Ratio, as Kracauer terms it).
The critical exploration of the struggles of various individual selves within and against the disenchanted life-world of the metropolis and of modernity; the consequences attending the advent of the masses and the mass media as defining phenomena of social, cultural and political life in the twentieth century; and the search for modes of dialectical critique—these, then, are the central and recurrent motifs of Kracauer’s work. Spanning more than forty years of intellectual endeavor, these fundamental concerns inform and find expression in the many and varied textual forms taken by his writings, including feuilleton fragments and reviews, a couple of novels, some government reports, and several film treatments and potential scripts. Above all, these abiding concerns run through the four main books published by Kracauer in his lifetime: a pioneering urban ethnography of contemporary Berlin: The Salaried Masses (Die Angestellten, 1930); Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of Time (1937), an equally original so-called “societal biography” (Gesellschaftsbiographie) examining Paris in the Second Empire; From Caligari to Hitler (1947), a social-psychological history of film and cinematic audiences; and Theory of Film (1960), a critical exposition of the very ontology of the film medium itself. It is in relation to these themes—the mass, the mass media, dialectical critique—and against the backdrop of these four major studies that Kracauer’s writings on propaganda and political communication took shape.
On February 28, 1933, the day following the infamous Reichstag Fire, Kracauer, then feuilleton editor for the Berlin edition of the relatively liberal daily Frankfurter Zeitung (FZ), together with his wife, Elizabeth (Lili), former librarian at the Institute for Social Research, hastily packed their belongings and quit the city—indeed, left the country altogether. At the behest of the newspaper’s proprietors, they fled (via Frankfurt) to Paris, a city then becoming home to an increasing number of exiles and refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, among them, of course, Walter Benjamin, Kracauer’s acquaintance and colleague in Critical Theory. Kracauer was at least able to find some consolation in the prospect of becoming the paper’s designated correspondent in the French capital, though this was to prove perhaps the most bitter disappointment of all: only a few weeks later, his journalistic and editorial services were dispensed with altogether when the newspaper finally deemed it too damaging to continue employing Jewish left-wing intellectuals even as foreign correspondents abroad. Thus, Kracauer’s hitherto productive and prolific journalistic career, in which he penned some two thousand pieces for publication in the course of a dozen years, came to an abrupt and acrimonious end.
Kracauer had first started as a freelance local reporter with the FZ back in January 1921 when, increasingly drawn to sociological, philosophical, and cultural ideas and issues, he abandoned his chosen career as an architect, for which he had trained in Darmstadt, Berlin, and Munich and been engaged professionally since before the Great War. The Berlin lectures of the sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel, and his weekly Frankfurt discussions of Kant with the precocious Theodor W. Adorno, some fourteen years his junior, were rather more inspiring than drawing up plans for housing estates in Osnabruck. And so it was that while architecture remained one of Kracauer’s journalistic specialisms—reviewing contemporary exhibitions and designs and reporting on the construction and opening of new buildings in Frankfurt and elsewhere—his writings took both a broader and deeper perspective, his subject matter the whole sweep of everyday cultural life in the modern city. These texts met with no little success: in November 1924, he became a full-time, permanent member of the newspaper staff. In 1930, when he was invited to assume an editorship position with the Berlin issue, he and his wife relocated to the capital of the Weimar Republic.
Although Kracauer’s writings were many and varied during the 1920s (a full-length philosophical treatise on the detective story, an epistemological and theoretical consideration of sociology as science, a semiautobiographical novel entitled Ginster), the pages of the FZ were without doubt the principal site for the articulation and presentation of his preoccupations and predilections. The exigencies of newspaper publishing were to be the tough schooling for the precise and concise expression of his ideas and insights. His fundamental concerns were the contemporary cultural conditions he witnessed and came to describe as “the newest Germany” during the fraught years and amid the fragile institutions of the Republic. In particular, his attention was drawn to the expanding cosmopolitan center that was Berlin in the jazz age with its radically transforming class patterns, its rapidly emerging consumer culture, its pioneering and proliferating entertainment industries, and its modern technologies, traffic, crowds, edifices, and structures: opulent department stores, extravagant cinemas conceived as picture palaces, radio masts piercing the urban skyline, seedy nightclubs, burlesque cabarets and theatrical revues, popular bestsellers, fashion magazines, and, of course, the newspapers themselves.
Just prior to his final move to Berlin, in the guise of an intrepid metropolitan ethnographer, Kracauer collected an eclectic array of material (interviews, anecdotes, newspaper and commercial reports, various statistics, conversations, and other reflections) for a series of articles in which he hoped to document, or provide a panoramic vision of, the everyday lifestyle of what he regarded as the distinctive and increasingly dominant socioeconomic class of the city, that broad stratum of petit bourgeois employees whose very ordinariness and obviousness had made them seemingly invisible to social commentators and critics: the white-collar workers, mundane office and clerical staff—in short, the salaried masses. First published in twelve installments commencing in 1929 and then collected in book form the following year, The Salaried Masses sought to map the “terra incognita” of these employees, not only with respect to their experiences of the occupational structure, but also in terms of their fundamental roles as customers, consumers, and clientele; as shoppers and browsers; as spectators, audiences, and readers.
It should come as no surprise that, in bearing witness to the incipient phases of those structures and identities constituting bureaucratic, Fordist modernity, The Salaried Masses is permeated with Kracauer’s bleak Simmelian vision of a disenchanted, functionalized, mechanized life-world. Above all it brings the two central paradoxes, the double double-binds, of the white-collar world of this time into sharp focus. Firstly, since the bureaucratized apparatus itself is premised, as Max Weber famously recognized, upon impersonality, anonymity, and objective criteria of formal, technical expertise, the whole principle undergirding such rationalized systems is the dispensability and seamless substitution of individual office holders. Posts are filled and refilled with more or less competent functionaries. At the same time, however, significance is attached in ever greater measure to the distinctive personal attributes, morals, and virtues of the individual employee. Secondly, aspiring vainly to haute bourgeois notions of education (Bildung) and culture (Kultur), all the while disdaining the working classes, these office employees find themselves situated in a comfortless intermediary socioeconomic position, one that leaves them bereft of any sense of social solidarity. These salaried masses are, as Kracauer memorably puts it, “spiritually shelterless [geistig obdachlos].”9 They are indebted for their very existence to this rationalized, bureaucratized, impersonal, modern system and at the same time the main bearers of its miseries and misfortunes: frustration, resentment, repression, boredom, fatalism.
As we will see, this is of the utmost importance for Kracauer’s writings on propaganda and communication in the mid-to-late 1930s because these socioeconomic strata—obliging, and obsequious to those above them, haughty and high-handed to those below—were the very ones most susceptible and predisposed to the promises and prejudices promulgated by National Socialist propaganda.
Kracauer himself, like Benjamin, was to lead a precarious financial existence in Paris as a freelance writer devoting his time and energy to three main projects: a second novel, Georg, which was to remain unpublished at the time; his 1937 study of the French composer and impresario Jacques Offenbach, a book that he styled as a “societal biography,” critically exploring the “dreamworld” of the Second Empire through the satirical lens of one of its outstanding cultural figures, and a work Kracauer hoped would become, if not exactly a bestseller, then at least popular enough to provide some much-needed income; and, most significantly for us here, at the instigation in late 1936 of Max Horkheimer, then-director of the Institute for Social Research while in exile in New York, an extensive study of contemporary totalitarian propaganda in Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, a work that, like the Offenbach book, was to become the subject of a bitter and acrimonious exchange with Adorno.10
Kracauer’s “Totalitarian Propaganda” writings will be introduced in part 1. Here, some words on his Offenbach book are needed by way of context, especially because this work—written in parallel with Benjamin’s ongoing study of the same historical moment as manifested in the Parisian arcades and the poetry of Charles Baudelaire—was intended as something other than a conventional biography, the kind he himself had critically discussed just a few years earlier. Exploring the Paris of his time as much as the life of the composer, it was an attempt (perhaps a little too often implicit) to redeem what Kracauer identified as the satirical energies and utopian intimations of Offenbach’s music for contemporary political interventions. The composer was no arbitrary choice: his comic operettas and other musical theater enjoyed remarkable and sustained success in a dreamworld that was itself, Kracauer claims, “operetta-like” in its illusions and pretensions. Paris under Napoleon III was home to the spectacular proliferation of commodities, fashions, and luxuries imported from around the empire framed amid new urban consumption sites and spaces (arcades, boulevards, world exhibitions); to cycles of financial speculation and economic crisis as new industries, grand public works, and colonial trade flourished and failed; and to the accelerating tempo of modern metropolitan society and its burgeoning distractions and entertainments. Kracauer thus posits a correspondence, or an elective affinity, between the fanciful world of the operetta and the ostentatious and outlandish world of the Second Empire. For a while, the realities of dictatorship and class struggle were forgotten, sidelined, or ameliorated by short-term prosperity. Theatricality, artifice, and pretense took center stage. The operetta both expressed and was an essential part of the phantasmagoria of this farcical (as Marx observed) regime. It was to be short lived: the Franco-Prussian War saw the catastrophic defeat of the Second Empire in 1870–1871. It was the end, too, for Offenbach’s operettas. Turning to gloomier themes, the composer died in 1880 just prior to the first performance of his melancholic Tales of Hoffmann.
Kracauer’s Offenbach book is of particular interest for us in this anthology for both thematic and methodological reasons. Significantly, Kracauer sees Offenbach’s music as providing the signature tune to the hegemony of a dictatorial regime combining brutality and repression with spectacular and superficial “joy and glamour”; mobilizing mass populations for civic projects, urban and infrastructural renewal, and military adventures; embarking on ruthless colonial exploits to appease a people familiar with la gloire and avaricious for pomp and pageantry; and destined to war and defeat at the hands of one of its neighbors. All these features of the recent past would have been only too familiar to those forced to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Additionally, in taking the life of Offenbach as a kind of monadological entity from which to unpack critically the wider society of which he was such an integral part—that is to say, to see in, read through, and unfold from the life of a single individual the fundamental features of her/his times—Kracauer reconfigures the depth hermeneutic with which he opened his “Mass Ornament” essay written ten years earlier. Jacques Offenbach’s popular operettas are not so much surface-level expressions as the very musical embodiment of the Second Empire. Indeed, Kracauer claims his study of the composer as nothing less than a model of and for historical materialist cultural analysis: “By disclosing the connections between the operetta and society, the book demonstrates through an exemplary case the dependence of every genre of art on specific social conditions.”11 In this sense, Kracauer offers up his Offenbach study as a case study—or, more precisely, as a kind of test case of the historical materialist analysis of popular cultural phenomena and cultural production. The “societal biography” here becomes for Kracauer an essential Marxist method for reading the relationship between artist, artwork, and society.
First published while in American exile in 1947, Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (arguably still the book for which he is best known in the Anglophone academy) is Janus-faced. In many ways it represents the culmination of his writings on Weimar culture and society, the attempt to make some sense of a time, place, and people now seen in retrospect through the horrors that were foreshadowed by them. At the same time, the book constitutes his first major study of the cinematic medium that had long fascinated him as a reviewer and feuilleton editor for the FZ. In the Caligari book it is not just the “little shop girls” who “go to the movies” in search of romance, solace, and escapism, but rather all those “spiritually shelterless” white-collar workers whose workaday lives and commonplace tastes had earlier been revealed by the intrepid ethnographer and author of Die Angestellten.12 It was above all to the ever-changing but always conservative tastes and preferences of these numerous “middle strata” (Mittelschichten) that the German film industry pandered in its production of popular and predictable cinematic treats. For Kracauer, popular films—not those technical and aesthetic experiments in the medium created by the avant-garde—are the focus of his critical attention precisely because they provide a point of access into the deep-seated inclinations and predispositions of their ordinary, everyday audiences.
The book is significant for us here for at least three reasons. Firstly, and most important, is the fact that the Caligari book—or, more specifically, the archival work and other research undertaken to write it—played a fundamental role in saving the Kracauers’ lives. While Kracauer hoped that his commission from Horkheimer and the Institute for the “Totalitarian Propaganda” study and its subsequent publication in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung might be the first of a series of collaborations eventually facilitating an American visa and passage from Europe to the safe haven of New York, the debacle that ensued, leaving his text unpublished and creating considerable rancor on both sides, put a sorry end to any such aspirations. It was instead to be the offer from the Film Library at the New York Museum of Modern Art for Kracauer to become a special research assistant and undertake a project on the historical and sociological significance of German cinema that proved decisive in securing Siegfried and Lili the necessary financial guarantees and requisite transit documentation for their escape from occupied France in February 1941. Others, Benjamin among them, were not so fortunate.
Secondly, it is a key work thematically and methodologically. In the “Mass Ornament” essay, Kracauer first expounded upon and then elaborated the crucial critical insight that forms of modern metropolitan mass culture had a diagnostic or symptomatic significance as surface-level expressions of much deeper processes and tendencies. The Offenbach book had reworked this notion into a historical undertaking, the societal biography, in which the life of a particular and carefully chosen individual could provide for a monadological reading of an entire epoch and society: Paris in the “era of high capitalism,” as Benjamin termed it. Such practices of unfolding and interpreting were decisive for the Kracauer’s psychological history of German cinema that was to constitute the Caligari book. The popular films of a particular time together formed a rich collection or constellation of surface-level expressions for discerning and interrogating what he saw as a historically specific though ever-changing collective, national unconscious. Films are, he argued, especially important as expressions of underlying psychological patterns and proclivities. This is because of how they come into being; they are themselves collective cultural products, necessarily involving the collaboration of numerous specialists and hence never, pace theories of the director as auteur, the work of a single individual. And for whom they come into being: commercial pressures and the need to fill cinemas ensure that most films look to appease widely shared tastes and to “satisfy existing mass desires.”13 Films of a particular time and place—in this case, the Germany of the recent past—will display certain recurrent themes and motifs, “visible hieroglyphs” (2019, 7), whose critical decipherment would reveal the shared sensibilities and secret longings of mass audiences. The analysis of film was to proceed in an analogous manner to the interpretation of dreams—not so much individual dreams as collective ones.
Dividing the history of the German film industry into four main periods based on fluctuating socioeconomic and political conditions instead of, for example, technological innovations such as the advent of sound and new techniques in cinematography, Kracauer discloses the “secret history” (2019, 11) of the German unconscious prior to 1933 as manifested on the screens of Weimar movie houses.14 It is a story of increasing irrationalism and psychological retrogression in which the German psyche, marked by an absence of critical reasoning and an immature fear of genuine freedom, came to embrace, even to crave, authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
Taking the eponymous Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919) as his point of departure, Kracauer observes how by means of a framing device, “a revolutionary film was turned into a conformist one” (2019, 67). In their “outspoken revolutionary story” (64), the pacifists Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, horrified by the carnage of the Great War, penned a critical vision of tyranny and obedience as the fiendish Dr. Caligari uses his hypnotic powers to send the strange figure of the somnambulist Cesare—an innocent instrument of evildoing—on errands of murder and abduction.15 Bracketing this narrative such that it is no more than the delusions of an asylum inmate, the film version transforms Dr. Caligari from a showground charlatan and murderous manipulator into a benign hospital director.
This was a first taste of things to come. Craven submissiveness to authority, spurious reconciliations between classes (as in the final scenes of Fritz Lang’s “pompous” Metropolis of 1927), and the all-too “timid heresies” of the street film genre—with their youthful bourgeois rebels who dally with life on the edge before finding comfort again back with their well-heeled and forgiving families—were all to feature largely in the films that followed, indications for Kracauer of the fundamental paralysis of critical faculties. True, he observes, the economic crises of 1929 did lead to some politically progressive films,16 but these were no match for the spate of “national epics” and war films in which visions of heroism, duty and sacrifice, of national liberation and inspirational charismatic leadership on the battlefield are played out in costumes borrowed from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.17 German films were forms of both gratification and preparation for their audiences. Unquestioning loyalty and devotion to the national leader-as-genius, patriotism and self-sacrifice, blind obedience unto death: such sentiments repeatedly pervaded and provided the finale of Weimar film.
Kracauer’s original psychological-sociological-historical thesis is certainly not without its flaws, as numerous subsequent commentators have pointed out—not just inconsistencies and questionable readings of particular films, but the whole retrospective teleological thrust of the argument itself. But it is still important for this anthology in a number of ways: it reiterates Kracauer’s critique of mass metropolitan culture and, in particular, focuses attention on the salaried masses; it reorients this critique toward film, for Kracauer the mass medium par excellence; it makes the fundamental connection between film audiences and prevailing psychological conditions and circumstances; it designates the deciphering of films as the method of tracing these psychological traits; and it recognizes film as an instrument or gauge for exploring underlying states of mind.
Finally, it is important to recognize that Caligari occupies a key moment in the trajectory of Kracauer’s work. In a sense, it bookends the “Totalitarian Propaganda” study of 1936–1938 in that it takes as its historical focus the preceding period (the Weimar years) but itself appears a full decade later. The thematic complexes of the masses, psychological regression, the role of popular media, and forms of political power and domination are common to both. What were to emerge as the book’s central principles concerning the psychology of audiences were earlier being deployed and refined by Kracauer as part of, for example, his social-psychological “test film” project (“The Accident”/“Below the Surface”), whose script and other accompanying documents we include in this anthology. Designed specifically to reveal latent anti-Semitism among American students, as indicative of wider populations and prejudices, Kracauer proposed to use audience reactions to a film to explore their deep-seated values, attitudes, and preconceptions; this is a kind of Caligari in reverse. Also, research for Caligari developed in parallel with various other studies of propaganda and prejudice undertaken by the Institute during the 1940s, many on behalf of the American Jewish Committee. These, like Caligari, were conceived as a significant contribution to understanding the problem of authoritarianism in modern industrial societies, and—more urgently—to the Allied psychological warfare research effort and the defeat of Nazi Germany. Several former affiliates of the Institute worked directly for the U.S. government during and after the war, conducting intelligence work on Nazi Germany.18 It was to this end that Kracauer was employed as a special research assistant: his work had a pertinent, practical, and political purpose.
In the light of this, the Caligari study may be understood as the very centerpiece of Kracauer’s various writings on authoritarianism and propaganda. Paradoxically, we do not present any material from the book itself here. Nevertheless, for us it is the sun around which the works in this anthology orbit, albeit at different distances and, in some cases, eccentrically.
Kracauer’s Caligari study is a significant text in that, as will become clear, it anticipates many concepts, techniques, and examples explored in Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), the fourth and last of his books to be discussed here. For example, one reads in Caligari of the camera’s ability “to scan the whole visible world” (2019, 6) and, importantly, of its penchant for capturing the contingencies and happenstances of everyday urban existence—the “flow of life,” as he terms it, as witnessed on the busy streets. There are due references, too, to various techniques and practices of cinematic montage and editing and to the increasing importance of sound and music as forms of emotional intensification and the creation and accentuation of mood. Such insights would later be extended and reconfigured in Kracauer’s ambitious attempt to articulate the redemptive possibilities and restorative promise inherent in the medium of film. And, like Caligari, film is here to be considered in the context of a double catastrophe: the alienation and “spiritual shelterlessness” of the subject in a disenchanted modern world are placed in a new light by the unspeakable, perhaps unrepresentable, horrors of the Holocaust.19
Although Kracauer’s Theory of Film appeared after his Cold War studies from the 1950s—studies that, much to his frustration, repeatedly delayed progress on the book manuscript—it is still highly relevant as the backdrop to the propaganda writings collected in this anthology. This is the case not least because, as Miriam Hansen points out in her lucid introduction to Theory of Film as well as elsewhere, the book was originally conceived before the Caligari study as an analysis of film aesthetics sketched in a series of notebooks in Marseilles in 1940 while the Kracauers were still trapped in Occupied France.20 In fact, the origins of the project go much further back. The search for the genuine subject matter of the new film medium was one of the principal concerns of Kracauer’s very earliest writings on cinema and imbue his numerous film reviews for the FZ in the 1920s.
In seeking to identify and establish both the essential qualities of the film medium and its inherent possibilities, Kracauer’s Theory of Film takes as its point of departure the not unreasonable view that the so-called “moving” images of film and the “still” images of photography fundamentally share the same logic and capacity for revealing and recording the visible world—what he variously terms “physical,” “material,” or “camera” reality. Film finds itself in accord with this inherent “realistic tendency” when it attends to and captures the serendipitous and spontaneous movements and patterns of life that ceaselessly unfurl and unfold before the lens of the camera.21 The hurry-scurry of pedestrians; the stop-start of traffic; the happenstances of chance encounters; things in transit; life in passing and passing away; the ephemeral, marginal, and improvised—all are among the true subject of the film medium which is dedicated to perceiving and preserving this ‘real’ world as it is manifested in the moment. This realistic tendency—or “cinematic approach” (1997, 35), as Kracauer terms it—contrasts with the “formative tendency,” with the work of the filmmaker to give structure, shape, and sequence to these images, cutting, splicing, and editing them, fashioning them through montage and relay into a narrative, rendering them as works of art. These two opposing tendencies are not, of course, mutually exclusive; on the contrary, all films involve a compromise between realistic and formative tendencies for their content and form, for their very existence.
Foregrounding and privileging the realistic tendency of the film medium, Theory of Film continues with the exploration of cinematic techniques and the use of, for example, diegetic and nondiegetic sound and music. In so doing, Kracauer offers readings of numerous movies that accord with and exemplify his principles and others that contravene or conflict with them. His argument, then, is neither a dogmatic insistence upon realism in film nor a naïve advocacy of, for example, Italian neorealist cinema. It is one that leads him nonetheless to some idiosyncratic and, to his credit, highly unpretentious evaluations of particular films and film genres. While he celebrates the unpredictable world and ad hoc methods of improvisation displayed in popular slapstick comedies, as well as the interruption of narrative progression for the sake of singing and dancing in Hollywood musicals, Kracauer is also not afraid to decry the lamentably uncinematic qualities of much avant-garde, experimental “film art”—that is, films more concerned with displaying the technical inventiveness and skills of the filmmakers themselves than with depicting the life-world in which we are immersed. Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 Berlin: Symphony of a Great City is a particular case in point. Kracauer’s attitude toward films like Ruttmann’s—not just mild distaste for but outright rejection of—is highly instructive as to the principles and precepts of Theory of Film and the significance of these for the propaganda studies in our anthology.
In many ways, one might expect Kracauer to be appreciative of Ruttmann’s “city symphony,” which was based on an original idea by Carl Mayer (none other than the coauthor of Caligari) and shot by his close associate Karl Freund. The film was supposed to depict the mundane sights and scenes of an ordinary day in Berlin, with images set to an original musical score by the Austrian composer Edmund Meisel. The visual and the acoustic were to combine in various ways to capture the hither and thither, the hustle and bustle of quotidian metropolitan existence: busy streets; criss-crossing pedestrians; traffic at speed; crowded streetcars; the comings and goings of local trains laden with commuters; office workers at their desks tap tapping away on typewriters; factories filled with wheels spinning, machinery pumping, engines turning; thriving shops, cafés, and bars; cinemas and theaters packed with appreciative audiences; even the Tiller Girls themselves (or a dance troupe like them) make a brief appearance. Walter Ruttmann was brought in as editor to give a very particular shape and distinctive direction to Freund’s images while collaborating closely with Meisel. All this activity and energy captured on film was edited according to the demands of rhythmic montage to ensure the correct dynamic tempo and proper sense of kaleidoscopic fragmentation. Mayer was appalled. And Kracauer loathed the film. Why?
For one thing, Kracauer detested what he saw as the overly self-conscious editing and stylization of the film: the emphasis time and again on the formative tendency, which celebrated the contrivances and cleverness of the filmmaker at the expense of the material depicted. Experimental aesthetics here equated to cinematic self-indulgence and narcissism, style over substance. And it produced what Kracauer detested most: abstractness. Here, the logic and speed of machines and engines are not simply privileged over human life, but become the very measure and pace for the responses of the body; here, the citizens of Berlin appeared either as aggregations, as masses, as otherwise meaningless constituent elements of larger patterns, or as banal types, as representatives of roles and responsibilities; Berliners never feature as distinctive individuals. Automation, atomization, anonymity: these are the main features of the featureless world conjured up by the Berlin symphony. For Kracauer, such things betray the radical promise of the film medium. In his epilogue, “Film in Our Time,” he returns to his earlier critical vision of the disenchanted Simmelian life-world, one beset by the onward march of rationalization, calculation, and quantification. These processes, he reiterates, have led to a diminution of the human senses and an indifference to the unique qualities of things around us. It is precisely these tendencies, this work of reification, that the film medium promises to counteract. In its very ability to penetrate, record, and (re)present reality—revealing what was previously invisible, revitalizing perception by the use of unconventional camera angles, defamiliarizing and questioning the everyday and taken-for-granted—the film camera enhances our faculties, heightens our sensitivity and receptivity, and restores our aesthetic appreciation of the world around us.22 Kracauer thus sees film as promising a twofold redemption: of the physical reality it (re)discovers, and of those who bear witness to this renewed world, an emancipated humanity.
Images of choreographed anonymous masses moving in and out of step to the relentless tempo of the machine and the rhythms of the Ratio were scrupulously edited into a kind of posthuman city-as-cyborg Gesamtkunstwerk. Ruttmann’s film, then, is a kind of cinematic “mass ornament” and, as such, constitutes the very antithesis of Kracauer’s precepts in Theory of Film. Little wonder, then, that Ruttmann later worked with Leni Riefenstahl on Triumph of the Will (1934). He was to die of injuries sustained on the Russian front while shooting footage as a cameraman making Nazi propaganda films extolling “total war.” Ultimately, for Kracauer, film is not a neutral medium that can simply be put into the service of any number of political persuasions and purposes. Rather, film is only true to its own ontological imperatives when it serves the radical redemption of human faculties and senses. Propaganda films are always and everywhere a betrayal of the very medium of film itself, for they seek to blind us to very reality they should, as films, reveal and redeem.
The leitmotifs of Kracauer’s main works are hopefully evident: modern metropolitan mass society and the forms and possibilities of individual and collective experience this environment engenders and endangers; the significance of cultural phenomena, and film in particular, as manifestations of the prevailing social, cultural, political, and spiritual conditions of the masses; the complex and subtle strategies and textual techniques by means of which the Critical Theorist can undertake modern cultural analysis, reading the dialectical play between surface and depth, individual and society, conscious and unconscious states; and the possibilities of film, not only as a phenomenon through which the contemporary collective psyche may be discerned and deciphered, but also as the most important modern medium whose essence, for Kracauer, is to restore human perception and appreciation of the physical world so as to reveal it anew and thereby redeem it from a state of oblivion. The aesthetics of film were antithetical to the anaesthetics, the amnesia and alienation, of existence under the exigencies of modern capitalism.
In bringing together this selection of Kracauer’s writings on media, propaganda, and political communication for the first time in English, we hope that this anthology will lead to a new appreciation of the scope of his interests and expertise. Kracauer was a witness to the traumatic occurrences of the first half of the twentieth century, events that imbue his writings even as they seek to explicate and illuminate them. Not surprisingly, in Kracauer’s case, this chronological time frame also corresponds to significant thematic reconfigurations and reconceptualizations as the Marxist critique of (German) mass culture as ideology develops into an increasingly sophisticated and detailed analysis of film as a medium (including its techniques, practices, and potentialities) and of its reception and interpretation by cinema audiences. Written over some twenty-five years, the various chosen texts collected here are invaluable for any proper understanding of the developments and trajectories of Kracauer’s thought.
The truly alarming political developments of recent years have prompted a much-needed reassessment and long-overdue recognition of the Frankfurt School’s many insightful writings on authority and authoritarianism, on Fascist agitators and propaganda techniques, and on anti-Semitism and prejudice.23 For too long there was perhaps a widespread perception of much of the Institute’s empirical research agenda in American exile as mere exercises in financial expediency (Brotarbeit) and institutional politicking both to win favor with influential organizations and, as Marxist German émigrés, to minimize unwelcome scrutiny from the authorities. Such studies were perhaps overlooked because they were seen at first to be characterized and compromised by precisely the kind of naïve methodology, empirical simplifications, and pseudoscientific experimental style characteristic of mainstream American social sciences—the very forms of knowledge against which Critical Theory configured and indeed defined itself. Overshadowed (or, perhaps more accurately, outshone) by the sophisticated critical analyses of the triumph of instrumental reason and the many essays in ideology-critique dissecting the culture industry, these texts are being subject to renewed interest and investigation. Not only is their continuity with and contribution to the more celebrated writings of Critical Theory increasingly evident, but also the prescience of their insights, the relevance of their conceptual armature, is newly and appreciable. They speak clearly, cogently, and urgently to the politics of our twenty-first-century world today.
Kracauer’s writings on propaganda and political communication are exemplary in this regard. True, these analyses may seem to lack some of the philosophical sophistication and richness that make his other writings so demanding and provocative. However, we would argue that this does not diminish their value and significance, both as historical documents and as sources of theoretical and critical insight. Indeed, for Kracauer, the propaganda studies constituted essential and urgent intellectual contributions to the Allied war effort and the desperate struggle of liberal democratic regimes against Fascism and National Socialism.24 Spanning a quarter of a century, these writings constitute a pioneering attempt to examine the social-psychological and cultural dimensions of the mobilization of the masses for “states of exception” that saw the accession to power and the legitimation of ruthless dictatorship, the acquiescence to if not actual willing participation in violence and terror, and the perpetration of total war and genocide. As such, these studies were developments of, rather than departures from, his long-standing intellectual trajectories. As we have already sought to suggest in this introduction, they demonstrate a clear correspondence with, and are primarily intelligible in terms of, those very cultural and aesthetic studies that have since eclipsed them.
While not wishing to create discontinuities in Kracauer’s work, our anthology groups his texts into four main constellations under rubrics that are both chronological and thematic. In what follows, we provide a more specific and detailed contextualization of the selected works.
This first section focuses on Kracauer’s various writings—sketches, notes, schematic plans, and two substantial extracts—involved in his ill-fated “Totalitarian Propaganda” study, a project begun in 1936 at the behest of Max Horkheimer, which was to remain unpublished in his lifetime. Kracauer’s initial outline or exposé of the work, entitled “Mass and Propaganda” (chapter 1), identifies three main questions: “How did the propaganda emerge? What is its underlying reality? And what function does it fulfill?” To address and answer these questions, he proposes a categorical framework for the project in four dimensions: 1) The Crisis After the War and Its Consequences; 2) The Decisive Phase of the Crisis; 3) The Approach of the Fascist Sham Solution; and 4) The Role of Propaganda in Fascism. The exposé highlights the potency and reach of emerging forms of mass communication, mediation, and spectacle, and the concomitant demise of individual identity and subjectivity as the distinctive individual personality is atomized and incorporated into the undifferentiated mass. Importantly, the exposé demonstrates that his propaganda project was conceived as a continuing investigation of the transformation of the urban masses as pioneered in Die Angestellten and adopting its pivotal conception of “spiritual shelterlessness.” Thus, Fascist propaganda deceitfully promises to deliver the masses from the fundamental existential crises and ideological vacuum of modernity. The exposé also reveals how, in its critical disenchantment of the joy and glamour of the Second Empire and the hollow spectacle of imperial dictatorship, Kracuaer’s 1937 study Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time takes on an acutely critical significance in the era of totalitarianism.
In the exposé, Kracauer emphatically links the unprecedented penetration of the new media of the time into mundane lives and quotidian settings. For instance, he argues that radio has transformed the home into a public space, resulting in a “totalization of the inwardness of the individual” and a “politicization of the everyday lives of the masses.” Fascist propaganda plays a distinctive and destructive role in the transformation of both private and public spheres and, importantly, of the borders and thresholds that have traditionally separated them. Furthermore, Kracauer considers his propaganda project to be a rigorous sociological investigation of the complex relationship between the urban masses and totalitarian regimes in high capitalism, a relationship that is inextricably interwoven with ideology and propaganda. Unlike communist propaganda, fascist propaganda’s goal is not concerned with the disappearance or transcendence of the masses since fascism itself cannot exist without their constant mobilization. For Kracauer, this is an intrinsic dilemma that fascist regimes face. Herein lie noteworthy affinities and subtle differences between Benjamin’s famous yet still enigmatic characterization of fascism as the “aestheticization of politics” and Kracauer’s critical vision of mass spectacle and ornament. Benjamin’s thesis constitutes an attempt to reflect upon the total crisis and alienation of the human sensorium in conjunction with the high capitalist entertainment industry. In Kracauer’s conception, however, the masses always present themselves in the “aesthetically seductive form of an ornament or of an effective image.” This insight is less akin to the formation of false consciousness than to the psychological reception of a mass mediated iconography of power, one exploring Fascist strategies in terms of the very visibility of the masses themselves (or “ornamentalization” of the masses, to use Kracauer’s own terminology).
Developed from this exposé, Kracauer’s 150-page typescript was completed two year later. It was duly sent to the Institute in New York, where it received scathing criticisms from Adorno in his “evaluative report” (Gutachten) provided to Horkheimer (see appendix 1). Dissatisfied with what he saw as a lack of theoretical insight and methodological rigor, Adorno took it upon himself to edit and abridge the manuscript (or, in Kracauer’s view, “distort” it) under the title “On the Theory of Authoritarian Propaganda” (Zur Theorie der autoritären Propaganda).
After some heated correspondence and debates, Kracauer rejected Adorno’s bowdlerized version and, when his own proposal of a compromise—the publication of two sections of the text—was declined, furiously withdrew his text altogether.25 In accordance with Kracauer’s wishes, we include here in original English translation the two key sections (E, exploring the formation of masses, and G, the concluding section) that he himself argued should be published (chapter 2). The original typescript for this was subsequently lost, and only a handwritten manuscript has survived in the Kracauer Nachlass in Marbach-am-Neckar. Painstakingly deciphered and transcribed, this was first published by Suhrkamp Verlag in the second part of volume 2 of Kracauer’s Werke in 2012. Moreover, again respecting Kracauer’s own view, we have decided, after careful deliberation, not to include a translation of Adorno’s rewritten version in this anthology. Whatever its own shortcomings and merits, this was and remains Adorno’s text, not Kracauer’s.
Written both during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the writings gathered in this section were inspired by two main factors: firstly, in examining propaganda techniques and audience psychologies, they were genuinely seen as a contribution to the American war effort; and, secondly, in experimenting on and examining American audiences, they were intended to identify, understand, and counteract fascist mentalities and anti-Semitism in the United States itself—the enemy within, so to speak. Here we group these writings under the sign of his major historical-psychological study of German cinema, From Caligari to Hitler, because it is in this book that so many of Kracauer’s key ideas—especially the attempt to analyze the resonance of particular images and motifs for the inner psychological states of audiences—come to full fruition.
As we have already noted, Kracauer’s propaganda projects were conceived against the background of his ongoing research on the Caligari book. Some of these first materialized in America with the help of the faculty of the New School for Social Research as well as the Museum of Modern Art Film Library. Kracauer’s review article “Hollywood, the Movie Colony—The Movie Makers by Leo C. Rosten” was published in Social Research in 1942, a journal edited and published by the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, including Alvin Johnson and Hans Speier. The first tangible outcome was a pamphlet, Propaganda and the Nazi War Film, issued in 1942 by the Museum of Modern Art Film Library and later incorporated as a supplement to the Caligari book. As Kracauer explicitly acknowledged, Speier and Ernst Kris, another faculty member of the New School for Social Research, were deeply engaged in the development of his study of Nazi war film. The second piece, “The Conquest of Europe on the Screen: The Nazi Newsreel, 1939–1940” (chapter 6), was originally produced for the Experimental Division for the Study of War Time Communication in 1943. An abbreviated version was published in a 1943 issue of Social Research, one that included a major article by Hans Herm, “Goebbels’ Conception of Propaganda,” and Speier’s “Nazi Propaganda and Its Decline.”
In the field of cultural sociology and communication studies in America in the 1940s, qualitative analysis of German cultural phenomena was not unfamiliar. Kris and Speier, among other émigré scholars, were undertaking extensive qualitative analyses of the German media and political communications. Kris’s work “German Radio Propaganda” (1944) was highly influential in the early stages of media and propaganda research. It is little wonder to find close theoretical affinities between Kracauer’s and Speier’s views on the impact of Fascist propaganda on the transformation of white-collar workers. Since the mid-1930s, Speier had comprehensively researched the structural changes of salaried employees in modern society and, specifically, the role of German white-collar workers in the rise of Hitler. From the 1940s onward, Speier investigated how the radio communication of war news in Germany played a key role in the transformation of the masses.
As should be clear, for Kracauer film was not merely an ideological tool of the powerful, but also a new and innovative research instrument for the study of unconscious prejudices and a medium that promised a renewed sensitivity to physical reality and an enrichment of human experience. In his analyses of Nazi newsreels, Kracauer provides differentiated and nuanced accounts of Fascist propaganda as a form of mass culture, recognizing its popular appeal and the pleasure of distraction while retaining a resolute critical accent. In the essay “The Conquest of Europe on the Screen,” he proceeds to analyze Nazi newsreels by characterizing their main aspects as “the unification of the news as a whole” and “the predominance of the visual element over commentary.” He also offers a detailed examination of the role of the camera, of pictorial editing techniques, and the calculated combination of images, commentary and music. In these propaganda studies, we see Kracauer’s search for an adequate and appropriate critical method for the concrete application of Critical Theory, for an approach that might combine European ideas and American methods into a sophisticated, powerful, and empirically grounded historical critique of the mass media and politics.
In exploring further the relatively sophisticated cinematography of Nazi newsreels—how camera angles and lighting can be used to create particular effects for example—Kracauer’s “The Hitler Image” (chapter 7) from 1944 foregrounds the two key motifs from his earlier “Totalitarian Propaganda” study. An exemplary analysis of the aestheticization of politics, this essay considers not just the idolatry of the Führer—Hitler portrayed as genius and savior—but also the construction of his relationship with the masses, those adoring crowds from whom he retained a distinctive and necessary distance. Newsreels played their part in the fabrication of what one might term, following Benjamin, the “aura” of the Führer: a vision of both singularity and of remoteness.
That the Kracauers decided to remain in America after the war and not to return to live in Germany—perhaps to engage in some way with its socioeconomic, cultural, and political reconstruction—or even elsewhere in Europe, should not be passed over without comment. While some, Adorno in particular, were seemingly only too keen to quit America and restore the Institute to its rightful home, Frankfurt-am-Main, Kracauer was to become one of those “permanent exiles”26 like Leo Löwenthal and Herbert Marcuse, who chose to remain on the other side of the Atlantic.27 As one-time editor of the Zeitschrift and hence part of the inner circle of the Institute, Löwenthal perhaps had more reason than most to return to his native city, but he, like Marcuse, was able to establish an academic career on the West Coast, first at Stanford and then at Berkeley. Much to his delight, and partly as a result of his own prompting, he was to be joined in California by Marcuse, who, after a spell at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, took up a post at the University of California, San Diego. Kracauer, however, remained in New York. Despite close ties with Columbia University, he never held a proper full-time academic position. Their decision to stay in America and become naturalized U.S. citizens (in September 1946) is perhaps indicative of three things.
Firstly, it is undoubtedly indicative of Kracauer’s own underlying attitude to Germany and the horrors of the Holocaust. Extraordinarily, the latter receives scant explicit mention in his published postwar works, with a late and oblique reference in Theory of Film to the role of cinema as a medium permitting audience to look upon and thereby overcome such atrocities, just as the hero of Greek myth Perseus uses his shield to reflect the petrifying image of, and then decapitate, the monstrous Medusa. Despite Kracauer’s best long-distance efforts, first from Paris and then from New York, to enable his aging mother and aunt to leave Germany, they were expelled sometime in November 1941 from the modest Frankfurt apartment they shared and then deported to Theresienstadt in the middle of August 1942. All contact with them was then lost. They were just two of the many thousands who perished there. Reading Kracauer’s review in the New York Times of January 4, 1948 (chapter 9), of Marshall Knappen’s And Call It Peace, one is left in no doubt as to his own skepticism regarding the ease with which Allied postwar reconstruction efforts would bring about denazification and welcome Germany into the happy family of postwar liberal democratic states. Knappen’s focus on economic factors in accounting for Hitler’s rise to power, Kracauer notes, leads him to the optimistic but naïve conclusion that the Marshall Plan—involving massive U.S. investment to stimulate and sustain economic growth and jobs—would radically and rapidly transform German sensibilities and attitudes, bringing a swift metamorphosis from authoritarian militarized masses to public-minded civilians. Kracauer’s conclusion is telling: “For a historian, Mr. Knappen seems rather oblivious of Germany’s past. We can only hope that a future Germany will not give lie to his rosy basic assumption.” His skepticism was grounded, of course, in his own psychological-historical research, the work that was to culminate in the Caligari book. Here, the triumph of totalitarianism in Germany was not merely the result of particular economic crises during the 1920s and 1930s, but also because of the fertile ground it found in the prevailing national collective psyche, one whose predispositions to the rule of tyrants had repeatedly found symbolic expression on the cinema screens of the Weimar Republic since its very inception in 1919. For Kracauer, it would take considerably more than a job at steady wages to bring about the genuine denazification of German society.
Secondly, the decision to stay in New York is suggestive of Kracauer’s confidence in his facility and fluency in the English language. For a writer who of necessity lives by means of the typewriter, especially a wordsmith praised even by Adorno for his gift for ironic expression and seemingly effortless literary style, this is no small matter.28 For Kracauer, the economics of this were simple: insufficient English would mean no publications in America, which in turn would mean no money. The Kracauers had little if any English as they first stepped off the transatlantic steamship Nyassa in New York back in the spring of 1941. Nevertheless, at the age of fifty-two, Kracauer began writing in this alien tongue almost from the start, with his first English-language publication appearing just six months after their arrival.29 Kracauer’s resourcefulness and skills as a journalist and editor honed with the FZ in the Weimar years were to serve him well once again, this time in the very different context of postwar New York, where as a freelancer and frequent contributor Kracauer managed to establish a small network of outlets for his writings including such journals as the New Republic, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Commentary, as well as the book review section of the New York Times.
While Kracauer was never a full-time paid-up insider as such, he was nevertheless successful enough in integrating himself through the good offices of various friends and colleagues into the institutional fabric of the American academy,30 of the various private research funding foundations, and even of several governmental agencies.31 These did not make for a life of luxury, but they did suffice for a living. In any case, the prospect of getting by by means of these short-term fellowships, ad hoc journal pieces, and report-writing contracts was clearly preferable to the alternative: returning to Germany.
Finally, the decision to stay in America is significant in that it tells us something about his continuing relationship with Adorno, Horkheimer, and the Institute. Prior to his commission for the “Totalitarian Propaganda” essay in 1936, Kracauer had expressed his resolve not to have anything more to do with the Institute, a stance that the ensuing debacle around the study could only reaffirm. It might be pushing things too far to suggest that Kracauer stayed in New York precisely because Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Germany, but the fact remains that they left for Frankfurt, and he did not. Perhaps one could formulate it like this: their choice had, at best, little consequence for his decision. Not that he was invited to join the Institute, of course; not that he would have accepted such an invitation if it had been forthcoming. Neither the departures of Adorno and Horkheimer for Frankfurt, nor those of Löwenthal and Marcuse for the sunnier climes of California, were to persuade Kracauer to forsake his new home in Manhattan.
The seemingly diverse texts included in this section attest to Kracauer’s enduring concern with the contrasting character of the techniques, forms, and contents of totalitarian propaganda, and those of other types of persuasive communication prevalent in capitalist liberal democracies—namely, advertising. This had originally been a part of this plan for the “Totalitarian Propaganda” study itself but had been dropped so as to sharpen the focus of the work. In his unpublished “Popular Advertisements” (chapter 11), dated January 15, 1949, Kracauer explores the recurrent motifs of American advertising, ones that—in promoting images of youthfulness, of health and vitality, of contentment and fitting in to the status quo—emphasize how correct fashion, brand, and lifestyle choices ensure social esteem, personal popularity, and all the other blessings of conformity. Two points are of particular interest here: that selling the “American dream” is here not so very different perhaps from promoting those “friendly face[s]” and “morally pink complexion[s]” (1998, 38) Kracauer scathingly identified as the secrets to success in the white-collar world of Berlin twenty years earlier; and that this incipient dreamworld of affluent consumerism was precisely that to which the “satellite mentalities” of those escaping the postwar Soviet bloc were drawn.
Not surprisingly, America’s cinema screens are also the focus of Kracauer’s attention in this period. In his satirically titled article “A Duck Crosses Main Street” (chapter 12), published in the New Republic in December 1948, Kracauer critically examines the American newsreel as it vies for the attention of audiences and struggles to fill screen time both in terms of economy and entertainment. The loosely linked pieces, air of eclecticism, and excessive chatty commentary of these newsreels are in stark contrast to those tightly crafted, intensely focused, and highly coherent image-led Nazi propaganda newsreels that Kracauer had critically explored earlier as part of the Caligari project, a study included in the previous section. American newsreels may exhibit “sloppiness, distortion and bias,” but these are, he suggests, “unintentional” consequences of their being “indolent rather than totalitarian minded.”
Such newsreels might be seen as part of the “Deluge of Pictures” identified by Kracauer in his January 1950 review of Lancelot Hogben’s From Cave Painting to Comic Strip (chapter 14). Kracauer’s critical comments here on the modern superfluity and superficiality of images recall themes articulated many years earlier in his 1927 essay “Photography”: “The blizzard of photographs,” he noted back then, “betrays an indifference toward what the things mean” (1995, 58), but now the proliferation of images and the concomitant diminution of meaning is given a new and rather different inflection. Now it is not so much the surfeit of images per se that is the problem, but the ever-more-intrusive and directive role of text and voice in steering interpretation and anchoring understanding. Captions, headlines, labels, slogans, and commentary increasingly tell viewers what to think of the picture, as opposed to allowing them to look for and find meaning in the pictures themselves. We are everywhere overwhelmed by the superabundance of pictures but simultaneously prevented from properly perceiving and questioning them. We are told the story; we are not permitted to see and make sense of it for ourselves. The “deluge,” then, is not just of images, but of words—words that reduce pictures to mere illustrations.
Kracauer’s study of “National Types” as depicted in Hollywood films (chapter 13) appeared in a number of different guises and was part of a 1949 UNESCO project exploring, and seeking to alleviate, “International Tensions.”32 In making linkages between recurrent cinematic motifs and unconscious attitudes of national audiences, his approach here echoes that of the (contemporaneous) Caligari study. Indeed, the essay partially fulfills Kracauer’s interest in redirecting the critical interpretive approach developed in relation to Weimar cinema toward popular Hollywood films. Such parallels are clear when, for example, he notes, “The audiences also determine the way these films picture foreigners. The subjective factor in any such image is more or less identical with the notions American public opinion entertains of the people portrayed.” Kracauer then proceeds to contrast the relatively wide and diverse representations of British characters—“American films offer a more complete cross-section of the English than they do of any other people”—emphasizing “British imperturbability, doggedness and, sportsmanship” with the much narrower portrayal of Russians, which, after a hiatus during the war years when negative depictions of allies would have been impolitic, revert to eccentric stereotypes of the “mad Russian” as postwar temperatures drop and the Cold War takes hold. Film here is not only a way of decoding popular sentiments and sensibilities, of deciphering latent public opinion and political attitudes, but also of assessing and evaluating the state and prevailing spirit of transcultural perceptions and international relations.
In this final section of our anthology we bring together a number of writings stemming from Kracauer’s work with various American government agencies and other organizations in the postwar period, most notably Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASRA), where he served as a research adviser on a part-time basis from 1951. Our selection of texts here, writings that provided repeated and unwelcome distraction from progress on the Theory of Film manuscript, focus on two main issues.
Firstly, this work was concerned with exploring the reach, efficacy, and proliferation of both American democratic and Soviet propaganda, especially along the newly established (indeed, still establishing) borders between Western and Eastern territories and spheres of influence. This particular topic was explored in two key ways. On the one hand, in relation to the success or otherwise of radio broadcasts (by the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe stations) in promulgating anti-Soviet messages in different countries and among diverse communities, classes, and other constituencies within those nation-states. In June 1952, for example, he completed a report entitled “The Voice and the BBC: A Comparison,” based on broadcasts to Greece, of September 1951. In this anthology we include the more wide-ranging “Appeals to the Near and Middle East: Implications of the Communications Studies Along the Soviet Periphery,” a summative report prepared in May 1952 for the International Information Administration (chapter 15).
On the other hand, Kracauer undertook research on the formation and articulation of attitudes among populations within the Soviet bloc itself, and in particular in Eastern Europe. Using interview data collected from some three hundred refugees from Hungary, Poland Czechoslovakia detained on the border and held temporarily in screening centers in Austria and elsewhere in central Europe (1951–1952), Kracauer and Paul L. Berkman’s 1956 “Satellite Mentality” was a substantial report identifying not only the various grievances and sources of hostility towards Soviet systems, conditions, and apparatchiks in these different countries, but also the aspirations and expectations of those who had fled them for a new life in the capitalist West. Published in Social Problems in 1955, the essay included here, “Attitudes Toward Various Communist Types in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia” (chapter 16), is a summation of this larger report and investigates the attitudes of non-Communists to their country’s Communist regime. It argues that the initial success of Communist propaganda in drawing people to the party quickly dissipated as the various promises made failed to materialize and the quality of daily life deteriorated. It also explores how the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe helped shape the perspectives of non-Communists toward their compatriots, toward the Soviet Union, and toward Western Europe and the United States.
Secondly, while it might be tempting to see Kracauer’s Cold War reports as responses to financial necessity, this would be to do them, and him, an injustice. These writings were at the same time part of a much wider methodological exploration under the auspices of the Bureau of Applied Research: the search to devise appropriate methods for the empirical investigation and qualitative analysis of mass media texts, images, and other such data. Such epistemological and methodological issues were concerns dating back to Kracauer’s early writings on sociology as a science, his ethnography of Berlin’s white-collar workers, his societal biography of the Second Empire, and his interpretive schemas for film analysis underpinning Caligari. The three essays included in this section are particularly relevant here, for they demonstrate Kracauer’s repeated attempt throughout the 1950s to elaborate a systematic qualitative communication research method, one that insists upon the need to move beyond the coding and counting techniques of conventional content analysis and recognize instead the critical role of situation and context in the hermeneutical interpretation of meaning. We include “Proposal for a Research Project Designed to Promote the Use of Qualitative Methods in the Social Sciences” (unpublished manuscript, 1950; chapter 17); “The Challenge of Qualitative Content Analysis” (Public Opinion Quarterly, 1953; chapter 18); and “On the Relation of Analysis to the Situational Factors in Case Studies” (unpublished manuscript, ca. 1958; chapter 19). Defending the virtues of qualitative techniques such as participant observation and in-depth interviews, these writings together constitute a critical response to the Columbia bureau’s tendency to focus on quantitative methods. It may indeed be significant how often particular words and phrases occur in a text or transcript, but for Kracauer any one-sided reliance or overemphasis on quantitative content analysis leads to a neglect of how language is used and how meaning itself is produced, reproduced, expressed, conveyed, understood, and subverted. For us today this is perhaps a salutary and timely reminder of the role of intense and critical reading and interpretation in an era fascinated by the potential of “big data” and the ubiquity of computer-generated infographics.
The final text of our anthology, “The Social Research Center on the Campus: Its Significance for the Social Sciences and Its Relations to the University and Society at Large” (ca. 1954; chapter 20), draws heavily on his experiences working as a research adviser at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University during the 1950s. This unpublished article was, as Kracauer writes, “intended as an inclusive and systematic contribution to the running controversy about the significance of organized social research in the university.” Although the pursuit of such research at established, continuously functioning university institutions was still a relatively recent phenomenon in the United States, some reflection upon the problems and internal debates that had been most persistent so far was warranted. But rather than carrying out an ambitious comparative study of these institutions, Kracauer focuses on the history of BASRA itself, which was a pioneer in the field of media and communications research and became a model for similar institutions at other universities. He looks, in particular, at three main areas of controversy: autonomous research, commissioned research, and the training of aspiring social scientists at these institutions. Although Kracauer clearly made an effort to adopt the scientific-objective style of writing common among the positivist-dominated social sciences in the United States, his own voice and his criticisms of such hegemonic views are also apparent throughout the text.
We are also including as appendices two texts that were not written by Kracauer, which will contribute to a better understanding of his substantial manuscript on “Totalitarian Propaganda.” The first is the Gutachten—that is, the brief assessment of Kracauer’s essay, which was written by Adorno in March 1938. As mentioned earlier, Kracauer had hoped to publish his essay in the Institute’s house journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. The chief editor of the journal and director of the Institute, Max Horkheimer, had asked Adorno to pen an evaluation of Kracauer’s essay. Adorno’s harsh critique of it in his Gutachten undoubtedly delivered the final blow to any possibility of publication in the Zeitschrift. The second text we are including is an article by John Abromeit that examines both Kracauer’s “Totalitarian Propaganda” study and Adorno’s evaluation of it. Abromeit’s article has several aims. It provides a section-by-section overview of Kracauer’s manuscript that will make its main contours and arguments familiar to a non-German-reading public; although we have translated and included in this volume two of the seven sections of the manuscript, the remaining five sections remain inaccessible to English speakers. Additionally, Abromeit argues that not all of Adorno’s criticisms of Kracauer’s essay were justified. In contrast to Adorno, who asserted a fundamental theoretical incompatibility between the Institute’s and Kracauer’s own analyses of fascism, Abromeit seeks to demonstrate how Kracauer’s essay complements and supplements the Critical Theorists’ writings on fascism, especially the work of Horkheimer and Erich Fromm from the 1930s, which Kracauer repeatedly cites in his essay. Finally, Abromeit makes a case for the ongoing relevance of both Kracauer’s and the early Frankfurt School’s sophisticated studies of fascism. Drawing on these studies and more recently theoretical and historical scholarship, he tries to show in particular why fascism should be seen as an extreme form of authoritarian, right-wing populism, and thus also how a careful study of historical fascism can still yield important insights into the less extreme—yet still deeply menacing—versions of authoritarian populism that have proliferated in Europe, the United States, and many other parts of the world in the past few decades.
In this anthology we bring together a diverse range of Kracauer’s texts spanning more than twenty years. We hope that these writings will shed light on how manifold forms, techniques, and roles of political propaganda and persuasive communication may be subject to critical scrutiny and intense interrogation. We hope that the insightfulness and importance of Kracauer’s writings on such themes will become evident and his contribution to Critical Theory as a vital and continuing critique of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and irrationality will be increasingly recognized. Above all, we hope that this anthology will be an encouragement to all to read and engage with Kracauer’s work in a critical and appreciative spirit, recognizing its enduring importance in the struggles of the present.
NOTES
1. Of particular significance for our work here is that the nine volumes of the German-language Werke issued by Suhrkamp Verlag now include vols. 9.1 and 9.2, “Early Writings from the Archive” (2004); and vol. 2.2, “Studies in Mass Media and Propaganda” (2012).
2. Most notably, Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings, ed. Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
3. See, for example, the publication by Suhrkamp in English of Kracauer’s second novel, Georg (2016).
4. Including, most important, the publication of Kracauer’s correspondence with Theodor W. Adorno, first by Suhrkamp in German (2008) and now by Polity in English translation (2020).
5. See, for example, Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke, eds., Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012); Johannes von Moltke, The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), very much a companion study for his edited collection with Kirsty Rawson, Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); and Harry Carver, Reluctant Skeptic: Siegfried Kracauer and the Crises of Weimar Culture (New York: Berghahn, 2017). See also Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). Kracauer’s work is the focus of many of the essays in The Detective of Modernity, ed. Georgia Giannakopoulou and Graeme Gilloch (London: Routledge, 2020), a collection dedicated to the sociologist David Frisby, a pioneering figure in the Anglophone reception of Kracauer’s Weimar studies. Gilloch’s Siegfried Kracauer: Our Companion in Misfortune (Cambridge: Polity, 2012) provides an overview of his principal writings.
6. Jörg Später’s magisterial Siegfried Kracauer: Eine Biographie was published by Suhrkamp in 2016 and is now available in an English translation by Daniel Steuer under the title Kracauer: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity, 2020).
7. As we will see, Kracauer’s friend and colleague Leo Löwenthal was also to write on this theme in a 1944 essay proposing an interesting shift in focus away from so-called “idols of production” to “idols of consumption”: Leo Löwenthal, “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” in Radio Research: 1942–1943, ed. Paul Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton (New York: Duell, Sloane & Pearce, 1944). See also Leo Löwenthal, “German Popular Biographies: Culture’s Bargain Counter,” in The Critical Spirit: Essays in Honor of Herbert Marcuse, ed. Kurt H. Wolff and Barrington Moore Jr. (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 267–83.
8. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. T. Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
9. Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans. Q. Hoare (New York: Verso, [1930] 1998), 88. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
10. Regarding the Offenbach book, see their exchange of letters during May 1937 in Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer: Correspondence, 1923–1966, ed. Wolfgang Schopf, trans. Susan Reynolds and Michael Winkler (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), 240–50.
11. Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time, trans. G. David and E. Mosbacher (New York: Zone, [1937] 2002), 24.
12. “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies” was a series of eight pieces published in the FZ in March 1927. See Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 291–304.
13. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1947] 2019), 5. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
14. These are: the “archaic” period (1895–1918); the immediate postwar era (1918–1924); the “stabilized period” (1924–1929); and the pre-Hitler years (1930–1933).
15. In his combination of showmanship, charlatanism, ruthlessness, and hypnotism, the figure of Dr. Caligari serves not only as the first in a series of onscreen tyrants, but also, as will see, embodies key characteristics of the totalitarian dictator examined in the “Totalitarian Propaganda” study.
16. For example, pacifist and antimilitarism films like G. W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 (1930); films critiquing authority like Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform (1931); and even some more radical films such as Slatan Dudow’s famous Kuhle Wampe (1930).
17. Kracauer notes the popularity of Luis Trenker’s war films, the glut of Napoleonic costume dramas, and a series of “Fridericus” films (homilies to Frederick the Great).
18. On the work of Institute affiliates for the U.S. government during World War II, see Barry M. Kātz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer, Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, ed. Raffaele Laudani (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
19. In Theory of Film, Kracauer suggests that Allied footage shot to document the extermination camps after their liberation may enable us to confront onscreen via the medium of film such horrors which we otherwise could not face.
20. See Hansen, Cinema and Experience.
21. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1960] 1997), 33. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
22. What Benjamin would famously term the “optical unconscious” in his 1936 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” essay.
23. These texts include, for example, Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (Palo Alto, CA: Pacific, [1949] 1970); Adorno’s own study of American Fascist agitators in the mid-1930s, The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, [1975] 2000); and, subsequently, The Authoritarian Personality (London: Verso, [1950] 2019). For one recent assessment of the relevance of these writings to contemporary forms of authoritarianism, see Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism, ed. Jeremiah Morelock (London: University of Westminster Press, 2018).
24. In the addendum to his 1936 exposé, “Masse und Propaganda,” he particularly emphasized that propaganda studies should also examine “the corresponding conditions in the great democracies (especially in America).”
25. For Kracauer’s rejection of Adorno’s edited version of the text and counterproposal, see their exchange of letters (August 20 and September 12, 1938) in Correspondence, 269–74.
26. Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
27. This was perhaps more the case with Adorno than Horkheimer. The former was eager to return because he saw his thought so inextricably bound up with the German language, and he believed he could have a greater impact in Germany. Horkheimer was hesitant. For example, he got the U.S. government to preserve his U.S. citizenship even after he returned to Germany. During his first visits to Frankfurt after the war, Horkheimer stayed in a hotel close to the train station, so he could leave very quickly if need be. Horkheimer was finally convinced only by the students who were eager to learn from him. His time in Germany after the war was often unpleasant, and he retired early in Switzerland after being subjected to anti-Semitic attacks from other professors in Frankfurt.
28. Adorno acknowledges this, even in his otherwise hostile report on Kracauer’s “Totalitarian Propaganda” study of 1938, and notes, “We are not overly blessed with contributions of such writerly quality” (see paragraph 5 of the Gutachten). Adorno’s appreciation of Kracauer’s power of expression were strictly limited to his German-language publications. He lamented the shift to English and tried without success to persuade Kracauer to write in German again. Writing in English was to rob oneself of one’s most precious insights, observations, and expressions, Adorno insisted, but to no avail. To his credit, Kracauer was unimpressed by such linguistic chauvinism.
29. See von Moltke and Rawson, eds., Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings, 2.
30. In 1952 he succeeded in becoming a staff member and then research director of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University. See Ingrid Belke and Irina Renz, Siegfried Kracauer, 1889–1966 (Marbach: Marbacher Magazin, 1988), 111.
31. He received funding from and became an adviser to both the Bollingen and Old Dominion Foundations, for example. He also received monies from the Chapelbrook Foundation.
32. Here, as published in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1949. Subsequently, a version under the amended title “How U.S. Films Portray Foreign Types: A Psychological View of British and Russians on Our Screens” appeared in Films in Review in March 1950.
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