In this section, we consider Kracauer’s writings dating from his arrival in American exile in April 1941 to the publication of his retrospective social-psychological study of German film during the years of Weimar Republic, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), the major work that was so central in enabling Kracauer to obtain the requisite visas for leaving occupied France. All of these writings in some way orbit around the Caligari book, in which so many of his ideas come to fruition, and especially the attempt to interweave the study of particular images and their resonance with the inner workings of (certain) minds. Nevertheless, we can divide these texts into two main categories. First, there are those that examine specific propaganda techniques and motifs, as well as audience psychologies in relation to Nazi newsreels. These studies were seen as a direct contribution to the American war effort and to work combatting the spread of National Socialist ideas. Second, there are those that are concerned with studying American audiences for the important purposes of identifying, understanding and countering fascist mentalities and anti-Semitism in the United States itself—“the enemy within,” so to speak. Most significantly, there are various drafts, sketches, and fragments pertaining to Kracauer’s proposed test film project, a social-psychological investigation using film as an experimental device to expose latent anti-Semitism and other racist tendencies using selected American students as subjects. Although Kracauer himself drafted several versions of the screenplay of the film, it was never made, and the project came to naught. These various documents have never been published before in the original English.
Kracauer’s research projects at this time on propaganda in general, and on the medium of newsreels in particular, were conceived against the background of his ongoing research on the Caligari project. Some of these studies first materialized in the United States with help from members of the faculty of the New School for Social Research, such as Alvin Johnson, Hans Speier, and Ernst Kris, as well as the director of the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, Iris Barry. Kracauer’s first American publication, the review article “Hollywood, the Movie Colony—The Movie Makers by Leo C. Rosten,” appeared in Social Research in 1942, a journal edited and published by the Graduate Faculty of the New School. The first tangible outcome in relation to German propaganda was a pamphlet, Propaganda and the Nazi War Film, issued in 1942 by the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, which explores two feature-length campaign films—Feuertaufe (Baptism of Fire, 1940) and Sieg im Westen (Victory in the West, 1941)—both of them largely composed of newsreel footage. The study emphasizes three key points regarding the efficacy of German war newsreels: they had to show the actual footage of events themselves and not simulations or reconstruction; these newsreels were extended in length (up to forty minutes); and they were subject to rapid distribution so that the scenes depicted were fresh from the frontline. Later this brochure was incorporated as a supplement into From Caligari to Hitler in 1947 (hence we omit it from our selection).
Working in the field of cultural sociology and communication studies in America in the 1940s, Kris and Speier, among other émigré scholars, were themselves extensively engaged with quantitative analyses of German media and political communications. Kris’s work on German radio propaganda was highly influential in the early stages of media and propaganda research.1 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, in particular, 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 particular role in the transformation of the masses. Kracauer’s second study of Nazi newsreels, “The Conquest of Europe on the Screen: The Nazi Newsreel, 1939–1940,” was originally produced for the Experimental Division of the Study of Wartime Communication in 1943. It was published in an abbreviated version in a 1943 issue of Social Research, which included a major article by Hans Herm, “Goebbels’ Conception of Propaganda,” and Speier’s “Nazi Propaganda and its Decline.”
Kracauer’s short report contains some fascinating insights, including notions that figure prominently later in his theory of film. One reads, for example, that “film surpasses other arts in that it reflects the visible world, to an extent hitherto unknown. Everyday life, with its infinitesimal movements, its multitude of transitory actions, could be disclosed now there on the screen.” Moreover, he notes how early German cinema presented pictures featuring “the city street as the place where the ‘man of the crowd’ perceives the kaleidoscopic configurations of everyday life; they are full of house facades, window dressings, strangely lit rooms and physiognomic details.” The unique capacity of film for the redemption of physical reality is anticipated here—perhaps not surprisingly, since such ideas, as Miriam Hansen notes, had already been formulated in Kracauer’s Marseilles notebooks as he was waiting to escape from occupied France.2 As for the newsreels themselves, Kracauer emphasizes that their power derives from a number of key features. For one thing, they are able to construct the sense of a single unified narrative through the use of image sequences, which seem to merge into each other and stand in stark contrast, Kracauer suggests, to the plethora of heterogeneous episodes characteristic of contemporary American newsreels (a point later reiterated in his article “A Duck Crosses Main Street”; see part 3 in this volume). Additionally, Kracauer notes that the Nazi newsreels—grounded in the techniques, practices and skills perfected by German cinema during the Weimar years—give much greater emphasis to the images themselves rather than to the commentary and subtitles. Kracauer argues that images can speak for themselves to a much greater degree. This is important because they stimulate an emotional response from the audience. Propaganda does not rely on an appeal to reason and intellect; instead, it manipulates emotions and presents images in the form of an integrated totality. The spare commentary of German newsreels is far more effective than the verbosity of their American and British counterparts, which are distinguished by a deluge of words. Kracauer also notes the key role of music in the newsreels—not just Wagnerian symphonic music with its leitmotifs, but also popular songs and familiar melodies, prompting nostalgia, sympathy, and identification. The cinematic qualities of German newsreels are truly different from other forms of screen propaganda, especially that of the Allies. The clever use of intercutting, the presentation of dramatic landscapes and seascapes, and an overall emphasis on movement and dynamism all contribute to what Kracauer sees as an aestheticization of war—a clear echo of Benjamin’s notion of the aestheticization of politics with which he concludes in his famous 1936 “Work of Art” essay.3 Finally, Kracauer highlights how Nazi newsreels succeed in contrasting the figure of the Führer, as a solitary and distinct individual, to the mass into which the individual has been wholly dissolved. The mass itself becomes a motif in the form of an adoring crowd, victorious soldiers, flag-waving parades; the image of the mass itself becomes an ornament. This theme of the remote leader as an auratic figure—in Benjamin’s sense, of maintaining a distance no matter how close it may be—is developed in Kracauer’s article “The Hitler Image,” which was published in 1944 in the New Republic. Here, Kracauer comments upon the way Nazi newsreels present the Führer as a quasi-mythical being, a kind of savior who heals the sick; as an artistic genius, who turns his marvel Olympia into a living being; as the “lord of hosts” directing his generals; and as a great leader, who is the object of adoring crowds. Kracauer suggests that, amid such sycophantic representation, attempts “to humanize the idol” by placing him among weeping children or next to a faithful warhorse, prove less than successful. Hitler is much more at home when pictured with dutiful soldiers—the cannon fodder of the Wehrmacht.
So far in this volume, we have been concerned with Kracauer’s writings on totalitarianism, propaganda, and the masses. The materials pertaining to Kracauer’s “Below the Surface” project are of a different kind. Kracauer’s interest here is not so much in communication techniques, particular ideologies, or forms of persuasion, but rather in the development of a social-psychological experiment to test the susceptibility of America itself—that is, a liberal democratic capitalist society—to authoritarianism and anti-Semitism. Kracauer’s beloved medium of film was not to be the object of the analysis; instead, it became a methodological tool used to investigate deep-seated and latent psychological predispositions, tendencies, and prejudices. The project came into being in the context of the Studies in Prejudice program—a collaboration that started in the late 1930s between the Scientific Research Department of the American Jewish Committee and the members of the Institute for Social Research, who, like Kracauer, found themselves in exile in New York. The possibility of using film as a tool of empirical social research, by depicting an incident and then using a series of questionnaires to tease out audiences’ responses, seems to have originated with Horkheimer as early as 1941.4 The involvement of Kracauer, newly arrived in America, remains unclear in this initial stage. The project was resumed in 1945 when Kracauer engaged in a flurry of communications with Horkheimer and Adorno in Los Angeles, and with Lowenthal and others in New York. The first version of the screenplay for the twenty-minute film was proposed under the title “The Accident.” The second version bore the title “Below the Surface,” or “Below the Surface, Final Version,” and was produced by Kracauer. There is also another version of the script in which some of characters involved are named for the first time. The project was dogged by competing suggestions and countersuggestions as to precisely which questions should be asked in the follow-up to the film screening. More seriously, the issue remained of who would make the film, and how exactly it would be funded; indeed, these were to prove fatal to the project as a whole. “Below the Surface” sank, but not without a trace. The documentation of the project was strewn between different archives, including those of Kracauer himself and Max Horkheimer, until it was eventually published in German translation.5 We are publishing here a variety of documents relating to this failed enterprise for the first time in their original language.6
Although many of the details of “Below the Surface” remain unclear, the general intention is nonetheless evident. The film was to be shown to small groups of students drawn from American colleges, and then their responses to events on-screen were to form a data set in which levels and degrees of prejudice could be measured and established. In a manner that would probably fail our current ethical standards for research methodology, the student test subjects were supposed to remain ignorant of the purpose and design of the experiment itself. The film events themselves were intended to provide sufficient distraction and diversion to disguise its principle intention. In accordance with his long-standing emphasis upon methodological digression, Kracauer was at pains to emphasize that genuine attitudes could only be captured if the experimental subjects themselves were unaware of, or unable to second-guess, the experimental goals. The screenplay itself went through various changes, and, most importantly, it was decided that different variants of the film be shown in which the accused person would be Jewish or African American or white American white-collar workers—the latter as a kind of control variant. The action is as follows: on an overcrowded evening subway train taking commuters home from their workplaces in the city, a woman encumbered by a large vacuum cleaner falls through the rear door of the carriage but is saved by safety chains. Emergency brakes kick in, and the train stops in the tunnel. An argument breaks out among various passengers (an array of types) when the vicious accusation is made that the woman did not fall but was pushed, her assailant being Jewish, African American, or white. Passengers take a side, and the tensions rise. It is probably at this point that the film would have been paused, the questionnaires distributed, and the views of student subjects elicited. Would they share the prejudicial views—anti-Semitic, racist—of the lead accuser, the clubfoot peddler? Or would they see through such malicious allegations as the expression of bigotry and hatred? Once such data had been collected, the conclusion to the film could be shown. Now recovered from her ordeal, and unharmed by her near-death experience (the vacuum cleaner is completely destroyed!), the woman is able to refute the spurious allegations that have been made: she just tripped and fell. No one is to blame. Calm returns, and the train moves off. The End.
“Below the Surface” will probably not strike the reader today as a particularly subtle or sophisticated social-psychological experiment. Various characters involved in the events are certainly rather crude stereotypes, serving essentially as mouthpieces for different ideological positions. As we have made clear in our previous discussion of the screenplay, what one sees in this film is a veritable rogues gallery of figures embodying particular preoccupations of Critical Theory: the linkage of forms of ignorance and irrationalism; bourgeois prejudices that lie just below the surface in everyday life; working-class solidarity with the marginalized; and the spinelessness and supine attitude of (American) intellectuals. But if the plotting and characters are rather crude, nonetheless Kracauer’s test film project remains of interest for us because its pioneering attempt to utilize the medium of film in social scientific research looks to get below the surface of public opinion and reveal the American unconscious. It is a fascinating example of Kracauer seeking, as Wiggershaus puts it, to “combine European ideas and American methods”—or, more precisely, to develop a new critical empirical research method as a key component of Critical Theory.7
NOTES
1. Ernst Kris and Hans Speier (and associates), German Radio Propaganda: Report on Home Broadcasts During the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944).
2. Kracauer was part of the larger émigré community in Marseilles at this time, which was memorably depicted in Anna Seghers’s 1944 novel, Transit, and—more recently and more allegorically—in Christian Petzhold’s 2018 film, Transit, which was based on Seghers’s novel.
3. Kracauer attributes the camera’s continual concern with figures in motion—especially columns of soldiers, military vehicles of all kinds, aircraft, and shipping—to pleasures of movement itself inculcated into German youth by such organizations such as the Wandervögel and other hiking groups. A more likely reason for the emphasis upon the speed and movement of troops, we suggest, would be as a contrast to the stasis and immobility that characterized trench war experiences of 1914–1918.
4. It is worth noting that the Institute would use a different version of this method in the Group Experiment (Gruppenexperiment): the first major empirical study it conducted after reestablishing itself in Frankfurt in 1949. This study analyzed West Germans’ attitudes about recent historical events and current political topics, such as World War II, the Holocaust, and American occupation. In this study, the subjects’ responses were provoked not by a film, but by a fabricated “stimulus letter” that was supposedly written by an American military officer, who was skeptical about Germans’ willingness to accept responsibility for the recent past. As with the film “The Accident,” the stimulus letter was used to expose attitudes that lay below the surface and would not be revealed by standard questionnaire or interviews methods. See Friedrich Pollock and Theodor Adorno, Group Experiment and Other Writings: The Frankfurt School on Public Opinion in Postwar Germany, ed. and trans. Andrew J. Perrin and Jeffrey K. Olick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
5. “Projekt eines Testfilmes,” in Siegfried Kracauer, Werke, vol. 2.2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2012), 470–99.
6. For a more detailed account of the history and themes of this ill-fated project, see Graeme Gilloch and Jaeho Kang, “ ‘Below the Surface’: Siegfried Kracauer’s ‘Test Film’ Project,” New Formations, no. 61 (2007): 149–60; and Graeme Gilloch, Siegfried Kracauer: Our Companion in Misfortune (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 146–52.
7. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 410.