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Craver, Reluctant Skeptic: Siegfried Kracauer and the Crises of Weimar

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Craver, Reluctant Skeptic: Siegfried Kracauer and the Crises of Weimar RELUCTANT SKEPTIC SPEKTRUM: Publications of the German Studies Association Series Editor: David M. Luebke, University of Oregon Published under the auspices of the German Studies Association, Spektrum offers current perspectives on culture, society, and political life in the German-speaking lands of central Europe—Austria, Switzerland, and the Federal Republic—from the late Middle Ages to the present day. Its titles and themes reflect the composi- tion of the GSA and the work of its members within and across the disciplines to which they belong—literary criticism, history, cultural studies, political science, and anthropology. Volume 1 Volume 8 The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered Mixed Matches: Edited by Jason Philip Coy, Benjamin Transgressive Unions in Germany from the Marschke, and David Warren Sabean Reformation to the Enlightenment Edited by David Luebke and Mary Volume 2 Lindemann Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s Volume 9 Edited by Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, Kinship, Community, and Self: and Kristin McGuire Essays in Honor of David Warren Sabean Edited by Jason Coy, Benjamin Marschke, Jared Poley, and Claudia Verhoeven Volume 3 Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Volume 10 Early Modern Germany The Emperor’s Old Clothes: Edited by David M. Luebke, Jared Poley, Constitutional History and the Symbolic Daniel C. Ryan, and David Warren Sabean Language of the Holy Roman Empire Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger Volume 4 Translated by Thomas Dunlap Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe Volume 11 Edited by Marc Silberman, Karen E. Till, and The Devil’s Riches: Janet Ward A Modern History of Greed Jared Poley Volume 5 After The History of Sexuality:German Volume 12 Genealogies with and Beyond Foucault The Total Work of Art: Edited by Scott Spector, Helmut Puff, and Foundations, Articulations, Inspirations Dagmar Herzog Edited by David Imhoof, Margaret Eleanor Menninger, and Anthony J. Steinhoff Volume 6 Volume 13 Becoming East German: Socialist Structures Migrations in the German Lands, 1500–2000 and Sensibilities after Hitler Edited by Jason Coy, Jared Poley, and Edited by Mary Fulbrook and Andrew I. Port Alexander Schunka Volume 7 Volume 14 Beyond Alterity: Reluctant Skeptic: Siegfried Kracauer and the German Encounters with Modern East Asia Crises of Weimar Culture Edited by Qinna Shen and Martin Rosenstock Harry T. Craver Reluctant Skeptic Siegfried Kracauer and the Crises of Weimar Culture 12 HARRY T. CRAVER berghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com Published in 2017 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2017 Harry T. Craver All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Craver, Harry T., author. Title: Reluctant skeptic : Siegfried Kracauer and the crises of Weimar culture / Harry T. Craver. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2017. | Series: Spektrum : Publications of the German Studies Association ; volume 14 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016053297 (print) | LCCN 2016058090 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785334580 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781785334597 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Kracauer, Siegfried, 1889–1966—Criticism and interpretation. | Germany—Intellectual life—20th century. Classification: LCC PT2621.R135 Z55 2017 (print) | LCC PT2621.R135 (ebook) | DDC 834/.912—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053297 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78533-458-0 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-459-7 ebook 1 CONTENTS 2 Preface vii Introduction. Kracauer on and in Weimar Modernity 1 Chapter 1. “Location Suggests Content”: Kracauer on the Fringe of Religious Revival 36 Chapter 2. Reading the War, Writing Crisis 66 Chapter 3. From Copenhagen to Baker Street: Kracauer, Kierkegaard, and the Detective Novel 106 Chapter 4. Religion on the Street: Kracauer and Religious Flânerie 153 Conclusion. Criticism in the Negative Church 208 Afterword. From Don Quixote to Sancho Panza 244 Select Bibliography 255 Index 279 1 PREFACE 2 iegfried Kracauer was one of the most striking voices to emerge out of the S social and political cauldron of the Weimar Republic. His writings include pioneering works of film history and theory, sociological studies, social history, historiography, and hundreds of reviews and essays on a variety of subjects that took the measure of the kaleidoscopic nature of modern culture. In spite of his close association with and influence on well-known philosophers such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, he remains a somewhat peripheral figure. This is unfortunate as he was among those early critics who were ready to recognize some legitimacy in popular culture, and to blend close readings of everyday phenomena and a deep engagement with contemporary philoso- phy—something that has become much more common today. Most readers and students who encounter him will probably first read his studies of cinema, written in English after he had fled Nazi Germany and found refuge in New York in 1941. Second in line is a selection of his Weimar essays on film and culture, published in German under the title The Mass Ornament in 1963 and translated into English in 1995. A number of his other writings have appeared in English, such as his social biography of Jacques Offenbach and a penetrating study of white collar workers. However, his writings on cinema are what he is most known for today, and his classic study of 1947, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, remains in print decades later. Since Kracauer is most known in film studies, where his work has had an uneven reception, he has been often perceived as a writer linked to modern mass culture, a writer embedded within modernity and part of the ferment of the interwar period. This study wants to complicate this view of him, for Kra- cauer, born in 1889, was already twenty-five when the First World War broke out; thus he grew to adulthood during the Kaiserreich, and in his intellectual preoccupations there are significant traces of debates that had begun before the war blew the old order of Europe apart. Perhaps the most important of these debates concerned secularization and the decline of religion. One motivation for this study has been to place these issues in the foreground of his development as a writer and critic, and thus to give more attention to his antediluvian bag- gage. This yields a portrait of Kracauer that affords more space for his writings prior to 1925. Of more significance, however, the study argues that the crisis of viii 1 Preface modernity during the Weimar Republic—whether real or rhetorical—needs to be more closely integrated with the history of religion, in both Germany and Europe. For the pre-1914 conflicts between religion and secularism were not insignificant to the conflicts of cultural modernity and the instabilities of the Weimar Republic. As this study has had a long genesis, there are many to thank. Starting with the University of Toronto, my thanks to Modris Eksteins, Jennifer Jenkins, Derek Penslar, Jim Retallack, and, more generally, the History Department. I read the Rites of Spring out of general interest many years ago before traveling to Europe, so I owe to Modris a particular debt as this book led me back to school and towards the study of history. My deep gratitude to the Joint Institute of German and European Studies, and to Alan and Patricia Marchment for their support of the research needed for this book. Thanks to friends and colleagues in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where I have taught German history as an adjunct since 2015. Thanks are also owed to scholars who have helped on the way, to Eric Weitz and David Darby. Numerous archives have made research an enjoyable and less laborious task: thanks to Gudrun Schwarz and the Benjamin Archive in Berlin; Sylvia Asmus, Katrin Kokot, and the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Frankfurt am Main; the Bundesarchiv in Berlin; the Leo Baeck Institute in Berlin and New York; the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich; the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam; Magdalene Popp-Grilli and the Württembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart; and, most importantly, the Deutsches Litera- turarchiv in Marbach am Neckar, where the Kracauer Nachlass is kept. Ste- phen Roeper and company at the Johannes Senckenberg Library in Frankfurt were especially welcoming. Research abroad was enabled by the hospitality of Anthony Cantor, Jenny and Sibylle Flügge, and KD Wolff. To Sibylle, I also owe much thanks for my first lesson in Sütterlin. My thanks to the editors and staff at Berghahn Books who have accepted this study into their substantial cata- logue of books on German history and made many improvements to the book; my thanks also to the anonymous readers who read the manuscript as it made its way into publication. If some of their remarks have not found a place in the final draft it is due more to a lack of space rather than a failure to appreciate the insights and feedback they have offered and for which I am grateful. Bookstores are an important if indirect and often overlooked stimulant to study, by the simple fact of keeping history on the shelf—thanks to Book City in Toronto, the Seminary Co-op in Chicago, the Banff Book and Art Den (RIP), Labyrinth, and the excellent shop founded by Jim Munro on Vancouver Island.
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