Eric Jarosinski

Urban Mediations: The Theoretical Space of Siegfried Kracauer’s Ginster

Siegfried Kracauer’s notion that “reality is a construction” serves as a starting point for an exploration of urban space in his 1928 novel Ginster. Focusing on the work’s central theoretical and spatial figure, the “mosaic”, this essay argues that Kracauer challenges us to think of urban space as multiply mediated, especially when it would seem to be represented or experienced most directly. The analysis focuses specifically on linguistic mediation, as the traffic between the city as mate- rial fact and as representation is articulated within literary space. Set in opposition to figures of transparency throughout the novel, primarily in the glass and steel of proto-Modernist architecture, language becomes the object, agent, and scene of a complex web of forces inscribed into and as urban space. These “spatial turns” of Kracauer’s metaphors and tropes speak to the current theoretical challenge of con- ceiving of urban space as both material and abstract. Ginster suggests that articu- lating the tensions between the two best defines a more illuminating and dynamic notion of space itself.

“Where is Kracauer?” and Theodor W. Adorno pose this question frequently in their correspondence throughout the 1920s and 1930s as the two friends attempt to keep track of the location, both geographically and intellectually, of their longtime “extraterritorial” colleague and friend. While his work for the famed may have given him the most public profile of the three, Siegfried Kracauer was indeed the hardest to situate precisely. His wide-ranging interests and distaste for the philo- sophically systematic and politically doctrinaire led to an extremely produc- tive intellectual exchange, but also misunderstanding and disagreement with friends Adorno, Benjamin, and others. Their frequent uncertainty about his coordinates is just as relevant today, especially as the figure of Kracauer has begun to assume sharper contours. With renewed critical interest, we are wit- nessing a new phase in his reception as one of the Weimar-era’s most sensi- tive readers and equally perceptive writers, for whom his friends’ question of “where?” remains of critical importance. For Kracauer, a trained architect, space served as a, if not the, key critical category throughout his many essays of the Weimar period, as he sought to read the urban environment as the material incarnation of the dreams of the age, an approach outlined in his well-known 1927-essay “Das Ornament der Masse” [“The Mass Ornament”]. In examining the hotel lobbies, amusement parks, and movie theaters of Weimar Germany, Kracauer articulates a formally disparate, yet conceptually coherent theory of space that might best be seen as 172 an extension of his well-known formulation of the relationship between reality and representation in Die Angestellten [The Salaried Masses], his 1929 ethno- graphic study of the new class of white collar workers in :

Hundert Berichte aus einer Fabrik lassen sich nicht zur Wirklichkeit der Fabrik addieren, sondern bleiben bis in alle Ewigkeit hundert Fabrikansichten. Die Wirklichkeit ist eine Konstruktion. Gewiß muß das Leben beobachtet werden, damit sie erstehe. Keineswegs jedoch ist sie in der mehr oder minder zufälligen Beobachtungsfolge der Reportage enthalten, vielmehr steckt sie einzig und allein in dem Mosaik, das aus den einzelnen Beobachtungen auf Grund der Erkenntnis ihres Gehalts zusammengestiftet wird. Die Reportage photographiert das Leben; ein solches Mosaik wäre sein Bild. [A hundred reports from a factory do not add up to the reality of the factory, but remain for all eternity a hundred views of the factory. Reality is a construction. Certainly life must be observed for it to appear. Yet it is by no means contained in the more or less random observational reports of reportage; rather, it is to be found solely in the mosaic that is assembled from single observations on the basis of comprehension or their meaning. Reportage photographs life; such a mosaic would be its image.]1

The notion of a mosaic representing a reality that includes, yet also extends beyond mimetic representation is equally apt for Kracauer’s “image” of urban life. Though much of his work remains unknown or untranslated, echoes of Kracauer’s writings resound throughout contemporary theories of urban space as a multiply mediated, densely coded, and multi-layered social and aesthetic product and set of practices. Then as now, the work of mapping this space is to construct a mosaic, or, to read the above passage more precisely, it would be. Kracauer’s use of the subjunctive is telling, with its grammatical logic hin- dering the facile realization of a reassuring totality. Instead, such a represen- tation of the “reality” of a city, certainly no less than that of a factory, might have to remain a wish or possibility, especially in light of the interplay of the transparency and opacity that informs images of the urban. Like so much in Kracauer’s work, the construction of a mosaic names a challenge much more than a program. Perhaps nowhere is this critical stance explored with greater insight than in Kracauer’s untranslated and still somewhat neglected 1928 novel Ginster, a work whose distinctively spatial quality Adorno alludes to in situating it as “ein Gebilde, das, paradox genug, selbst im Niemandsland zwischen Roman

1 Siegfried Kracauer: Die Angestellten. In: Siegfried Kracauer: Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder Bach and Ingrid Belke. Vol. 1. /Main: Suhrkamp 2006. Pp. 211–310. Here: P. 222. English translation: Siegfried Kracauer: The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany. Trans. by Quintin Hoare. London: Verso 1998. P. 32.