In this section we bring together some key writings stemming principally from Kracauer’s ongoing work with American governmental agencies and other organizations in the 1950s, in particular the Bureau of Applied Research at Columbia University, where Kracauer became a part-time research advisor in 1951. These diverse texts exemplify Kracauer’s approach to the analysis of international political communication with respect to three particular and pressing issues: 1), the critical analysis and evaluation of Communist propaganda in terms of its proliferation and efficacy both within the Soviet bloc itself and along its margins; 2), a consideration of the prospects and possibilities of the “democratic” propaganda promulgated by America and the West in response; and 3), the search for appropriate and optimal methods for the empirical investigation and qualitative analysis of mass media images and texts.
Kracauer’s own attitude to these studies in political communications is certainly complex and equivocal. On the one hand, they clearly exhibit a degree of continuity with the earlier writings from the 1940s addressed in the previous section and thus may be considered as an extension of his genuine and abiding preoccupation with the critique of authoritarian regimes. On the other hand, as Kracauer himself makes clear on a number of occasions in his correspondence, he considered these studies a mere Brotarbeit—that is to say, as driven by monetary rather than intellectual interests, and, accordingly, experienced as irritations and distractions impeding progress on his real critical focus, the book of film aesthetics that would appear in 1960 under the title Theory of Film. However much Kracauer perceived them as compromised, in our view these texts nonetheless provided him with an opportunity to develop certain critical ideas in English. For us, there is a great deal going on between the lines of these texts, and the critical reader should resist simple, superficial understandings of their contents. There is much of theoretical interest below the surface.
From 1950 onward, Leo Löwenthal and Paul Lazarsfeld played a decisive role in the development of Kracauer’s communication research. In 1950, Löwenthal, then-director of the Evaluation Staff of the International Broadcasting Service (Voice of America) at the U.S. Department of State, offered Kracauer a post as research analyst. On November 2, 1951, Lazarsfeld wrote to Löwenthal, asking him “to form and chair a sub-committee on communications research in the international field.” As a guest editor and chairman of the Committee on International Communications Research of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), Löwenthal invited Kracauer to contribute to the special issue of International Communication Research for Public Opinion Quarterly, the issue that included the seminal essays of Lazarsfeld and Harold Lasswell in the field of political communication. In 1951, Kracauer was appointed as a part-time research advisor of the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) at Columbia University (founded by Paul Lazarsfeld in 1944). Throughout the 1950s, Kracauer tried to develop empirical studies of international communications and propaganda and to organize related research programs, characterizing his role with a certain degree of irony, if not cynicism, as a “roving consultant.”
At this point, it is worth recalling how Lazarsfeld earlier ended his collegial relationship with Adorno, to help us understand the direction of Kracauer’s study of communication research in an attempt to develop a critical theory of political communication. In a response to an article by Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), Lazarsfeld wrote “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communication Research” in the journal of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science in 1941. Here, Lazarsfeld strongly recommended that Critical Theory be included in American communication studies along with his own style of research, which he termed “administrative communication research.” The term refers to the way he envisaged the relationship between empirical research in the service of government and mass media institutions and his effort to “build a pluralist bridge to critical scholarship.” In a move to inject critical thinking into empirical research, Lazarsfeld invited Adorno to join the Princeton Radio Research Project, but, as widely known, their collaboration ended in failure.1 In 1951, Lazarsfeld invited Kracauer to the bureau, based on a similar motivation but with tempered enthusiasm, which is understandable given his bitter experience with the members of the Institute.
In this section, we include two exemplary instances of Kracauer’s work for the BASR, in each case summarizing more extensive research programs. The first of these is a document from May 1952 marked “restricted” for the International Information Administration’s (IIA) program in the Near and Middle East, entitled “Appeals to the Near and Middle East: Implications of the Communications Studies Along the Soviet Periphery.” This text summarizes a series of earlier documents and reports that collectively explored various dimensions and specific national and regional case studies of then-contemporary propaganda practices and possibilities with particular reference to Voice of America radio. The second, “Attitudes Toward Various Communist Types in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia,” is an overview written in 1955 of a substantial empirical study entitled Satellite Mentality, coauthored by Kracauer with the psychologist Paul L. Berkman, which explores the perceptions of recent refugees from Eastern Europe, as contained in transcripts documenting some three hundred interviews conducted in 1951–1952 with exiles from Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. In investigating the attitudes of non-Communists to their country’s political regimes and social and economic systems, Kracauer and Berkman draw attention to the way Communist propaganda quickly dissipated once the promises of the party failed to materialize and the quality of the daily life became ever more impoverished. Importantly, the authors highlight the nuanced and highly differentiated set of categorization and attitudes held by refugees toward Communist Party members, depending upon reasons for affiliation, ideological enthusiasm, and life situations. Far from decrying party members as mere fanatics or functionaries, the interviewees demonstrate a sympathetic appreciation of varied motives and exigencies at work in these Soviet-dominated societies. Kracauer and Berkman also explore how the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe helped shape the perspectives of non-Communists toward their compatriots, and toward the Soviet Union, Western Europe, and the United States. Because these perspectives were frequently unrealistic and even utopian in character, they could become a potential source for future disenchantment; for example, when in due course these refugees came to discover that Western capitalism was not a workers’ paradise of economic bounty, unrestrained liberty, and unalloyed justice for all.
At first sight, these two reports suggest that Kracauer was now extending his wartime work to interrogating forms of totalitarianism and the possibilities of individual and collective resistance, and gearing his labors explicitly to the U.S. Cold War effort. It is legitimate to ask whether in doing so Kracauer, as a recently inducted U.S. citizen, rather uncritically embraces its ideologies and values. And so one reads, for example, in the 1952 summary, sentences such as following: “Contrary to what they [Arab populations] believe, America does not sustain the status quo but is actually the driving power behind an effort to improve conditions and illiteracy”; and “Israel stands a fair chance of developing into a ferment for social and economic progress in the Middle East.” One is left to wonder if these comments genuinely express Kracauer’s own views. There are other possibilities, of course. He may well be writing with a degree of a bad faith for the purposes of appeasing the bureaucrats and functionaries in the state department for whose attention they were intended. Restricted documents do not have to be, indeed should not be considered as, the proper vehicle for the presentation of personal, idiosyncratic views and values. Kracauer would certainly not welcome their circulation among his Critical Theory colleagues at the Institute. There is another possibility: that Kracauer is being ironic, or that in eulogizing the United States he is in some way contrasting its lofty self-perceptions with the far less rosy reality of 1950s American political and economic life. Utopian categories and conceptions become a form of critique of existing conditions. Kracauer himself suggests the manifold meanings of words and phrases in the course of his methodological writings, so the reader of Kracauer’s texts would be well advised not to assume that Kracauer is merely endorsing American values and ways of life in any simplistic manner.
It is clear from these two reports that Kracauer did have some insights into incipient political issues that have remained with us in an intensified and exacerbated form right up to today. These include the problem of Palestine as the determining factor of contemporary American and Arab relations, as well as acute anxieties over American expansionism and imperialism. They also include critiques not only of American political, economic, and social hegemony, but also of American culture. Its superficiality, sexualization, triviality, banality, and vulgarity as a way of life appeared as anathema to those who sought to preserve other forms of culture conceived as authenticity, historical tradition, and profound faith. Kracauer is not unaware of the ironies and contradictions here. While America is frequently lauded as a land of equality and opportunity, and an enviable standard of material comfort, as the very epitome of progressive, tolerant, and liberal modern society, it is also castigated for its shallowness and vacuity. Then as now, it seems that the world loves and loathes American cultural products in equal measure, something many Americans themselves still struggle to understand.
The use of what today would be deemed Orientalist language, in terms of both particular tropes and overall tone, should on no account go unmentioned. It deserves particular comment, not to excuse it by some complacent appeal to historical context but rather because Kracauer himself, always so attentive to the use of language, was perhaps not wholly unaware of it. In the lengthy 1954 paper “The Social Research Center on the Campus: Its Significance for the Social Sciences and Its Relations to the University and Society at Large,” one finds the following reflection in relation to work on the “Satellite Mentality” study: “It is well-nigh inevitable that scientists and researchers should be affected from within and without by the powerful stereotypes that shape public opinion in the area of politics” (see page 375, this volume). Academic works themselves, even critical studies, are not so privileged as to be exempt from the danger of recycling the very clichés they purport to unmask and challenge. Our attention is drawn here to the inescapably ideological character of language itself and, importantly, to the figure of the intellectual who stands not outside or above the conditions of everyday life and concerns of wider communities, but is rather immersed in and imbued by them just like everyone else. Without wishing to overstate the case, one might suggest that for Kracauer the Critical Theorist imagined here is not the trailblazer leading the way for others to follow, but, rather, always and only with us, one of us, our loyal companion in misfortune.2
It is also worth noting that, although Kracauer’s focus is primarily on radio broadcasts (in particular, the Voice of America), his discussion does include other forms of media and interpersonal communication as well. Film is not ignored in Kracauer’s writing on the IIA paper on the Near and Middle East. Once again, he emphasizes the importance of receptivity to communications with respect to existing predispositions of audiences and spectators. Moreover, this emphasis reflects his “Below the Surface” project more than his Caligari book. Kracauer is at pains to emphasize that the messages are most effective when they are veiled or partially concealed. Three interesting observations result from this. Firstly, the more explicit propaganda is, the less effective it will be (propaganda conceived as such is not just useless but actively counterproductive). Secondly, feature films with a strong narrative enabling emotional attachment between audiences and characters are far more powerful than documentary films with their didacticism and direct advocacy. Finally, Kracauer underscores the importance of indirectness as a technique and method; digression is the surest way to achieve intended goals. In contemporary parlance, soft power needs to be soft if it wants to be powerful.
As outlined above, it should be clear that Kracauer’s work on communications in the early 1950s was not lacking reflexivity; it explicitly analyzed different methods of communication, including the role of language, and how best to understand the functioning of the realm of ideas, opinions, and discourses. In short, epistemological and methodological issues were at the forefront of his thinking in undertaking these empirical social-scientific analyses and evaluations. This should come as no surprise, since Kracauer had long been concerned with such questions; for example, in his early writings on sociology as a “science,” his “ethnography” of Berlin’s white-collar workers, his study of “mass ornament,” the societal biography of Jacques Offenbach, and also in the interpretive scheme underpinning From Caligari to Hitler.
In the early 1950s, Kracauer’s ongoing concern with method is evident in his critical response to the BASR’s one-sided focus on quantitative methods, which leads him to defend the virtues of qualitative techniques such as participant observation and in-depth interviews. Three essays particularly relevant to this issue are reproduced here: “Proposal for a Research Project Designed to Promote the Use of Qualitative Methods in the Social Sciences” (unpublished manuscript, 1950); “The Challenge of Qualitative Content Analysis” (Public Opinion Quarterly, 1953); and “On the Relation of Analysis to the Situational Factors in Case Studies” (unpublished manuscript, ca. 1958). In his “Proposal for a Research Project,” Kracauer points to the limitations of content analysis as a method for the critical analysis of textual materials, questioning the usefulness of, for instance, simply coding and then counting the frequency of a particular word or phrase in a political speech or radio broadcast. Insisting upon the importance of contextual and situated hermeneutical readings to capture the actual sense and full significance of language use, he suggests the value of a study identifying and exploring the mutual benefits that would accrue such qualitative and quantitative approaches when used in tandem. For Kracauer, overreliance or overemphasis on quantitative content analysis leads to a neglect of qualitative research in communication research. According to Kracauer, quantitative analysis can, at best, disclose issues in a “roundabout way,” but it often leads to “over-fine” categorizations and oversimplifications. Highlighting the complementary relation of the two methods, Kracauer identified some exemplary instances of the fruitful combination of quantitative and qualitative methods in communication research: Leo Löwenthal’s “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” Rudolf Arnheim’s “World of the Daytime Serial,” and the essays in Paul Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton’s edited book Radio Research, 1942–1943.
In 1958, he completed a twenty-six-page memorandum, “On the Relation of Analysis to the Situational Factors in Case Studies.” In October 1960, Kracauer sent it to Adorno under his private pseudonym, Friedel. While thoroughly reviewing the diverse research perspectives on case studies, Kracauer criticized the overemphasis on “psychology” and dismissed the hope for generality in a case study as merely “an illusion.” Kracauer also gave a critical assessment of the Institute’s project The Authoritarian Personality. In his view, the project should have related their “personality syndrome” to “situational factors”—that is, the historical and national contexts in which it was conducted.3 Defending his earlier empirical work as well as Löwenthal’s study of biographies in popular magazines, he foregrounded the significance of the sociological dimension of the case studies to formulate the situational factors.4 According to Jay, Adorno’s response was to label Kracauer’s research method as “anti-idealist and ultimately anti-philosophical” in an article he wrote in commemoration of Kracauer’s seventy-fifth birthday.5 Adorno was probably partly right when he attributed Kracauer’s fundamental theoretical debt to Georg Simmel’s sociological impressionism. Like Simmel, Kracauer was less an abstract philosopher than a critical sociologist of urban culture, who preferred experiencing the complexities of modern culture as concrete surface phenomena to theoretically generalizing it.
Our final text, the report “The Social Research Center on the Campus” (1954), examines “organized research” in social science research centers, or “social laboratories,” taking the work of the BASR at Columbia as a paradigmatic case study. In distinguishing between three overlapping areas of activity—“autonomous research,” “commissioned research,” and research “training”—Kracauer provides a series of interesting and insightful reflections upon, among others, three key thematic foci of relevance for our anthology: communications and opinion formation, politics and political behavior, and methodology in the social sciences. While the various analyses of mass media discussed here concentrate on radio and radio audiences (including Kracauer’s own Voice of America writings) there is also reference to studies of advertising and marketing, and the fundamental role of “opinion leaders” (akin to what Pierre Bourdieu would later term “cultural intermediaries”): “Interpersonal relations,” Kracauer writes, “play a much larger role in decision making than mass communications proper.” In a felicitous anticipation of the language of social media today, he speaks of the need to “locate relevant ‘influentials’ in four areas … marketing, movie preferences, fashions and political affairs.” Given his own intellectual marginal status and financial precarity, the institutional and professional ethical juggling of research led by genuine scholarly passions and that driven by commercial interests thematized under the rubric of “professional integrity” in this study was, of course, something that preoccupied Kracauer throughout his American exile and is acutely relevant for universities and academics today.
NOTES
1. On the Princeton Radio Research Project, and the Institute’s relationship to Lazarsfeld and the Bureau of Applied Social Research more generally, see Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 86–94; and David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 47–104.
2. Kracauer himself wryly observes: “Even atomic physicists have come to realize that they are not only scientists but also citizens and that in consequence they owe allegiance to two ethical codes which might easily conflict with each other” (“The Social Research Center on the Campus,” 375).
3. In an unpublished commentary on The Authoritarian Personality, which Adorno penned in 1948, he essentially agreed with Kracauer’s criticisms here, pointing out that the predominantly social-psychological methodology of the study would need to be supplemented by a more sociohistorical approach, in order to fully grasp the persistence of authoritarianism in modern capitalist societies. This text has recently been published: Theodor Adorno, “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” in T. W. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. J. Levinson, and R. N. Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Verso, 2019), xli–lxvi.
4. For more details about Löwenthal’s work on popular biographies, see note 7 in the general introduction to this volume. In his memoir, Löwenthal reveals that “On the Relation of Analysis to the Situational Factors in Case Studies” was written at the suggestion of the research mangers at the BASR, but the essay “criticized their research enterprise as lacking a historical or truly political foundation.” Despite his willingness to stay close to “sociological empirical research,” Löwenthal adds, Kracauer’s message in this essay explicitly shows that “you have to watch out that you don’t do research in a vacuum but in a concrete political and cultural context.” Leo Löwenthal, “As I Remember Friedel,” no. 54 (Fall 1991): 13.
5. T. W. Adorno, “The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer,” New German Critique, no. 54 (Fall 1991): 159–77; Martin Jay, “Adorno and Kracauer: Notes on a Troubled Friendship,” in Permanent Exiles (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 232.