Under this heading, we collect together here a rather diverse range of texts penned by Kracauer toward the end of the 1940s, including a couple of essays intended as magazine articles, a report produced under the auspices of a wider UNESCO project, and a number of book reviews published in some leading newspapers and journals. These texts constitute a series of reflections upon the condition and tendencies of mass media and their audiences in postwar America. The heterogeneity of the materials themselves, and of the publication outlets in particular, is highly suggestive of Kracauer’s precarious financial and intellectual position in postwar New York, as he sought to establish himself as a regular freelance writer for particular journals and newspapers and secure long-term positions as a researcher attached to different organizations and institutions in the wake of the publication of From Caligari to Hitler in 1947. Together these writings show a sustained concern with critically identifying and exploring the relationships between different forms of popular media, emerging consumer culture, and their reception and perception by American audiences in the context of what Adorno and Horkheimer would term “the culture industry” in their famous study Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947).
We begin with two reviews from 1948 published in the New York Times Book Review, exploring recent contributions to understanding propaganda and prospects of denazification measures then being undertaken by the Allied authorities as part of ongoing German postwar reconstruction. Kracauer provides a brief account of Marshall Knappen’s own advocacy of a “soft program” of German reeducation undertaken by churches and community groups on the ground and the difficulties that hampered such work in the light of the proposed Morgenthau Plan. For Knappen, deindustrialization and the dismantling of a modern national economy would run counter to the fundamental and necessary processes for denazification and the creation of new liberal democratic Germany. While praising the book as “an honest piece of American self-criticism,” Kracauer remained unconvinced by Knappen’s optimism that economic growth enabled by the Marshall Plan—the option eventually chosen—would necessarily guarantee new political attitudes in Germany. It is noteworthy in this context of reconstruction of postwar Germany that the Kracauers themselves never returned to live in Germany despite the acute problems, economic and otherwise, that confronted them in America, whereas Adorno and Horkheimer were back in Frankfurt as early as 1949 to reestablish the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt as part of the reeducation, reconstitution, and rehabilitation of Germany after the trauma of the Third Reich. Kracauer was not a part of this reeducation program; he and Elizabeth became American citizens instead.
Six months later, Kracauer reviewed the book Public Opinion and Propaganda, a study by the notable Yale psychologist Leonard W. Doob (1909–2000), who would publish his famous article “Goebbels’ Principles of Propaganda” in 1950. While Doob’s book is written, not surprisingly, from a psychological perspective, Kracauer is nonetheless enthusiastic about the book’s scope and its attention not only to the makeup of individual personality but also to the formation of public opinion and the specifics of different types of media, such as press, radio, and film. While providing an “anatomy of propaganda” in terms of its techniques, Doob engages with a set of questions that are also close to Kracauer’s own long-standing interest—for example, “How are people made to perceive propaganda, to respond to it, and eventually to follow its suggestions?” As we have already seen, the complex relationship between propaganda messages, forms of media, and the receptivity of audiences as a mass is central to Kracauer’s thesis regarding the impact and efficacy of totalitarian propaganda. Kracauer’s description of Doob as a “skeptical humanist” is perhaps also a self-characterization.
“Popular Advertisement” is rather a puzzling text. Originally intended for publication in the leading journal Commentary, in which Kracauer’s work had previously appeared, this essay was never published in his lifetime. Moreover, while the date given for the text is January 15, 1949, the actual advertisement for “waterproof coffins” (!) with which Kracauer begins his reflection is dated as first appearing in 1957.1 What is most striking, however, is that it seems to be his only direct engagement with American advertising in the course of his American writings. There are earlier examples and references to commercial adverts in his newspaper writings for the FZ during the Weimar era. Indeed, this blurring of news and publicity opens his 1927 photography essay, when one particular member of the Tiller Girls dance troupe smilingly welcomes the attention of what today we would describe as the paparazzi. Kracauer’s reflection on advertising clearly resonates with the notion of the culture industry and anticipates Marcuse’s vision of a “one-dimensional” America published some fifteen years later. Kracauer highlights three key themes: “conformity,” “youthfulness,” and “the happy consciousness.” Just as totalitarian propaganda both produces and relies upon some notion of a homogeneous mass, the disappearance of the autonomous subject and the uniqueness and idiosyncrasy of genuine individual personality, so the advertising industry in postwar American advertising produces images and narratives marked by “insistence on conformity”: “They aim at eliminating social diverseness and unconventional characters; and they ruthlessly regiment taste and manner down to the smallest detail.” The use of “popular” is key here: whereas Horkheimer and Adorno wish to retain a critical moment in the term, as a reference to genuine critical impulses in folk and other cultural manifestations of and for the people, in contradistinction to the concept of “mass culture,” Kracauer seems to use the term “popular” here with respect to a normative and normalizing set of expectations and social and psychological compulsions. We all crave to be popular, and to be popular is to be the same. To be the same is to share the taste and values of the multitude of others. To be popular is to be no different. Otherness is stigmatized and eradicated. And this popularity is about being young. Advertising is geared toward a fantasy of youthfulness (especially for those who are no longer youthful!) and identifies the young themselves (that new emerging category of teenager) as a particular target consumer group. Popular also means to be happy. The products and services that are promoted through advertising provide compensation for a life of boredom, repetition, and meaninglessness. The vacuity of our dispirited and disenchanted times is to be filled by the “joy and glamour” of fashion and consumption. Kracauer’s essay on advertising is an early critique of consumer capitalism in the American context. Massification, youthful bodies, imaginary compensations for lives bereft of meaning—the principles of the contemporary advertisement are not so far from those undergirding techniques of propaganda. Kracauer’s conclusions though are less pessimistic: the very dreamlike quality of the advertisements’ images and delusions may yet come to have a critical edge when confronted with real-world, everyday experiences that fail to match up to these visions of harmony and happiness. Dreams can be also made to question that which is. Psychoanalytically speaking, dreams are, after all, the manifestations of what the world does not yet permit. Walter Benjamin and the Surrealists were, of course, among the first to see modern commodity culture as bound up with dreamlike experiences and anticipations. Kracauer suggests that those who are looking to sell us dreams, even the American dream, might be playing with fire: the consequences of peddling dreams may not be the ones that the advertising industry and capitalist culture have in mind.
Coauthored with the journalist Joseph Lyford, Kracauer’s essay “A Duck Crosses Main Street” reflects upon the fragmented style of contemporary American newsreels and the disparate incidents they deem newsworthy, such as the eponymous foolhardy fowl. In a manner which recalls the start of Kracauer’s “Below the Surface” screenplay, the text opens with an American citizen heading home from work, but instead of boarding the subway train and encountering the various characters created for the test film project, he misses his connection and instead seeks comfort at a movie theater to kill time waiting for the next train home. Kracauer proceeds to give an impression of the montage of disconnected news items with which he is confronted in the darkness of auditorium. Kracauer thereby reinforces the key point made in his earlier study of Nazi newsreels: how totalitarian propaganda seeks to bind otherwise disconnected and diverse images and episodes into a totality through the use of music and narration in order to tell a single story. The quick-fire montage of random incidents, in which the serious, catastrophic, sordid, sensational, comic, and quirky are all treated with the same indifference, is designed for those seeking mild distraction while they wait. The American newsreels place few demands on its audience, not even the need to concentrate on what is shown. When “A Duck Crosses Main Street” is news, the newsreel itself has lost any pretense at informing and educating its viewers about the contemporary social, economic, and political situation. News has become mere novelty, banal entertainment for the masses. For Kracauer, newsreels seem able to offer only a miniature “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) of fascist propaganda or the consumerist spectacle of fashion and frivolity.
The proliferation of popular advertising and the eclectic assemblage of moving images in the newsreels contribute to and constitute part of the current “deluge of pictures”—the title Kracauer adopts for his 1950 review of Lancelot Hogben’s extensive overview of the history of visual representation, From Cave Painting to Comic Strip. In a passage highly reminiscent of his 1927 photography essay, Kracauer critically contrasts the meaningfulness of memory images to the meaninglessness of photographic images, and he laments the blinding consequences of the veritable blaze of images:
Now pictures surround and besiege us. Through television, they silence our thoughts in that last and now insecure refuge of introspection, the bar; we cannot pick up a printed piece of paper without being faced with an image. We are flooded with sights and spectacles—not with the originals, not with the sights and spectacles of nature, but with an intemperate outpouring of reproductions. Nature provides man with one spectacle at a time to which both intelligence and heart can respond; but man now provides himself with a mechanical, kaleidoscopic flurry of endlessly succeeding images. Instead of seeing clearly, he is almost blinded.2
Hogben’s book, nevertheless, sees positive potential in this multiplicity of visual material in the modern world. Pictures encapsulate the possibility of language that transcends national differences, a kind of optical Esperanto for communication and mutual understanding between different linguistic communities. Kracauer himself will be drawn to the ideas and possibilities of what we would now term intercultural dialogue or transcultural communication in work he was to undertake at the behest of Department of Social Sciences at UNESCO. But he was unconvinced by Hogben’s wide-eyed enthusiasm for the potential of images. Kracauer saw little prospect of popular cartoons, for example, being anything more than relatively trivial phenomena. Indiscriminate and uncritical, “The Deluge of Pictures” is more likely to overwhelm us with crass and crude stereotypes than to create and circulate genuine and nuanced portraits of others.
Developed from his 1949 “International Tensions” report for UNESCO, Kracauer’s study “How U.S. Films Portray Foreign Types: A Psychological View of British and Russians on Our Screen,” is a clear example of his penchant for the cinematic medium and his advocacy of its critical potential in reconceptualizing and reframing attitudes and perceptions with respect to individuals and collectives of other nations. While the films he refers to in this study are themselves (with one or two exceptions) now obscure, if not wholly forgotten, there are some interesting points, we suggest, that emerge from Kracauer’s discussion. For instance, his study emphasizes the importance of audience perceptions, predispositions, and prejudices—what we might gather under the term “susceptibility.” Echoing his earlier work on Weimar film in his recently published Caligari book, Kracauer focuses on our need to understand particular forms and patterns of audience receptivity to images and messages. For communications to be effective, Kracauer proposes, they must attune themselves and at least partially coincide with existing and well-established notions. In other words, radically new or discrepant messages, or film images radically at odds with preconceived ideas, are apt to fall flat and fail to engage audiences. To have the desired impact, film images always need to meet their spectators halfway. Propaganda does not work in a vacuum, and it cannot ignore the vagaries and contingences of context, history, and what Kracauer later refers to as the “total situation.”
In the case of English and Russian characters and characterization—the twin foci of Kracauer’s studies—prevailing ground reception are characterized by notions of an in- and an out-group, respectively. Relative familiarity with the English (e.g., in terms of long-standing common cultural traits, heritage, sympathy, and languages) ensure and enable American films to present a wide range of national and social types including but also extending well beyond the typical figure of the eccentric aristocratic snob. To be sure, the English are stereotyped in Hollywood films, but there is a multiplicity of guises and classes on display. Kracauer argues that this plethora of types enables a more diverse and hence representative set of “portraits” to emerge, which have some degree of verisimilitude. By contrast, Kracauer notes, Russian characters are far less common and diverse with only the mad Russian appearing as a recurrent figure. As an out-group, Kracauer contends, the images of Russians are cruder caricatures. Members of out-groups appear as unsophisticated stereotypes, as the audience’s level of familiarity and its expectations are much lower. Kracauer concludes that the less familiar a group is to typical audiences, the more important prevailing political interests are in their depiction: Russian stereotypes changed in accordance with fluctuating U.S.-Soviet relations. Hostility in the 1930s gave way to more positive images in the 1940s, which then returned to negative and antagonistic images in the postwar period. Two points emerge from this analysis. First, the more familiar populations are to their audience, the more difficult to stigmatize them in terms of, for example, class, ethnicity, and nationality; propaganda works best against out-groups. Second, film images—in this case in Hollywood productions, but in principle in any national cinema—may be seen as a kind of index or barometer of political relations between different countries. Films and film characters serve as a means of critically reading fluctuating international political relations and tensions.
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