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Photography and Representation in Kracauer, Brecht and Benjamin1 CH008.qxd 4/16/08 10:47 AM Page 115 Steve Giles Photography and Representation in Kracauer, Brecht and Benjamin1 The debate about the nature and purpose of representation in photography and other art forms which took place in Germany from the 1920s onwards was part of a larger discussion which began with the opposed positions of Realism and Symbolism and was continued in a slightly altered form in the work of the Russian Formalists and Futurists and the German Expressionists. This essay sketches out that debate and its antecedents with special reference to Kracauer, Brecht and Benjamin. In the process it sheds par- ticular light on the Brechtian notion of Verfremdung and on the intellectual relation- ship between Brecht and Benjamin. 1 One of the most striking aspects of Thomas Levin’s recent translation of Siegfried Kracauer’s Weimar essays is its inclusion of photographic material from the 1920s and early 1930s which typifies the “new photography” associ- ated with the Neue Sachlichkeit movement.2 Disappointingly perhaps, Kracauer’s 1927 essay on photography, published in the Frankfurter Zeitung some four months after Das Ornament der Masse, does not present us with a systematic, dialectical critique of this “new photography” and its functions in the culture of distraction.3 However, it does embody certain modernist discursive presuppo- sitions that invite explication. These presuppositions offer an intriguing paral- lel with two other Marxist aesthetic theorists who were exercized by problems 1 This crucial contextualization of Brecht is an abridged and pointed version of Steve Giles: Limits of the Visible: Kracauer’s Photographic Dystopia. In: Counter-Cultures in Germany and Central Europe. From Sturm und Drang to Baader-Meinhof. Ed. by Steve Giles and Maike Oergel. Berne: Lang 2003. Pp. 213–239. 2 Siegfried Kracauer: The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays. Ed. and trans. by Thomas Levin. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press 1995. On the “new photography”, see: Germany – The New Photography 1927–33. Ed. by David Mellor. London: Arts Council of Great Britain 1978, and Hans G. Vierhuff: Die Neue Sachlichkeit. Malerei und Fotografie. Köln: Dumont 1980. 3 Siegfried Kracauer: Die Photographie. In: Siegfried Kracauer: Schriften. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1990. Vol. 5.2: Aufsätze (1927–1931) Pp. 83–98. Referenced henceforth in main text as Die Photographie. Unlike Das Ornament der Masse (in: Ibid. pp. 57–67), Die Photographie has generally not received detailed and sustained critical attention, notwithstanding the major upsurge in Kracauer schol- arship since his centenary year of 1989. The only exception is Inka Mülder: Siegfried CH008.qxd 4/16/08 10:47 AM Page 116 116 of photographic representation after modernism, namely Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. A careful exploration of them therefore will not only help to situate Brecht’s aesthetic theory within the context of its time. It will also pro- vide some much-needed historical background to the notion of Verfremdung. And it will offer a chance to touch briefly on one concrete outcome of the intel- lectual companionship between Brecht and Benjamin. 2 By the early 1920s – in Western Europe and the USA, at any rate – there had developed two clearly articulated but polarized discourses on photography, namely the documentary and the fetishistic, the scientific and the magical, which betray their roots in the aesthetic theories of the 1880s and 1890s.4 On the one hand, we have the photographer as witness, producing images of reportage which ostensibly provide empirically verified and verifiable information. On the other hand, we find the photographer as seer, using imagination to tran- scend empirical reality and express inner truths. In other words, artistic dis- courses on photography in the early years of the twentieth century were dominated by Realism/Naturalism and Romanticism/Symbolism. With the emergence of Cubism, however, both of these positions were undercut. Instead of being con- strued as a mediator of a prior or pre-existing reality, whether external or inter- nal, the visible surface of the painting came to be seen as an autonomous entity in its own right. The dispute between Realism/Naturalism and Romanticism/ Kracauer – Grenzgänger zwischen Theorie und Literatur. Seine frühen Schriften 1913–1933. Stuttgart: Metzler 1985. Pp. 72–77 and 96–101, which does not engage with the aesthetic presuppositions that underpin Die Photographie. Brief discussions may also be found in Dagmar Barnouw: Critical Realism. History, Photography, and the Work of Siegfried Kracauer. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1994. Pp. 27, 29–30 and 60–62; David Frisby: Fragments of Modernity. Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin. Cambridge: Polity 1985. Pp. 127 and 153–155; Miriam Hansen: Decentric Perspectives. Kracauer’s Early Writings on Film and Mass Culture. In: New German Critique 54 (1991). Pp. 54–55; Thomas Levin: Introduction. In: Kracauer: Weimar Essays (n. 2). Pp. 21–22; Inka Mülder-Bach: Der Umschlag der Negativität. Zur Verschränkung von Phänomenologie, Geschichtsphilosophie und Filmästhetik in Siegfried Kracauers Metaphorik der “Oberfläche”. In: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 61 (1987). Pp. 370–373; Johanna Rosenberg: Nachwort. In: Siegfried Kracauer: Der verbotene Blick. Beobachtungen – Analysen – Kritiken. Leipzig: Reclam 1992. Pp. 361 and 363; Heide Schlüpmann: Phenomenology of Film: On Siegfried Kracauer’s Writings of the 1920s. In: New German Critique 40 (1987). Pp. 102–105. 4 See Allan Sekula: On the Invention of Photographic Meaning. In: Thinking Photography. Ed. by Victor Burgin. London: Macmillan 1982. Pp. 84–109. On the rather different approaches to photography in the Soviet Union, see Simon Watney: Making Strange: The Shattered Mirror. In: Ibid. pp. 154–176..
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