Notes To Literature

For years Kracauer read the Critique of Pure Reason with me regularly on Saturday afternoons. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that I owe more to this reading than to my academic teachers. Exceptionally gifted as a pedagogue, Kracauer made Kant come alive for me. Under his guidance I experienced the work from the beginning not as mere epistemology, not as an analysis of the conditions of scientifically valid judgments, but as a kind of coded text from which the historical situation of spirit could be read, with the vague expectation that in doing so one could acquire something of truth itself. If in my later reading of traditional philosophical texts I was not so much impressed by their unity and systematic consistency as I was concerned with the play of forces at work under the surface of every closed doctrine and viewed the codified philosophies as force fields in each case, it was certainly Kracauer who impelled me to do so. As he presented it to me, Kant’s critical philosophy was not simply a system of transcendental idealism. Rather, he showed me how the objective-ontological and subjective-idealist moments warred within it, how the more eloquent passages in the work are the wounds this conflict has left in the theory. From a certain point of view, the fissures and flaws in a philosophy are more essential to it than the continuity of its meaning, which most philosophies emphasize of their own accord. Under the watchword ontology, interest in this, which Kracauer shared during the period around 1920, opposed epistemological subjectivism and its passion for system. At that time no clear distinction had been drawn between what was actually ontological in Kant and the traces of naive realism in him.

Without being able to account for it fully, through Kracauer I perceived for the first time the expressive moment in philosophy: putting into words the thoughts that come into one’s head. The opposite moment, the moment of rigor, of compelling objectivity in thought, took second place to it. For quite a while after I first encountered it in the practice of philosophy at the university it seemed academic to me, until I found out that among the tensions that are the lifeblood of philosophy the tension between expressiveness and rigor is perhaps the most central. Kracauer was fond of calling himself an alogical man. I am still conscious of how much this paradox impressed me in a man engaged in philosophy, someone who operated with concepts, judgments, and conclusions. But what pressed for philosophical expression in him was an almost boundless capacity for suffering: expression and suffering are intimately related. Kracauer’s relationship to truth was that suffering entered into the idea—which usually dissipates it—in undistorted, unmitigated form; suffering could be rediscovered in ideas from the past as well. The word Leiden, suffering, even made its way into the title of one of Kracauer’s first monographs. To me Kracauer seemed, although not at all sentimental, a man with no skin, as though everything external attacked his defenseless interior; as though he could defend himself only by giving voice to his vulnerability. He had had a difficult time in his childhood, in more than one regard; as a pupil in the Klinger Upper School he had also suffered anti-Semitism, something quite unusual in the commercial city of Frankfurt, and a sort of joylessness hovered over his own milieu, despite its humane scholarly tradition; this was probably the source of his later aversion to the architectural trade he had had to pursue. In retrospect it seems to me that, for all the friendliness I was shown, the catastrophe that befell his mother and her sister, who seemed to have an influence over him, in extreme old age had long been anticipated in the atmosphere of Kracauer’s home. Suffice it to say that Kracauer told the story of carrying, in a pitiful parody of the little red book in which the teachers recorded their marks, a similar book in which he graded his fellow students on their behavior toward him. With him, many things were reactive; philosophy was in no small measure a medium of self-assertion.

This is connected with the anti-systematic tendency in Kracauer’s thought and his aversion to idealism in the broadest sense of the term, something that never left him. For him idealism was a transfiguring form of thought, as in Georg Simmel’s dictum that it was amazing how little the sufferings of humankind could be seen in its philosophy. Philosophy had not been Kracauer’s major at the university, and the power of its great constructions, which easily degenerate into affirmation, Hegel in particular, remained alien to him. Kracauer’s work was so deeply stamped by this that at one point, around 1923, Benjamin called him an enemy of philosophy. His oeuvre is tinged with a kind of amateurish thinking on his feet, just as a certain slackness dampened self-criticism in favor of a playful pleasure in felicitous insights. Ideas that are too heavily defended against the danger of error are of course lost in any case, and the risks Kracauer ran are not without a certain sly cautiousness. Kracauer once gave as a motto for a tractatus a sentence by Nietzsche to the effect that an idea that is not dangerous is not worth thinking; it is only that the victim of this danger is more often the idea itself than its object. On the other hand, being an autodidact gave Kracauer some independence from routinized method. He was spared the fate of professional philosophy, the doom of being established as a department, a specialized discipline beyond the other specialized disciplines; accordingly, he was never intimidated by the line of demarcation between philosophy and sociology. The medium of his thought was experience. Not that of the empiricist and positivist schools, which distill experience itself down to its general principles and make a method out of it. He pursued intellectual experience as something individual, determined to think only what he could fill with substance, only what had become concretized for him about people and things. This established the tendency toward content in his thought, which contrasted with the firm neo-Kantian formalism of his youth. He followed Georg Simmel and Max Scheler, who were the first to oppose the official division of labor and link the philosophical interest with a social interest that had been in ill repute in philosophy at least since Hegel’s death. He knew both men well. Simmel, on whom he wrote, advised him to go completely over to philosophy. Not only did Simmel train Kracauer’s capacity to interpret specific objective phenomena in terms of the general structures that, according to this view, appeared in them; Kracauer was also indebted to Simmel for a style of thought and presentation that connects one element to another with a gentle carefulness, even where the movement of thought could dispense with many such intermediate parts, where the tempo could become quicker: thinking with the pencil in hand. Later, during his activities as an editor, this moment of carefulness protected Kracauer from journalism. It was hard for him to get rid of the circuitousness that always had to find everything for itself, even what was familiar, as though it were freshly discovered. Simmel’s influence on him lay more in the gesture of his thought than in any affinity with the irrationalist philosophy of life. He encountered phenomenology in Scheler before he encountered Husserlian phenomenology. His book Soziologie als Wissenschaft [Sociology as Science] (1922) is clearly concerned with connecting the material-sociological interest with epistemological reflections based on the phenomenological method. The latter accommodated his specific talents well. Although Kracauer as a youth wanted little to do with his métier, architecture, the primacy of the optical that architecture requires remained with him in sublimated form. There was no pompous intuitionism in his kind of intellectuality, but there was a lot of sober seeing. Kracauer thinks with an eye that is astonished almost to helplessness but then suddenly flashes into illumination. The oppressed may well become master of their sufferings with such a gaze. In a way that is difficult to articulate, his thinking was always more contemplation than thought, singularly intent on not letting anything that solid things had impressed upon him be wrangled away through explanation. His mistrust of speculation was fed not least of all by his temperament, which was all the more guarded when it came to illusion because it had weaned itself from illusion with so much difficulty. The program of Wesensschau, the intuition of essence, and especially the so-called “Bildchen-Phänomenologie,” the “phenomenology of little images,” seemed suited to the long-suffering gaze that refused to be dismissed, although in other respects Kracauer’s skepticism rejected Scheler’s claim to have grasped something simply and objectively valid immediately, without reflection. The phenomenology of that period held possibilities quite different from those that predominated after Scheler. It was inscribed on the body, as it were, of a newly emerged type of intellectual and his needs. The watchword Wesensschau presented itself as a cure for the experiencing consciousness’ growing incapacity to understand and penetrate a complex social reality that lay beneath a more and more closely woven veil of ideology. The physiognomy of that reality took the place of theory, which had become discredited. It was by no means a mere surrogate for the latter; it taught consciousness to assimilate something that easily escapes the person who thinks from the top down, and at the same time not to be put off with dull, heavy facts. Phenomenology was for those who wanted to be dazzled neither by ideology nor by the façade of something subject merely to empirical verification. Such impulses bore fruit in Kracauer as in few others.

Kracauer’s central theme—which precisely for this reason hardly ever becomes thematic in his work—is incommensurability, which, in the form of the relationship between idea and existence, is of perennial concern to philosophy. In his book on sociology this theme is manifested in the idea that once the specific existent has been eliminated one cannot return with continuity and without rupture to empirical reality from the highest abstract specifications to which that discipline rises. In all his works, Kracauer reminds us that thought, looking back, should not forget what it divested itself of in order to become idea. This motif is a materialist one; it led Kracauer, almost against his will, to social criticism, the spirit of which is urgently concerned with this kind of forgetting. At the same time, Kracauer’s aversion to unrestrained thought gets in the way of a consistent materialism. Just proportion always carries its own penalty, moderationism. In his political years in Berlin, Kracauer once mockingly called himself the derrière-garde of the avant-garde. It came neither to a break with the latter nor to an understanding. I remember a somewhat earlier and very wide-ranging conversation between us in which Kracauer, opposing me, was not willing to grant the concept of solidarity much significance. But the pure individuality to which he seemed to adhere so obstinately virtually unmasks itself in its self-reflection. In evading philosophy, the existential becomes clowning, not far removed from Brecht’s paradoxical line, “In mir habt ihr einen, auf den könnt ihr nicht bauen” [“In me you have someone you can’t count on”]. Kracauer projected his self-understanding of the individual onto Chaplin: Chaplin, he said, is a hole. What had taken over the place of existence there was the private individual as imago, the Socratic crank as the bearer of ideas, an irritant by the criteria of the prevailing universal. Kracauer sometimes explained his patri pris for the inexplicable residue—a constant in his extremely eventful development—as an aversion to anything uniform, anything that was 100% what it was. But that is simply his aversion to theory in the emphatic sense: theory must go to extremes in interpreting its objects if it is not to conflict with its own idea. In opposition to that, Kracauer stubbornly insisted on a moment that always evaporated in the idea stage for the German spirit of almost any orientation. In doing so, however, he renounced the task that his awareness of the nonidentity of the thing and its concept led him to the edge of: the task of extrapolating the idea from something refractory to it, extrapolating the general from the extreme of particularity. Dialectical thought never suited his temperament. He contented himself with the precise specification of the particular for use as an example of general matters. He hardly felt a need for strict mediation within the thing itself, the need to demonstrate the essential within the innermost core of particularity. In this he held, conservatively, to subsumptive logic [Umfangslogik]. He would have dismissed the idea of an intellectual splitting of the atom, an irrevocable break with phenomena, as speculative, and would have stubbornly taken Sancho Panza’s side. Under the aegis of its impenetrability, his thought lets reality, which it evokes and which it ought to penetrate, stand as it is. From there one can make the transition to its vindication as something inalterable. Correspondingly, the enthronement of a form of individual experience, however eccentric, that is comfortable with itself remains socially acceptable. However much it feels itself to be in opposition to society, the principium individuationis is society’s own principle. Thought that hesitates to venture beyond its own idiosyncratic form of response thereby binds itself to something contingent and glorifies it simply in order to avoid glorifying the great universal. But the individual’s spontaneous reaction is not an ultimate, nor, therefore, does it guarantee binding knowledge. Even responses that are ostensibly extremely individual are mediated by the objectivity they are reacting to and ought to take cognizance of this mediation for the sake of their own truth content. Just as there is a motivation behind any disinterestedness in something merely learned, that is, in the externals of scientific activity, so, conversely, thought needs detachment from the experiential sphere in which it is formed. There are sufficient reasons for Kracauer’s suspicions about theory as the arrogance of a reason that has forgotten its own quasi-natural quality. Not the least of these is the degree to which theory in its purity becomes a means of domination. The evil spell cast by ideas—and their success in the marketplace—is aided by their systematic articulation in terms of a deductive logic. The idea, however, that responds to this problem by evading theoretical consistency—the cogency every idea inherently claims—not only becomes impotent within reality: that alone would not constitute an objection to it. It sacrifices power and evidence internally as well. The conflict between experience and theory cannot be conclusively decided in favor of one side or the other but is truly an antinomy and must be played out in such a way that the contrary elements interpenetrate one another.

Kracauer did not swear by phenomenology any more than he did by any other intellectual position; he was most faithful to Simmel, with a kind of philosophical infidelity, a sort of overvigilant fear of intellectual obligations, as though they were literally debts. Kracauer’s reactive stance was quick to shift when he felt constrained. Almost all the many reviews he wrote during his lifetime, some of which are quite biting, represent Kracauer’s breaks with aspects of himself, or at least with impressions that overwhelmed him. In Hegelian terms, one could charge him—for all his openness, and precisely because of the stubbornness of his openness—with lacking freedom in his relation to the object. With Kracauer, in place of theory it is always Kracauer himself who is already present in the gaze that grips the subject matter and takes it in. The expressive moment attains primacy over the material with which experience is concerned. While Kracauer’s thought recoils from thought, it seldom attains self-forgetfulness. The subject, guarding his primary experience as though it were a possession, readily places himself in front of the object of his experience with the motto “anch’io sono pittore”—I too am a painter. He was continually casting barbs at others, even Scheler, about whom, despite their close personal relationship, he published an essay in the Frankfurter Zeitung that pinpointed, brusquely and sincerely, but without euphemisms, the arbitrary and therefore ideological character of the eternal values Scheler was promoting. It is not as though Kracauer preaches the individual as a norm or telos; his responses are too social for that. But his thinking holds fast to the idea that what ought to be thought cannot be thought; his thinking selects this negative idea as its substance. It is this, and not a true theological need, that bound him to Kierkegaard and existential philosophy, which he came close to in monographs like the unpublished one on the detective novel, the first chapter of which has now been published in Das Ornament der Masse. Long before Heidegger or Jaspers, he had planned an existentialist work, though he did not complete it, any more than one a few years later on the concept of man in Marx. It is not a bon mot but a simple observation to say that one of Kracauer’s most important achievements was letting these ambitious manuscripts lie, despite the fact that they would have been within his powers. He made productive use of his insistent reluctance to become the vassal of either his own theory or that of others. This man who was obsessed with the incommensurable found himself unwilling to violate his own motif by reducing incommensurability to a philosophy. Shrewdly, he recognized that although it may have fed into his doctrine, Marx’s idea of man is degraded to something static and the tenor of his dialectic missed if one gives that idea a positive grounding in the nature of human beings instead of letting it be illuminated critically through the conditions that have been blighted by human beings and must be altered by them. Kracauer did not expound his existentialist ideas directly, any more than he did his social ideas. He expounded them only indirectly, preferably in the representation of apocryphal phenomena like the detective novel, which he treated as historicophilosophical allegories. This was more than literary caprice. It may have been apparent from the beginning to his materially oriented mode of thought that the so-called great intellectual ideas and ontological structures do not exist in themselves, beyond and independent of the material strata, but instead are inextricably interwoven with the latter; this is what permitted his reception of Walter Benjamin. He directed a very readable polemic, also reprinted in Ornament, against Martin Buber, in whom he encountered existentialism in the flesh, where he pointed out the restorationism inherent in Bible translation, a prototype of today’s jargon of authenticity. The polemic is based on the insight that theology cannot be restored by sheer will simply because it would be good to have a theology; that would tie theology itself to something internal to human beings, something theology claims to transcend.

Given the tenor of such criticism, Kracauer’s emphatic turn to sociology was not a break with his philosophical intentions but rather a consequence of them. The more blindly he immersed himself in the materials his experience brought him, the more fruitful the result. Thus it was he who really discovered film as a social fact. He did not inquire directly into its effects; his flair may have warned him against specifying these effects. They cannot be reduced to individual visits to the movies, perhaps not even to a multiplicity of such visits, but only to the totality of the impulses that were, at least before television, most pronounced in film. Kracauer decoded film itself as ideology. His unstated hypothesis would be objectionable by the rules of an empirical social research that in the meantime has become highly technically developed, but it remains completely plausible even today: namely, that when a medium desired and consumed by the masses transmits an ideology that is internally consistent and cohesive, this ideology is presumably adapting to the needs of the consumers as much as, conversely, it is progressively shaping them. For Kracauer, plucking the leaves of the ideology of film amounted to describing the phenomenology of a new stage of objective spirit in the process of formation. This approach was demonstrated for the first time in the series “Die kleinen Ladenmädchen gehen ins Kino” [“The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies”], which caused a sensation in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Kracauer’s interest in the mass psychology of film, however, was never merely critical. He himself had something of the moviegoer’s naive delight in viewing; he found an aspect of his own mode of response even in the little shopgirls who amused him. For this reason if no other, his relationship to the mass media was never as harsh as his reflections on their effects would have led one to expect. His predilection for lower-order things, things excluded by higher culture—something on which he and Ernst Bloch were in agreement—led him to continue to take delight in the annual fair and the hurdy-gurdy even after large-scale industrial planning had long since swallowed them up. In From Caligari to Hitler he recounts film plots in all seriousness, without batting an eyelash; and recently, in his Theory of Film, he narrates such atrocities as the visible genesis of a piece of music in the composer, the hero, as though something like the technical rationality of the medium were at work in them. The commercial film Kracauer attacked profited inadvertently from his tolerance; at times the latter reaches its limit at the intolerant—the experimental film.

In criticism of the asystematic experience Kracauer’s sociology offers, strict sociological empiricism tells us that the connection between that allegedly objective spirit and the actual consciousness of the masses, which is supposed to have been precipitated in that spirit, has not been proven, and we must concede that there is something in the criticism. In most countries of the world, for instance, the so-called gutter press hawks extreme right-wing political contraband alongside its sensations without having had much influence on the millions of readers in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Such objections, however, tend to be almost in complicity with film as a commodity, and in general with everything that keeps itself free of suspicion by being labeled “the mass media.” The latter go free because one cannot strictly prove the kind of disaster they create. Analysis of what they offer shows at the least that they could hardly create anything but disaster. It would be more advisable to try to refine the analysis of stimuli that Kracauer inaugurated, for which the name “content analysis” has been adopted, and to take it beyond the original thesis of ideological wish-fulfillment, than to persist in a study of the effects, which all too easily misses the concrete content of that which creates the effects, the relationship to the proffered ideology. Kracauer’s stance toward sociological empiricism is ambivalent. On the one hand, he sympathizes with it, in the sense that he has reservations about social theory; on the other, judging by the criterion of his conception of experience, he has emphatic reservations about a method that pinpoints and quantifies. After living in America for many years, Kracauer expounded on this in a penetrating theoretical defense of qualitative analysis. His analysis acquires its true value only when one knows what a challenge it presents to the almost universal practice of academic sociology in the United States. Kracauer’s experiential stance remained that of the foreigner, transposed into the realm of spirit. He thinks as though he had transformed the childhood trauma of problematic membership into a mode of vision for which everything appears as it would on a journey, and even what is gray and familiar becomes a colorful object of amazement. This independence of the conventional outer shell has itself since been conventionalized, in the Brechtian term Verfremdung, alienation; in Kracauer it was original. Intellectually, as it were, Kracauer dresses up in a sport jacket and cap. There are overtones of this in the subtitle of his book on the white-collar worker, Aus dem neuesten Deutschland [From the Newest Germany]. What is intended is humanness not through identification but through its absence; the act of keeping oneself outside as a medium of knowledge.

In that book Kracauer became fully emancipated as a sociologist. His method there has much in common with what in the United States is called the method of participant observation, as used by the Lynds in Middletown, for instance. Kracauer was most certainly unfamiliar with their work in 1930. In his book on the white-collar worker he made extensive use of interviews but did not employ standardized questionnaires; instead, he adapted flexibly to the conversational situation. The ostensible rigor and objectivity of one’s findings is often purchased at the cost of a loss of concreteness and essential insight; throughout his life, Kracauer tried in his planned but unsystematic way to balance the demand for empiricism with the requirement that the result be meaningful. This constitutes the particular merit of the book, which is once again accessible, thanks to the Verlag für Demoscopie associated with the Allensbach Institute. With more sophistication than contemporary academic scholarship, Kracauer diagnosed what he called the culture of the white collar worker. He described it in the Berlin Vaterlandshaus, for instance, the prototype of the synthetically produced consciousness of that new middle class that was not a middle class. Since then that style has spread across the integrated society of the industrialized nations. Words like “homogeneous middle-class society” and “consumer society” neutralize its untruth. In its essential ingredients it continues to resemble what Kracauer observed in the white-collar workers of 1930. Economically proletarianized, fervently bourgeois in their ideology, they contributed a sizable contingent to the mass basis of fascism. As though under laboratory conditions, Kracauer’s book on the white-collar worker provides an anticipatory ontology of a consciousness that has been seamlessly integrated into the total system only in its most recent phase. The book is weakened, to be sure, by the ironic tone it takes. After the horrors that consciousness helped to bring into the world, Kracauer’s tone sounds guileless and at the same time a little arrogant, the price of his antagonism to a theory which, if pursued rigorously, would extinguish one’s laughter. Of course Kracauer knew that the spirit at which he was pointing the finger had been aroused, provoked and reproduced according to plan in its bearers; it neither was, nor is, their own spontaneous spirit. But by failing, for whatever reason, to discuss that, and directing himself to immediate contact with those manipulated by mass culture rather than to the system as a totality, Kracauer does occasionally seem to place the responsibility for it on them. Even this displacement has a moment of legitimacy: outrage at the fact that countless human beings who ought to know better and at bottom do know better nevertheless abandoned themselves passionately to false consciousness. How far Kracauer dared to venture in his book on the white-collar worker is most evident in his critique of the rationality of the technological rationalization that condemned the white-collar worker to unemployment: “Capitalism does not rationalize too much but too little. The thinking it carries with it resists its completion in a reason that would speak from the ground [Grund] of the human being.”1 Kracauer’s talk of the “ground of the human being,” a phrase that has since become disreputable, is excused by the fact that what he means by it is reason, which such talk usually defames. His dégout, however, is directed against the signature of the whole era: that human beings are not simply deceived by ideology but rather obey the Latin saying and want to be deceived; and the more painful it would be to face the situation squarely the stubborner their desire to be deceived. Furthermore, Kracauer did not limit his critique of ideology to the sphere of the masses. He also practiced it in areas where the more elevated claims of the cultured bourgeoisie lived on but had degenerated unnoticed to a form of trash that takes itself for the opposite. He was the first to bring out the sinister implications of the fad for biography.

I consider Kracauer’s most significant achievement to be a work that, paradoxically, itself occupies the no-man’s-land between novel and biography, Ginster [Heather], first published in 1928. The title, after a plant that, as Kracauer, following Ringelnatz, once said, blooms on the railway embankments, took the place of the author’s name; it was supposed to have been written “by himself,” anonymously, not pseudonymously. The aesthetic subject is not sharply distinguished from the empirical person. In form and definition, even the narrative form becomes subject to Kracauer’s irony. Ginster is not a blind, autarchic work of art; the atheoretical element in it is theoretical. It represents the indissoluble element that Kracauer preaches, if you like; in a manner extremely rare in Germany, and for which Lichtenberg is virtually the only model here, the book represents a new manifestation of a venerable Enlightenment genre, the roman philosophique. Kracauer called Ginster an intellectual Schweyk. The book, which has suffered little from the passage of time, becomes productive by not representing the knot of individuality affirmatively, as something substantial. Through aesthetic reflection, the subject is itself relativized. A refined silliness that poses as non-understanding when in fact it does not understand, is the mirror image of absolute individuation. Ginster cunningly tames the reality he inhabits, just as strutting celebrities shrivel up in front of him. A naiveté that understands and describes itself as a technique for living is no longer naive. It transcends itself to become the theory at which it thumbs its nose. The possibility of something unmediatedly human is demonstrated and negated at one and the same time. Ginster provides fundamental proof that freedom and positivity cannot be posited as such today; otherwise the idiosyncratic moment in Kracauer would inevitably become mania. In the revised edition Kracauer wisely omitted the last chapter of the original, which flirts with this kind of positivity. The book’s language is on a par with its conception. With its unquenchable delight in taking metaphors literally, giving them autonomy à la Eulenspiegel, and coaxing them into a second-order arabesque-like reality, it sends roots far into modernism. It is a terrible shame that in his most mature years, under the compulsion to write English but probably also out of revulsion over what had happened, Kracauer became ascetic with regard to his own verbal art, which is inseparable from the German language.

To do justice to what Kracauer, or many other exiles, produced after 1933 means to speak more plainly about the situation of the emigré intellectuals than is usually done in Germany, without wanting to impugn gratitude for asylum by doing so. Currency regulations and special taxes forced the intellectuals literally to emigrate as beggars. The Nazis’ idea that this would keep those they hated from being viewed with favor in the places they found refuge was not far wrong. The fact that some nations accepted only those who had useful practical skills says something about even those that did without this kind of barbed-wire fence. If he had not established his qualifications in scholarly circles through so-called positive achievements or at least come from a place in the university hierarchy, the intellectual felt superfluous wherever he went. Probably the compulsion to fit in was worse than in earlier emigrations. In the most important countries of refuge the social net was very tight and thought control all too rigorous. The threat of unemployment made potential competitors unwelcome. Emigrants who had no friends in solidarity with them had to capitulate in order to live. In the economic domain everything proceeds on course, in accordance with the bourgeois rules of supply and demand. That these rules should extend to the spirit, and the spirit ultimately be absorbed by the functional complex, is one of the fixed consequences of the system, but it also stands in irreconcilable contradiction to the principle of spirit itself, which is not meant to be absorbed into the reproduction of life and which by creating awareness of what exists outlines, negatively, a possible Other. When spirit complies with a logic that is suspended only in the fortunate exceptional case, it negates itself by doing so; for spirit, more drastically than elsewhere, the primacy of the relations of production fetters the forces of production. I will never forget the occasion when, during the first months of emigration, a famous German sociologist who has since died encouraged me as I mangled the English language during a discussion: in the Anglo-Saxon countries, he said jokingly, I should never try to express more than what I had just stammered out. Although I did not follow his advice, it nonetheless kept me from feeling superior to the others. There is all the less cause for indignation in that what those who are spared the test so readily characterize as lack of character contains for its part a moment of bourgeois respectability, the determination not to live on alms but to earn one’s living on one’s own. But strength is necessary for cynicism, for a two-sided production in which one retains one’s intellectual integrity while writing commercial books on the side, a strength that is clearly not granted to just anyone, any more than any musician has yet been able to compose avant-garde music and earn money with popular hits, one right after the other. Brecht’s pleas for consideration should be extended to this set of issues.

The American government was superior to that of many European nations during the Hitler era in that it granted all emigrants the possibility of working and did not reduce any of them to the permanent status of welfare recipients. Conversely, the burden of conformity, which weighed upon the natives as well, was especially harsh. Intellectual immigrants who were already successful were enthusiastic advocates of that conformity. Adjustment became again the norm it had been in the early development of most of them, internalized by all those who would hardly have been able to cope with their external and internal difficulties other than through the psychological mechanism Anna Freud called identification with the aggressor. One cannot get an intellectual transfer, one person who had made the adjustment once triumphantly said of this unfortunate situation. Bringing back after the fall of Hitler precisely those emigrés whose quality consisted in something that was not directly interchangeable and convertible would have served as a corrective to this. A few universities did indeed do so, like the University of Frankfurt, or, more decisively than any hitherto, Adolf Arndt in his capacity as Kultursenator in Berlin. This did not generally occur, however. That this kind of reparation for the damaged intellectual life was not made is irresponsible not only to the victims but especially to what likes to present itself as representing the best interests of Germany. The good a man like Kracauer could have done in a trendsetting position, as Kulturpolitiker, someone who deals with the politics of culture, for a large paper, for instance, cannot be overestimated. It is enough to recall how Kracauer defined Heidegger’s language with the German proverb, “Die Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft, die mit Eifer sucht was Leiden schafft.”* Kracauer’s stubborn refusal to let the wool be pulled over his eyes would have been a salutary antidote to the synthetic atmosphere of Germany’s resurrected culture. Immune to the techniques of domination that in Germany are so readily equated with greatness and have made the very concept of greatness deadly, he opposed both Brecht and Heidegger. A large part of the responsibility for the illusory and affirmative, in the bad sense, aspects of the current objective spirit is borne by the vacuum created by the absence of the emigré intelligentsia. The guilt is intensified by those who would like to make the exiles responsible for the fall of the Weimar Republic because they recognized it as it was occurring. The catastrophe of the fascist dictatorship has consequences that extend beyond the fate of those who were murdered, although that consequence makes reflection on others impossible. One might well ask, in a variation on the Kabbalistic saying, whether the country that drove its Jews out did not lose as much as the Jews did.

No one should read Kracauer’s Offenbach, which was reissued in Germany under the title Pariser Leben [Parisian Life], or From Caligari to Hitler without bearing that in mind, and there ought not to be the slightest bit of patronizing mixed in. With a Kracauerian wink, the Offenbach falls into the genre of literary biography of which Kracauer had presented a ruthless x-ray image; at the same time, it hopes to rise above the pseudo-individualization of such products through the idea of “social biography.” The social problematic of the Second Empire, to which the great operetta was a response, was to be revealed. The book’s limitations are to be found in the abstinence its author had to practice with regard to Offenbach’s music.—The Caligari book, rich in detailed technical analyses, develops, revealingly enough, the history of German film after the First World War as the history of the developing ideology of totalitarian power. This tendency was by no means limited to the German film, of course; it may have culminated in the American film King Kong, which was truly an allegory of the unrestrained and regressive monster into which the public sphere developed—to say nothing of the rehabilitation of Ivan the Terrible and other monsters in Stalinist Russia. But there is a truth to be learned from the very thing that on the surface seems debatable in Kracauer’s thesis, namely, that the dynamic that exploded in the horror of the Third Reich extended down into the winding-shafts of society as a whole and for that reason was reflected in the ideology even of nations which were spared the political catastrophe. A general social factor is readily mistaken for the sole responsible factor when one has experienced it; even Hölderlin’s invective against the Germans was in actuality a denunciation of the deformation of human beings through the ubiquitous bourgeois form of the division of labor.—Kracauer gradually turned back to the things that had originally inspired him—to film, whose constituents he set about distilling theoretically, and finally, in an ambitious project, to the philosophy of history.