Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation: Critical Studies (Marx, Engels, and Marxisms) 3030679640, 9783030679644

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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation Critical Studies

Miguel Vedda

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14812

Miguel Vedda

Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation Critical Studies

Miguel Vedda University of Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, Argentina

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-030-67964-4 ISBN 978-3-030-67965-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67965-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Gibon Art/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editor’s Preface

Titles Published 1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014. 2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach chapter,” 2014. 3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism, 2016. 5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017. 8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, 2018. 9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018. 10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals: Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018.

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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, 2018. 12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 2018. 13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, 2019. 14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, 2019. 15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination, 2019. 16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative RealTime Political Analysis, 2019. 17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis, 2019. 18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds.), Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, 2019. 19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019. 20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019. 21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020. 22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020. 23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith, 2020. 24. Terrell Carver, Engels Before Marx, 2020. 25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and Marxism in France, 2020. 26. Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction. 27. Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space. 28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction. 29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th Anniversary Edition.

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

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30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century. 31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation. 32. Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and Italy. 33. Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism. 34. Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century. 35. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a Dealienated World. 36. Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation.

Titles Forthcoming Michael Brie & Jörn Schütrumpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism Miguel Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Selforganisation and Anti-capitalism Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean Jaures: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems and Debates in Post-war Argentina George C. Comninel, The Feudal Foundations of Modern Europe James Steinhoff, Critiquing the New Autonomy of Immaterial Labour: A Marxist Study of Work in the Artificial Intelligence Industry Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis and Alternatives Marcello Musto, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci

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Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist Analysis of Values Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship, State, and Revolution Thomas Kemple, Capital after Classical Sociology: The Faustian Lives of Social Theory Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory of “Labour Note" V Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’ Insubordination of 1968 Attila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A Marxist Analysis Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the French Communist Party Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.), Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning in Late Capitalism Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capitalism Tamás Krausz, Eszter Bartha (Eds.), Socialist Experiences in Eastern Europe: A Hungarian Perspective Martín Cortés, Marxism, Time and Politics: On the Autonomy of the Political João Antonio de Paula, Huga da Gama Cerqueira, Eduardo da Motta e Albuquer & Leonardo de Deus, Marxian Economics for the 21st Century: Revaluating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy Zhi Li, The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism Dong-Min Rieu, A Mathematical Approach to Marxian Value Theory: Time, Money, and Labor Productivity

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

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Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and Institution: The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of Marxism Kei Ehara (Ed.), Japanese Discourse on the Marxian Theory of Finance Éric Aunoble, French Views on the Russian Revolution Elisa Marcobelli, Internationalism Toward Diplomatic Crisis: The Second International and French, German and Italian Socialists Paolo Favilli, Historiography and Marxism: Innovations in Mid-Century Italy Terrell Carver, Smail Rapic (Eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century: Perspectives and Problems Juan Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class: Three Essays on Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism Patrizia Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of Socialist Youth Alexandros Chrysis, The Marx of Communism: Setting Limits in the Realm of Communism Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint the following articles: “The Novel of a Melancholy Outcast. On Ginster”: published previously as “La novela de un marginal melancólico. A propósito de Ginster, de Siegfried Kracauer” in: Kracauer, Siegfried, Ginster. Escrita por él mismo. Transl., with an Introd. by Miguel Vedda. Buenos Aires: Las Cuarenta, 2018, pp. 9–38. “A Philosophy of Rootlesness: The young Kracauer as a critic of Georg Simmel”: published previously as “Sobre una filosofía del desarraigo: a propósito del estudio del joven Siegfried Kracauer sobre Georg Simmel” in: Vernik, Esteban/Borisonik, Hernán (eds.), Georg Simmel, un siglo después. Actualidad y perspectiva. Buenos Aires: Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani – Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, UBA / CLACSO, 2017, pp. 261–272. “Allegories of improvisation: Streets in Berlin and Elsewhere”: published, in a shorter and somewhat different version, as “Alegorías de la improvisación. A propósito de los cuadros de ciudades en Calles en Berlín y en otros lugares, de Siegfried Kracauer” in: Projeto História 65 (mayo-agosto de 2019), pp. 10–28. “The Tradition of the Lost Causes: History. The Last Things before the Last ”: published previously as “La tradición de las causas perdidas” in: Kracauer, Siegfried, Historia. Las últimas cosas antes de

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las últimas. Introd. by Miguel Vedda. Transl. by María Guadalupe Marando and Agustín D’ambrosio. Buenos Aires: Las cuarenta, 2010, pp. 9–36. “The great Rift of the World”. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and the Discussions about the Character and Function of criticIntellectuals”, published previously as “‘La gran grieta del mundo’. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin y los debates sobre la figura del intelectual” in: Pandaemonium Germanicum. Revista de Estudos Germaísticos (USP, São Paulo, Brasil) 17/23 (junio de 2014), pp. 182–204. “Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of the Fairy Tale”, published previously as “Emancipación humana y ‘felicidad no disciplinada’. Walter Benjamin y la poética del cuento de hadas” in: Jozami, Eduardo/Kaufman, Alejandro/Vedda, Miguel (comps.), Walter Benjamin en la ex ESMA. Justicia, Historia y Verdad. Escrituras de la memoria. Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2013, pp. 303–318. “Anatomies of melancholy: Acedia and alienation in Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer”: published previously as “Anatomien der Melancholie: Acedia und Entfremdung bei Walter Benjamin und Siegfried Kracauer” in: Ibero-amerikanisches Jahrbuch für Germanistik V (2012) 102–117. “Decline and Fall of the short novel? Vicissitudes of a genre in the modern German Narrative”: published previously as “Verfall und Untergang der Novelle? Erscheinungsformen einer Gattung in der modernen deutschen Erzählkunst“ in: Ibero-amerikanisches Jahrbuch für Germanistik IX (2016). “The Historian in the Anteroom. Configurations of the Intellectual in the late Discussions between Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor W. Adorno”: published previously as “La historia en la antecámara. Figura y funciones del intelectual en las discusiones entre Siegfried Kracauer y Theodor W. Adorno” in: Revista em Pauta. Teoria social e realidade contemporânea (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro) 38 (2016). Fascism as a Farce of Farce: Totalitarian Propaganda appears for the first time in this volume.

Contents

Introduction: On Kracauer’s Essays and the Contemporary Significance of Dialectics

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Part I A Philosophy of Rootlesness: The Young Kracauer as a Critic of Georg Simmel

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The Novel of a Melancholy Outcast. On Ginster

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Allegories of Improvisation: Streets in Berlin and Elsewhere

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Fascism as a Farce of Farce: Totalitarian Propaganda

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The Tradition of the Lost Causes: History. The Last Things Before the Last

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Part II “The Great Rift of the World”. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and the Discussions About the Character and Function of Critic-Intellectuals

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Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of the Fairy Tale

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CONTENTS

Anatomies of Melancholy: Acedia and Alienation in Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer

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Decline and Fall of the Short Novel? Vicissitudes of a Genre in the Modern German Narrative

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The Historian in the Anteroom: Configurations of the Intellectual in the Late Discussions Between Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor W. Adorno

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Bibliography

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Index

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Introduction: On Kracauer’s Essays and the Contemporary Significance of Dialectics

To Carlos Eduardo Jordão Machado, in memoriam

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Kracauer’s Writings and Heterodox Marxism: A Study in Elective Affinity

In the course of the last decades, interest in the work and life of Siegfried Kracauer has rekindled after the relative silence that prevailed in the years immediately following the death of the German essayist. The appearance of a series of clarifying and insightful studies, the translation of his writings into several languages and, above all, the long awaited publication of Kracauer’s Werke in nine volumes by the German publishing house Suhrkamp helped to increase the attention for the essay and narrative production of this intellectual nomad. This reception began to extend beyond the interest to the first two books published in the North American exile, From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Theory of Film (1960), incorporating, not only the posthumous History. The Last Things before the Last (first published in 1969), but also the essays and narrative works composed in the 1920s and 1930s—those which, in our opinion, constitute the greatest theoretical and aesthetic contributions of the German author. To a lesser but appreciable extent, emerged a significant critical reception of early writings—Uber das Wesen der Persönlichkeit (On the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67965-1_1

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Essence of Personality, 1913–1914), Soziologie als Wissenschaft (Sociology as Science, 1922), The Detective Novel (written in 1925), among others. Whole dimensions of Kracauer’s work, however, remain unexplored. A particular feature of this reception is that, with rare exceptions, it is characterized by a political abstinence that speaks less about the peculiarities of the author studied than about the convictions and expectations of the critics themselves. In contrast to this trend, we have the conviction, on the one hand, that the thought of Marx and a variety of heterodox Marxists represent a substantial and persistent component of Kracauer’s work, which is above all at the basis of his major writings. On the other, that the theory and criticism of the German essayist could enrich (and, in some cases, have effectively enriched) Marxism with aspects that it simply neglected, or that it considered insufficiently or erroneously. It is telling that this late work by Kracauer which has been the target of harsher criticism due to its drifting towards a dogmatic and normative intolerance, Theory of Film, is also a study that is distinguished by a singular political abstentionism; and Miriam Hansen has aptly highlighted both the way in which Kracauer “himself repressed much of the political and historical dimension of his film theory in the process of revision”, and how “the traces that remained were altogether erased in the book’s American reception”.1 On the other hand, there is a certain consensus, among critics, that Kracauer’s most outstanding production is the one that emerged between the mid-1920s and the emigration to the United States, that is, the one that is most intensely marked by the exhaustive study of Marx and by personal and intellectual contact with Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Marx Horhkheimer, Theodor Adorno or Leo Löwenthal—as well as with the early Marxist writings of György Lukács. The weakening of interest in unmasking, from a materialistic perspective, false consciousness, as well as the objective fetishisms and mystifications of capitalist Modernity, the effort to provide a socio-historical and often expressly political analysis of artistic and cultural phenomena, coincided with a relative paralysis of Kracauer’s critical capacities, as we will have occasion to observe at various points throughout this book. All this aims to suggest an affinity and, even more, an elective affinity 2 between Kracauerian essayism and Marx’s dialectical thought. In another place we try to demonstrate to what extent both Marxian method and writing are deeply marked by an essayistic bias,3 something we would like to show in this book is how essayism and Marxism also appear productively combined in Kracauer’s writings.

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It is possible to see in this oeuvre manifold suggestions to provocatively expand the limits of Marxism. Urban ethnographies and explorations into the unknown territory of labour and cultural spaces, as well as asylums for the unemployed and the peripheral and marginal locations of big cities have unquestionable historical significance and should be recovered today, in the framework of the various attempts to found a historical and geographical materialism. The contributions to a sociology of the middle classes that can be drawn from The Sallaried Mases (1930) and from a variety of short essays, in addition to being highly innovative in their time, would provide extremely useful elements for analysing the behaviour of contemporary middle sectors, particularly in the context of expansion of the new radical Rights. Fertile indications for the analysis of the latter can be found in the anatomy of fascist propaganda displayed in Totalitarian Propaganda (written between 1936 and early 1938), a work explicitly and intensely influenced by Marx’s essays on Second Empire France; and it is characteristic that one of the most prominent contemporary scholars on radical Rights of our time is precisely Enzo Traverso, author of a fundamental book on the Frankfurt essayist. Kracauer was also a pioneer in developing an analysis of mass culture that constantly intertwines historical criteria with sociological and expressly political ones, highlighting the reifying and utopian impulses of the analysed phenomena along a coincident (but, at the same time, productively divergent) line with which contemporary authors like Jameson and Žižek promote. And so far we have only mentioned a few of the aspects that would justify a reivindication of Kracauer from a heterodox and emancipatory Marxist perspective. We still have to consider some particularly relevant points.

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The Modern Intellectual and the Essay as Method

One of the complexes of problems that run through this book is that of the physiognomy and functions of the modern intellectual, a subject that occupied Kracauer during the Weimar Republic—to a great extent, from a comparison between German circumstances and those that by then were taking shape in the Soviet Union. For the German author, as for some thinkers and writers close to him, this reflection went hand in hand with a recovery of criticism, understood as a non-dogmatic, non-regimented

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form of reflection, in keeping with the moving conditions of Modernity, and which requires an exploratory, “essayistic” attitude—something that partly explains why, in those years, essay came to be of such decisive importance. To this genre, as well as to essayism as a method, could be applied what Adorno wrote about Ernst Bloch’s early work, namely: that “it indicates a change of attitude toward the object. The object can no longer be contemplated peacefully and with composure. As in emancipated film, thought uses a handheld camera”.4 By virtue of this style of thought, “the bourgeois organization of experience with its seemingly fixed distance between the viewer and the viewed is a thing of the past” and this shakeup in the relationship of the subject to what he wants to say, according to Adorno, “alters the idea of truth itself”.5 It would be useful to recover this imperative of dynamism to define the (mobile) perspective from which we approach, a century later, the discussions that essayists like Kracauer, Benjamin or Bloch developed around the significance of the modern intelligentsia. This leads us to introduce a methodological specification: as is known, in the framework of the book project on Parisian Arcades, Benjamin set out to take up the idea, formulated by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness (1923), that a “Copernican revolution in historical perception” would have to be carried out, placing the present, and no longer the past, as a starting point. According to Benjamin, “what has been is to become the dialectical reversal – the flash of awakened consciousness. Politics attains primacy over history”.6 With differences and nuances, this thought reappears in other Marxist intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century; thus, for example, in the writings of Lukács, even in works much posterior to History and class consciousness. For the Hungarian philosopher—and this contradicts the interpretations of him as only a nostalgic for a time of fullness in the past—each present provides the parameter to relate to the past. Lukács’s idea is that the past is no fixed and ready once and for all, so that it can be described “the way it really was” (Ranke). We should approach the past with the awareness that our relationship with it is the result, not of a passive reception, but of a construction motivated in part by the interests of our present. Lukács frequently insists that, in any productive connection with the past (for example, the relation of a writer with what has been bequeathed to him by tradition), the person or the collective of the present must say, like Molière: je prends mon bien où je le trouve.7 This can be seen, for example, in The Historical Novel (1936–1937), where it appears explicit when he parallels the “method”

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of appropriation of the past employed by Walter Scott with that of Hegel: Lukács comments that there is no evidence that Scott has read Hegel— and, had he read it, it is unlikely that he would have understood him—but his procedures are sometimes reminiscent of those of the German philosopher.8 In Hegel’s Lessons on Aesthetics (1835–1838) it is stated that those past customs and institutions that no longer bear any connection with the present of humanity, lack genuine vitality and interest for this. In this context appears the following comment, which is reproduced in The Historical Novel : “History is only ours when […] we can look on the present in general as a consequence of a chain of events in which the characters or deeds represented form an essential link”.9 The past “even of one’s own people must stand in closer connection with our present situation, life, and existence”.10 It would be reasonable to place this comment in relation to the aforementioned “Copernican revolution” in historical research to take a step further: in “The Storyteller” (1936), Benjamin underlined the way in which become visible, from the perspective of each present, certain dimensions of the past that remain hidden in other historical moments, as well as in a rock, for the observer who has taken the correct distance and adopted the appropriate point of view, the head of a human being or the body of an animal can appear.11 If, in accordance with this method, we consider the work of the great Marxist essayists of the early twentieth century, we perceive a constellation of elements vanished in our time, just like Benjamin, in the mid-1930s, from a look at the narrative art from the past, believed he could deduce the death of the traditional storyteller. In relation to our theme: if, from the current situation, we address the life and work of the aforementioned authors, we are quickly struck by a model of intellectual that stands out especially today due to its absence. We refer to the tradition of critic-intellectuals: a tradition that was born at the time of the European Restoration and, more precisely, in the generation of Marx—with him as one of its prominent representatives—and which has been dying out, almost disappearing, from the 1960s. It could be said that the failure of the insurrectionary movements at the end of that decade helped to consummate the decline of that figure; but the process is much broader. Without it the logic of development having always been simple and univocal, the fading of critical intellectuals has been a correlate of the unfolding of neoliberalism, as was also, according to authors such as Jameson and Harvey, poststructuralist thought, without the latter and the academicization process of intellectuals integrates a single, closed and univocal process. Meanwhile, we have

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mentioned the fundamental formula to express what we have been saying: what decisively separates our time from the era in which intellectuals such as Benjamin, Kracauer, Bloch or Sartre existed is the relative absorption of the intelligentsia by academic spaces, a process that developed with almost inexorable punctuality in the course of the last sixty years and that marks a deep divergence from the aforementioned essayists. For Marx, the decision to abandon the project of being a university professor in Berlin and dedicate himself to journalism and independent investigation was not hard, even though it meant a life of financial hardship. For the aforementioned thinkers, the writing of ambitious books, or of essays for widely circulated magazines, was an almost natural form of intellectual production. In contrast to this essentially journalistic orientation, the “influential” intellectuals in the last half century have been primarily academics, who in many cases appealed largely to a university audience: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, JeanLuc Nancy, Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Giorgio Agamben… and the list could be expanded considerably. The exceptions are not only rare, but also doubtful. We can’t help but celebrate Chomsky’s forceful denunciations of US imperialism, but we know that those denunciations would not be as effective if the author were not a world-acclaimed linguist, emeritus professor at MIT. The fact that, in the course of the last decades, critics abandoned their traditional spheres of circulation to take refuge in universities has been the subject of various reflections. From a radical position, Terry Eagleton has pointed out that “criticism today lacks all substantive social function. It is either part of the public relations branch of the literary industry, or a matter wholly internal to the academies”.12 As we have already said, the academization of criticism referred to here is correlative to the fading of the critic-intellectual. It is impossible to discuss in depth the whole complex of questions here; we aspire only to present here some brief reflections on the problem. To speak of the modern critic-intellectual implies invoking a figure that had its first prominent manifestation in Europe during the time of the Restoration. Located on the threshold of Modernity, faced with the disintegration of traditional cultures and the advance of capitalism, but also located in a world in which history had ceased to be a matter of scholarship to enter daily life, the intelligentsia of the period felt the need to abandon the perspective of the world spectator to take an explicit position towards contemporary reality, and this sudden turn from contemplation to action can be seen in both progressives and

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conservatives. The conviction that an era marked by idealistic estrangement from the world had closed—strengthened after the deaths of Hegel (1831) and Goethe (1832)—helped to intensify the feeling that the age of criticism had begun. In 1833 Heinrich Laube wrote: “We live in a critical time, everything is questioned, great examination of the world has begun a long time ago. Now a world unfolds in becoming; its flag is the proof; his sceptre, judgment. In such an evolutionary period, the warm sun is rarely shown; everything seeks the guidance of the moon, that is to say: of criticism”.13 Laube thought that, in a critical age, the intellectual is deprived of the fixed parameters that characterize dogmatic times. The intelligentsia that is born from this historical crisis puts their own subjective opinion before the guiding framework provided by the institutions. In his doctoral thesis (1840), Marx paralleled his time with late Antiquity: the passage from the era of Goethe and Hegel to his own is compared with the one that goes from the “theoretical serenity” of the gods represented by Homer and the Greek sculptors to the intense dynamism that comes to life in the philosophy of Epicurus or in the poetry of Lucretius; in their atomism is expressed the decadence of the ancient world, but also the exhortation for humanity to emancipate itself from the chains imposed by tradition and to open new spaces for individual spontaneity. Related in a critical way to the institutions of his time, the intellectual of the Restoration vividly experienced alienation and denounced it in his works. As an announcement of this relationship with the institutions sounds that passage of the Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) in which Hegel contrasts the noble consciousness of the past with the vile consciousness of the modern world; that is, with a consciousness that “sees in the sovereign power a fetter and a suppression of its own being-for-self, and therefore hates the ruler, obeys only with a secret malice, and is always on the point of revolt”.14 This attitude could be attributed to one of the most important German writers and literary critics of the period: Heinrich Heine, a “vile” and torn conscience and a figure whose affinities with Kracauer we will examine in this book.15 Confronted with the antithetical trends of Restoration and Revolution, situated at a transition point between the aristocratic and bourgeois worlds and between patronage and the market, strained between literary autonomy and tendency literature, Heine is the representative writer of a period of profound tears that constituted an important turning point within Modernity. According to Heine, “The general character of modern literature consists of the fact that now individuality and scepticism predominate. The authorities have

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collapsed; reason remains the one lamp of humanity, and one’s conscience is the only staff in the dark labyrinth of this life. […]. Poetry is now no longer objective, epic, and naïve, but subjective, lyric, and reflective”.16 It is telling that the word tearing (Zerreißung ) is a representative term of Heine’s life and work, and the mark of a period of transition. Split between opposing principles—a true torn conscience—Heine felt, at the same time, alienated from all social orders; Gerhard Höhn, who claimed Heine’s status as the first modern intellectual, characterized the tearing in these terms: A Jew in Germany, a German in France, he has had to “pay” for the introjection of the […] tearing with the rupture or alienation with respect to all the organic links with the old and the new society: with his “opulent” family, with his religious community, with bourgeois society (career), with the backward fatherland and […] with the bourgeois host country, until being even exiled from the German language. Didn’t he write in 1840 […] that “My ideas are also exiled, exiled in a foreign language?”17

But Heine also feels torn, as we will see in greater detail in an article on this book, between his scrupulous devotion to the poetic mission and the conviction that it is necessary to go beyond the demands of the own métier to assume a social and political commitment to the present. Likewise, he has also been torn between the search for a practical, active intervention in social struggles and the determination not to submit the independence of judgement to the dictates of a party—to safeguard its autonomy of thought.

3

Crisis and Criticism: Essayism and Marxism in the Weimar Republic and the Process of Academization of the Intelligentsia

Beyond the differences, the situation of criticism in Germany during the first decades of the twentieth century presents similarities with what has been said about the “Age of Heine”. A generation of intellectuals— Kracauer, Bloch, Benjamin, Brecht, among others—felt, like Heine, the need to find a path that would avoid both seclusion in the ivory tower and the zigzags determined by changes in the party line. Tearing was once again the stigma of an intelligentsia that, determined to question the previous tradition and faced with a reality marked by the crisis, decided to

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investigate in depth the assumptions of its own work. The imperative to orient thought towards the fundamental problems of criticism, rather than superficial questions treated in accordance to fashionable terminology, was decisive for the intellectuals of this generation. The confluence— only apparently paradoxical—of scrupulous attention to the problems of the present and the decision to avoid passing fashions can be seen in a group of intellectuals who consider themselves since the beginning, but even more after the experience of exile, as marginal. Karl Mannheim coined the controversial expression of “floating” or “uprooted intelligentsia” (freischwebende Intelligenz)18 to designate modern intellectuals; Kracauer spoke of himself as an extra-territorial, and Benjamin presented the author of The Salaried Masses as the very incarnation of the marginal, but not without seeing, at the same time, in Kracauer’s essay a step towards the politicization of intelligentsia. This rift that pierced the consciousness and praxis of critical intellectuals during the first half of the twentieth century, and which became visible again during the 1960s, seems to have been artificially mended during the last third of the twentieth century. In 1966, Sartre noted that “under the influence of American ideas, intellectuals were disappearing: the progress of science will replace such universalists, with rigorously specialized teams of researchers”.19 Capitalist industry, Sartre believes, seeks “to extend its control over the university to force it to abandon the old obsolete humanism and replace it with specialized disciplines, destined to supply firms with testers, supervisors, public relations officers, and so forth”.20 What is lamented here, then, is the extinction of those thinkers who abuse their fame, who meddle in what is not his business and claim to question “both received truths and the accepted behaviour inspired by them, in the name of a global conception of man and of society”.21 The model promoted now, instead of that of the critic-intellectual, is that of a vile noble conscience, or—in Sartrean terms—that of the false intellectual. That we are faced with a more complex phenomenon than that described in the “Plea for Intellectuals” is something that is demonstrated by Sartre’s determination to close the rift that he himself experienced during most of his life. Until the end of the 1960s, he had conceived the intellectual “as a ‘technician of practical knowledge’ who was torn by the contradiction between the universality of knowledge and the particularism of the ruling class of which he was a product; thus, he embodied the unhappy conscience, as Hegel defined it”.22 The events of 1968 convinced him of the need to contrast the classical intellectual with a new intellectual, who seeks to merge with the mass, at the risk of renouncing,

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for this reason, the condition of intellectual. Later European generations often sought to erase the rift in a different sense: severing ties with praxis and with the problems of the social world; adapting, at the same time, to a docile institutionalism. Hence, Said has rightly spoken of a new betrayal of the intellectuals, who left the citizens of modern society in the hands of market forces, international corporations, manipulations of consumer appetites.23 With regard to literary criticism, it supported its specialization in the “noninterference in what Vico grandly calls the world of nations but which prosaically might just as well be called ‘the world’”.24 Said related this turn of criticism to a series of phenomena associated with the rise of Reagan, which today, from a broader perspective, we can identify as defining neoliberalism. All these changes contributed to the fact that the intelligentsia ceased to float freely to take root—if possible—in the universities, so that, as Irving Howe argued, today “most of the ambitious and talented young people within the literary academy publish only in journals read by their colleagues, and they seem to find this an acceptable, indeed a normal, condition”.25 Hence, the sentimental desire to recover the naivety of the past tends to be as chimerical (and therefore harmless) as the conservative longing for a pre-industrial world. Questioning academic criticism does not mean adopting the comfortable position of the beautiful soul, but rather seeking another form of extra-territoriality: adopting a perspective that questions the status quo without ignoring it. Criticism of current conditions cannot be limited to their mere ideological rejection. The commitment does not consist in placing oneself outside of history, but in tracing the innovative possibilities within that reality that one seeks to transform. Only in this way, paraphrasing Hegel’s verses, would it be possible to be not better than the age, but the age at its best. Too often, the nostalgic desire to cultivate models of criticism previous to those that characterize our time, making abstraction of socio-historical conditions, is put at the service of a justification of intellectual laziness, of theoretical vagueness, of the replacement of analysis by a series of general, sentimental and propagandistic statements. There is no doubt that the merit of a critical study does not derive from the number of footnotes, but it is infantile to think that the absence of notes is a guarantee of the quality of the analysis. On the other hand: it is understandable that a Marxist intellectual strives to make his ideas understandable; but this is not the same as dogmatically imposing a single model of exposition, the archetype of which is also to be found in the debased and debasing style of argumentation and writing of party flyers or hegemonic journalism.

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This does not imply a sheer condemnation of pamphlet and propaganda literature, but rather the recognition that the current depravity of both is not the alternative, but the correlate of the poverty of academic writing. Ignorance was once defined as the inability to follow reasoning for a long time26 ; this is a form of ignorance that especially marks our time, whose attention deficits disorders have less to do with neurobiological problems than with today’s ruling living, working and thinking conditions. From them is explained the propensity to banality, to melodramatic sentimentality, to the reduction of writing to the sententious and aphoristic. The infinite repetition of memorable sentences of venerable authors is a strategy common to catechisms, almanacs, social networks and a plethora of articles of the contemporary Left.

4 Learning from Reality and Dialectical Thinking It seems as if we have moved away from Kracauer. However, we are talking about issues for the treatment of which we could find productive elements in his writings. In the first place, because the German thinker embodies, to a much greater extent than other intellectuals with whom his name is often associated, such as Bloch, Adorno or Benjamin, the figure of the essayist who writes for a relatively large reading public, taking advantage of the possibilities offered by a medium in full expansion in those days such as Feuilleton. A central purpose of Kracauer was, from the mid-1920s and until the rise of Nazism, to provoke the awakening of consciousness in the urban masses, and just as we can observe, in the articles published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, a critique of trivial cinema that seeks to anesthetize the reflection of the public, we also find a critique of the “New Objectivity” (Neue Sachlichkeit ), and of photography and journalism that confuse the contingent appearances of reality with its deep essence. It will be recalled that, in “The Storyteller”, Benjamin linked the death of traditional storytelling with the spread of newspapers. Perhaps even more sceptical than Benjamin of any proposal to resuscitate the forms of the past, and convinced that art must work with the materials at its disposal, Kracauer aspired to transform the resources of journalism with a view to turning them into aesthetically and ideologically revulsive instruments. If the newspapers educate the reader to passivity and the unconscious assimilation of shocks, the German essayist tried to de-familiarize the all too known and, in this way,

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facilitate an awakening. As we will see in the articles in this book, the conviction that the essayist—no less than the artist or the fiction writer— must work with the means provided by his own time, and look in the past only for those procedures and themes that reveal provocative correspondences with the present, was not there from the beginning in Kracauer. His apprenticeship years to becoming the author of the great essays of the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s were marked by a break with kulturkritisch nostalgia for traditional organic communities and the medieval ordo as well as with the global condemnation of Modernity as an age of accomplished sinfulness—to use Fichte’s well-known expression. Kracauer’s most accomplished works are, on the one hand, the products of a writer who is no longer obstinate in contrasting the present “evil” with the ideal of a perfect and normative past, but interested in investigating contemporary reality, inspecting above all what is new and searching, in it, for the seeds of reification and utopia. Kracauer would have hesitated to call his own thought dialectical without further ado; most likely, he would have associated the term too directly with Hegelian philosophy, for which he felt an intense (and, from our perspective, unjustified) dislike from very early on. However, we would dare to affirm that the most productive impulses of Kracauerian thought could be characterized as dialectical, above all on a fundamental methodological plane that goes beyond the conscious convictions and explicit declarations of the author. This is already apparent in the early evolution of the Frankfurt essayist, who in a very general sense can be compared with that of the Stuttgart philosopher. Just as the thought of this latter advanced, along very complex paths, from an implacable criticism of the present—to which he contrasted, as an instance of unequalled perfection, the freedom and vitality of the ancient republics—to a reconciliation with the reality that was very far from being a capitulation to the prose of Modernity, Kracauerian essayism also acquired greater richness and originality when it overcame the essentially idealistic and nostalgic discontent with modern conditions to become a sort of detective and “ethnographic” investigation of the great cities in which aversion and fascination towards them are inextricably linked. Beyond all the differences that separated Kracauer from that convicted and confessed Hegelian that was Lukács, the methodology of the former is quite reminiscent of the words with which the latter defines the obsession of Goethe and Hegel to devote themselves— against the grain of the idealistic tendencies of their time—to a continuous learning from reality:

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Goethe and Hegel believe that the totality of reality, as it is, travels the path of reason. This faith is united, in them, with an insatiable hunger for reality, both want to assimilate and conceive the entire reality as it is, they want to continuously learn from reality, they are deeply convinced that the reason hidden in the movement of the external world is higher than the individual thought of even the most brilliant personalities. Thus they managed to conceive the concrete movement of contradictions as a unitary content of nature, history and thought.27

Dialectic is a thinking that does not remain immobilized in a fixed position and, instead, corrects itself over and over again in the work with its objects. For dialectical thought, there is no thing that exists once and for all, that is not in motion or in becoming. This thought, precisely because of its imperative of dynamism, resolutely refuses to do violence to its objects; rather, his intention is, in the words of Adorno—Kracauer’s friend from youth—to postulate the object as a priority, and the effort of thought must be aimed at adapting itself as deeply as possible to the particularities of the object. In other words: the dialectic extracts the concepts of the thing, and does not coercively impose on it an a priori concept; the dialectic “strives not to stand still, constantly corrects itself in the presence of the things themselves. We could define dialectic as a kind of thinking which does not content itself merely with the order of concepts but, rather, undertakes to correct the conceptual order by reference to the being of the objects themselves”.28 It is precisely this way of thinking that Kracauer endeavoured to put into practice in his early essays, and even the one that he recommended as a valid methodology to intellectuals, who should “radically question all the positions given. That is, they must confront their inherited concepts and precisely those that are apparently unshakable, with the results of the revolutionary theory, and then give account of the concrete reality that those concepts preserve”.29 Intellectuals truly committed to emancipatory thinking should cultivate this dynamic thinking rather than simply repeating revealed truths, in view of the fact that the “rigid, non-dialectic affirmation of the enumerated socialist ideals easily degenerates into sabotage of socialism”, and “the intellectuals who give into what is given, lay down their weapons before a utopia”.30 A son of Modernity, dialectical thought proposed itself as the most appropriate method to account for a substantially contradictory era in which reaction and progress, oppression and emancipation, reification and

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utopia are intimately linked, and that cannot be explained from a moral perspective. By virtue of its essential qualities, capitalism requires above all immanent analysis, qualified to doing justice both to its aspirations for consistency and persistence and to its antagonistic nature and to the contradictions into which it cannot avoid falling. The critique of political economy developed by the mature Marx is dedicated to the deep investigation of this essential dimension of capitalism: a work that in various ways and on multiple levels investigates capitalist Modernity as a unity of opposites, opposites that, as Fredric Jameson has rightly underlined, “no longer need to be identified with and labelled as positive and negative, inasmuch as the dialectic means a perpetual changing of places between them and a perpetual transformation of one into the other”.31 For Marx, “a phenomenon like capitalism is good and bad all at once and simultaneously the most productive as well as the most destructive force we have so far encountered in human history”.32 Hence “that mixture of admiration, horror and enthusiasm that characterized the ‘union of opposites’” of Marx’s own “personal and emotional dialectic”.33 Since the mid1920s—that is, contemporaneously to a period of intense occupation with Marxian work—Kracauer’s writings have been animated by an attitude consistent with these positions. The exasperated nostalgia for a successful past is being replaced by the conviction that modern times offer a productive space for improvisation that did not exist in earlier periods, and that these possibilities coexist with those destructive, regressive, mystifying tendencies that Kracauer emphasized in early essays. The critique of modern life from the perspective of German Kulturkritik did not disappear without leaving traces, but became a factor transcended and, to that extent, conserved (aufgehoben) of the mature essayistic work—in a way similar to how Enlightenment’s philosophy of progress and romantic anti-capitalism can be considered absorbed and transcended moments in Marx’s critique of political economy. Hence, it can be said of the author of “The Mass Ornament”, as has been written about the author of Capital, that attention to the new has continually allowed him to evade “the everpresent nostalgia for a simpler past and for a retreat into more human pre-capitalist modes of production”.34

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5 Against the Amenities of Conformism: The Present Conditions In the view of these considerations, it would be appropriate to ask ourselves in what terms we could propose an answer to the question about the legitimate spaces for the intervention of the intellectual in the circumstances in force today. Starting from the conviction that human beings can only make history under conditions that have not been created by them, our purpose should be to trace our opportunities for action within the historical circumstances with which we have encountered. About our possibilities of making significant contributions, it could be said what Benjamin asserted about our chances of happiness, namely: that they can take place only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to.35 During the Weimar years, Kracauer found the Feuilleton a fresh and living possibility, despite all its limitations and the objections often raised against it—considering it, for example, a form of capitulation to the imperatives of the market—by an already rotten idealistic philosophy. To suppose that we could today simply cultivate an essayism like the one that flourished in German-speaking countries during the 1920s and 1930s—and whose intellectual and aesthetic merits we would be the first to praise—would suppose an idealistic blindness to our times, perhaps more derisory than the one that suffered, in the novel by Cervantes, the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. And a Sorrowful Countenance is what offer, in our time, more than an outmoded writer who proceeds more or less like those German poets whom Heine compared with the bivalves that one keeps, as ornaments, on a fireplace, far away from their natural environment: even when far from the ocean, they “nevertheless begin suddenly to make the rushing sound of water as soon as the time comes in and the waves break against the coast”.36 While, in Paris, revolution raged and roared in the great human ocean, “on the other side of the Rhine German hearts were rushing and roaring… But they were so isolated; they were among unfeeling porcelain, tea cups and coffee-pots and Chinese pagodas which nodded mechanically as if they knew what the talk was about”.37 It would also be pertinent to ask ourselves where flourishes today an ocean of essays comparable to those that set the intellectual tone in the Restoration Paris or in the Weimar Republic. Suppose that we could abstract from the world in which we live and contrast the “bad” circumstances of the present with some kind of archetype once in force and existing today only in the spirits of some voluntarists—illuminated by

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that inner light that, as we know, is the most dark of all—would imply doing violence to history and offering a weak response to the demands of our time. To affirm that, if the historical facts are not in accordance with our inner élan, so much the worse for the facts, it has been, at least since Fichte, the maxim by which those voluntarists with whom faced critically, and for good reasons, the dialectical thought of Hegel and Marx. Academic research is not the only current possibility today—nor was Feuilleton in the 1920s and 1930s—but simply disdain or ignore it today is a gesture of romantic denial of reality from which something productive can hardly be derived. The risks of bureaucratic formalism in the academia have been sufficiently ridiculed without this having helped to suppress it in a productive way. Less frequent are criticisms of the degradation of the essay form, which, in the absence of intellectually penetrating and aesthetically talented writers, was lost in the meanders of philosophical dilettantism, argumentative triviality, and stylistic ineptitude. Just as Benjamin observed a revival of certain procedures and themes of traditional narrative art in Brechtian prose, and just as Kracauer succeeded in making elements of the extinct popular fairy tale productive for his own attempt to revolutionize Feuilleton, a real challenge today is to recover something from the impulse that once animated essay writing for contemporary theoretical and critical research. With regard to recent decades, outstanding examples of such an attempt can be found, among others, in Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Enzo Traverso, but also in authors from Our America (Nuestra América) such as David Viñas, Carlos Nelson Coutinho or Roberto Schwarz. We can openly say that the announcement of the appearance of a new book by those authors who, among those mentioned, are still alive and active—or a new publication by Michael Löwy, Susan Buck-Morss, Michael Heinrich or David Harvey—awakens in us greater expectations than reading the repetitive trivialities of those pseudo-essayists who find their rightful place in Saturday or Sunday supplements and whose tiresome comments reappear with the torturous periodicity of mythical punishments. When, on the other hand, it is pretended to challenge the complexities of the theory in the name of an unthinking political praxis, it falls back on an irrationalist and regressive activism that recalls the limitations of that conspiratorial tradition from which exhort to say goodbye, as it will be remembered, the first pages of the Communist Manifesto. About the disadvantages of a pure romanticism of action and of one-sided identification with the optimism of the will should sufficiently instruct us the

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infamies of the model of militancy endorsed by Stalinism, which had good reason to promote scepticism regarding theory. In their instances of greatest splendour and creativity, the emancipatory movements have been characterized by a spirit of global renewal of culture for which had to provide innovative elements, not only political organization, but also science and literature, philosophy and arts, pedagogy and popular traditions. It implies a declaration of not only mental but also political poverty, the childish belief that intellectuals should abandon the hard work of the concept and limit themselves to throwing stones and distributing pamphlets. The inability of the dogmatic activists to recognize as productive a practice different from his own recalls the fable of the peasant family that receives a giraffe as a gift and does not know what to do with the poor animal but to attach it to a plough. The politicization of scepticism, and even of melancholy promoted by Kracauer represents a healthy corrective to unthinking optimism; and represents also a provocative and productive piece of dialectics the invitation of authors such as Hegel and Marx, but also Heine and Kracauer, to examine the agitated ebbs and flows that run through the surface of capitalist Modernity always in relation to its essential structure, with its physiology (Marx), with a view to distancing himself from that immediacy in which, according to Capital, everyday consciousness tends to remain captive. Extra-territoriality fulfils in Kracauer a similar function to that of Heine’s preference for the perspective of the exile: that of fostering a break with immediacy, keeping consciousness lucid in the face of the mystifications that proliferate, under the conditions of Modernity, in ordinary life. A fundamental instrument to provoke this distance is humour, which, no less than in Heine’s Schnabelewopski or Ludwig Börne, is present in Kracauer’s novels and great Weimarian essays. The satirical talent, cultivated in a remarkable way by Marx—whose affinity for parody and irony became a substantial component of his thought and writing style—has faded in most of his successors, in whom the tendency to dogmatism fostered that kind of rigid seriousness that demands rather epic anger or tragic fatalism; it has occasionally re-emerged with it full powers in some atypical figures, such as Bertolt Brecht or Jura Soyfer. The author of the famous formula on the Institute of Social Falsification was indifferent both to epic grandeur and tragic fatality and rather identified with that humour which, as he himself has written about the Andreu-Rivel clowns, is the necessary complement of melancholy.38 This comical seriousness— if this oxymoron is allowed to us—is a trait that Kracauer appreciated

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in his favourite comedians (Chaplin, Buster Keaton) and that he understood as a cardinal attribute of his own idiosyncrasy. Inka Mülder-Bach has emphasized that, together with the metaphorical foreshortening, the ironic statement constitutes the outstanding element of the Kracauerian narrative style, as a means to question and criticize reified social relations: That is the tone of “caustic resignation” that Thomas Mann highlighted in his brief reference to Ginster; the “disconcerting laconism” that another critic compared with “the immobility of the face of the great comedians”. Kracauer undress reality by describing it as if it should be the way it is. He surrenders to the current conditions, affirms them, continues to think about them… and thus reveals his “imperceptible terribleness”, those details of an inhuman normality that immediate denial runs the risk to overlook. As an indirect form of criticism, this ironic intensification is the stylistic equivalent of the “impassibilité” of the hero, who, as the author of a contemporary review aptly put it, “sees society through his own lenses, but these are hyper-transparent”.39

In this apology for humour— in the cultivation of a particular kind of Chaplinesque Marxism—fulfil relevant functions both the German author’s aversion towards tragedy (the Marseille Notebooks to a theory of film offer abundant evidence on this, as well as on the author’s predilection for the essentially cinematographic motive of “salvation at the last moment”), such as the conviction, confirmed in the study on Totalitarian propaganda, about the lack of humor (Humorlosigkeit ) of the modern dictatorships, in view of the fact that “humour could damage the fine networks of propaganda”.40 Also the Kracauerian proposal of a kind of Chaplinesque Marxism should be vindicated for a critique of the Jacobin austerity and seriousness predominant in much of the history of revolutionary thinking and praxis, and as a standpoint that has important epistemological and analytical implications. In recent years, has emerged in Latin America a reception of Kracauer’s writings that has gained increasing importance and assumed a proper identity. This reception is manifested not only in the publication of individual and collective articles and books, in the writing of doctoral theses and in the organization of conferences dedicated to the author—which is already significant—but also in attempts to turn Kracauerian reflections productive to approach social, political, cultural, philosophical issues of Latin America and the contemporary world. A sign of identity of these Latin American readings is the interest in developing, along lines that

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coincide with those proposed in this book, the links between Kracauer’s writings and the tradition inaugurated by Hegel and Marx. Hopefully this book will also help to awaken the interest of an international reading public for this regional production that is still, as Kracauer liked to say, in statu nascendi. The articles that follow are organized into two sections. The first includes a series of articles concentrating primarily on specific works by Kracauer—from the early study of Georg Simmel to the posthumous History. The Last Things before the Last –, and in which the concrete analysis of the works is placed in the context of the intellectual, political, aesthetic and existential evolution of the author, and also in dialogue with the historical discussions and with the critical tradition. The second part develops what we consider fundamental in our reading of Kracauer; it is a sequence of articles in which Kracauerian perspective is placed in a polemical dialogue with that of other authors, in particular, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. We would like to close this preface by expressing our gratitude to Marcello Musto and Palgrave-MacMillan for the invitation to publish this book in the series “Marx, Engels and Marxisms”, which is making such significant contributions to the development of a serious reflection on non-dogmatic Marxism.

Notes 1. Hansen, Miriam, “‘With Skin and Hair’: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940”. Critical Inquiry 19/3 (Spring 1993), pp. 437–469; p. 469 cited here. 2. We use the term in a sense analogous to that given by Michael Löwy— under the inspiration by Max Weber—in the first chapter (“On The Concept of Elective Affinity”) of Redemption and Utopia. Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe. Transl. by Hope Heaney. London and New York: Verso, 2017. 3. Vedda, Miguel, “Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx as essayists. On the genesis and the function of the critic intellectuals”. Gupta, Shaibal/Musto, Marcello/Amini, Babak (eds.), Karl Marx—Life, Ideas, Influence: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2019, pp. 3–20. 4. Adorno, Theodor W., “The Handle, the Pot, and Early Experience”. Notes to Literature. Transl. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, vol. 2, pp. 211–219; p. 216 cited here. 5. Ibid.

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6. Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project. Transl. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 388 et sq. 7. I take my own where I found it. 8. Cf. Lukács, György, The Historical Novel . Transl. by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin Press, 1962. 9. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Transl. by T. M. Knox. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, vol. I, p. 272. 10. Ibid., p. 273. 11. Benjamin, Walter, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”. Selected Writings. Volume 3. (1935–1938). Ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 143–167; p. 143 citated here. 12. Eagleton, Terry, The Function of Criticism. London and New York: Verso, 1984, p. 9. 13. Laube, Heinrich, “Die neue Kritik”. Hermand, J. (ed.), Das Junge Deutschland. Texte und Dokumente. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1972, pp. 102–197; pp. 30, 39, 53. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of foreign-language quotations are the author’s. 14. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Phenomenology of the Spirit. Transl. by A. V. Miller. Oxford, New York, Toronto and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 305. 15. Cf. pp. 127–142. 16. Heine, Heinrich, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings. Ed. by Terry Pinkard. Transl. by Howard PollackMilgate. Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 42. 17. Höhn G., Heine-Handbuch. Zeit, Person, Werk. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987, p. 30. 18. We are not unaware that the term was previously used by Alfred Weber. 19. Sartre, Jean-Paul, “A Plea for Intellectuals”. Between Existentialism and Marxism. Transl. by John Matthews. London and New York: Verso, 2008, pp. 225–285; p. 229 cited here. 20. Ibid., p. 238. 21. Ibid., p. 230. 22. Beauvoir, Simone de, La cérémonie des adieux. Suivi d’Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre Aôut-Septembre 1974. Paris: Gallimard, 1974, p. 15. In view of the existing English translation of this passage (cf. Adieux. A Farewell to Sartre. Transl. by Patrick O’Brian. New York: Pantheon, 1984, p. 4), we have preferred to offer our own translation from from the French original. 23. Said, Edward, The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 4. 24. Ibid., p. 2.

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25. Howe, Irving, “The Common Reader”. A Critic’s Notebook. San Diego, etc.: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994, pp. 117–130; p. 125 cited here. 26. Cf. Barthes, Roland, “L’ancien rhétorique”. Communications 16 (1970), pp. 172–223; p. 203 cited here. 27. Lukács, György, Moskauer Schriften. Zur Literaturtheorie und Literaturpolitik 1934–1940. Ed. by Frank Benseler. Frankfurt/M: Sendler, 1981, p. 114. 28. Adorno, Theodor W., An Introduction to Dialectics. Ed. by Christoph Ziermann. Transl. by Nicholas Walker. Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press, 2017, p. 2. 29. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Minimalforderung an die Intellektuellen”. Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. 9 vols. Vol. 5.3: Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen (1928–1931). Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach with the collaboration of Sabine Biebl et al. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2011, pp. 601–606; p. 603 cited here. We will return to this quote and the one that follows, in a different context, cf. p. 136. 30. Ibid., p. 604. 31. Jameson, Fredric, Representing Capital. A Commentary on Volume One. London and New York: Verso, 2011, p. 131. 32. Ibíd., p. 8. 33. Ibid., p. 54. 34. Ibid., p. 8. 35. Benjamin, Walter, “On the Concept of History”. Transl. by Harry Zohn. Selected Writings. Volume 4 (1938–1940). Ed. by Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 389–399; p. 389 cited here. 36. Heine, Heinrich, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings, p. 104. 37. Ibid., pp. 104 et sq. 38. Cf. in this book pp. 73–75. 39. Mülder, Inka, Siegfried Kracauer—Grenzgänger zwischen Theorie und Literatur. Seine frühen Schriften 1913–1933. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985, p. 133. 40. Kracauer, Siegfried, Totalitäre Propaganda. Werke. Vol. 2,2: Studien zu Massenmedien und Propaganda. Ed. by Christian Fleck and Bernd Stiegler, with the collaboration of Joachim Heck and Maren Neumann. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2005, pp. 17–173; p. 140 cited here.

Part I

A Philosophy of Rootlesness: The Young Kracauer as a Critic of Georg Simmel

1

In Defence of Marginality: The Essayist as Vagabond

The readers of Siegfried Kracauer’s mature and late work—a corpus of writings that covers four decades approximately—will agree with the following statement: it can hardly be found, among the German intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century, a thinker as essentially identified with the figure of the marginal as the Frankfurt essayist. Kracauer’s two novels focus on characters who embody, in an exacerbated way, that form of existence that the author designated as extra-territorial. This is outstandingly illustrated by Ginster, whose protagonist has marginality and alienation inscribed in his own name, and to whose existence the words that Kracauer used to describe the character of Robinson in Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night could very well be applied: he is “the poor devil, the suffering creature of our time. Cynicism is the weapon with which he makes himself heard”.1 This last observation highlights a critical and satirical potentiality with which Kracauer identifies and which he discovers in some of his favourite authors and

Translation from the Spanish by Cecilia E. Lasa. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67965-1_2

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characters: Erasmus, Offenbach, Kafka, Chaplin’s tramp, Buster Keaton, Hašek’s Schweik. Enzo Traverso has acutely defined the “social biography” about Offenbach and the Paris of the Second Empire as a metaphor for exile2 ; and Kracauer’s last book, posthumously published, presents a sustained reflection upon the foreign condition as a fundamental element for the comprehension of history; according to the author of History. The Last Things before the Last (publ. 1969), the figure in which the materialist historian should find his model is that of the exile: The exile’s true mode of existence is that of a stranger. So he may look at his previous existence with the eyes of one “who does not belong to the house.” And just as he is free to step outside the culture which was his own, he sufficiently uncommitted to get inside the minds of the foreign people in whose midst he is living. There are great historians who owe ·much of their greatness to the fact that they were expatriates.3

In a letter to Leo Loewenthal, dating from October 27 1958, Kracauer asserts that vagabonds’ life is “the only authentic existence”. In keeping with this, Benjamin, twenty-eight years before, defines the author of The Salaried Masses as a rag picker and, therefore, at the same time, as somebody who “stands alone. A malcontent, not a leader. No pioneer, but a spoilsport”.4 About the presence of the legend of the Thirty-six Righteous Men in late Kracauer, Olivier Agard accurately writes: The Thirty-six Righteous Men are also those exiles who live, in fact, by their extra-territoriality, in the interstices. They have a truer, more universally humane look upon the world that those who are prisoners of appearances. Erasmus is an example of this – who appears as Jacques Offenbach’s, Ginster’s distant cousin –; or even this authentic man who transforms the world out of his sheer authenticity, and who is remembered by Kracauer (quoting Kierkegaard) in the epilogue to History. Jacques Offenbach also, by his very nature as an exile, as a marginal, unmasked the emptiness of the phantasmagoria of the Second Empire.5

Related to this identification with the outsider is Kracauer’s critical distancing from the idolatry of community that he perceived in German middle classes in the late 1920s and late 1930s, and that would soon turn into a component of the fascist ideology. In “Philosophie der Gemeinschaft” (“Philosophy of the Community”, 1924)—a review of Plessner’s, Dunkmann’s and Pichler’s works, Kracauer expresses his coincidence with

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the first of the three authors due to having distanced himself from the “community fanatics” (Gemeinschaftsfanatiker) who think that “the phenomena of social life are the symptoms of decadence and that civilisation should be nullified under all circumstances if the community is to prosper”.6 Kracauer’s second novel, Georg,7 offers an ironic characterization of the German intellectuals who want to find in the idea of community some shelter from the individualism typical of the bourgeois era; the protagonist of the novel feels repulsion at the chatter about the community and really thinks that a community is impossible before men are transformed.

2

Vitalism and Kulturkritik: The Early Study on Simmel

These certainties define Kracauer as from the middle of the decade of 1920 and are part of the foundation of his most significant works. They contrast with those he used to state in his first writings, in which, under the influence of the turn-of-the-century Kulturkritik, he displayed both his contempt for the impersonal and reifying tendencies of capitalism and a longing for the traditional community, supposedly founded upon a shared ethos and upon concrete and visible social relationships. Under these intellectual circumstances was written the study Georg Simmel. Ein Beitrag zur Deutung des geistigen Lebens unserer Zeit (Georg Simmel. A Contribution to the Interpretation of the Spiritual Life of our Times, 1919), of which, during the lifetime of the author, only the first chapter was published, and which appeared in full version as late as 2004. The purpose of this monograph is to draw Simmel’s intellectual physiognomy, to show some features of his historical evolution as a thinker and, above all, highlight his specific historical significance. Kracauer pays special attention to establishing the fundamental principle (Kernprinzip) of Simmel’s philosophy, according to which “[a]ll the expressions of spiritual life […] are present in innumerable reciprocal relations; none can be removed from those interrelations ”.8 In general, men are not aware of the connection that singular beings, things or events have with the totality of life—which goes unnoticed for them. One of Simmel’s fundamental efforts is to pull out every phenomenon from its Being-for-itself and to show how it is inserted in great vital contexts. Encouraged by the decision to remove things from the petrifying isolation that deprives them of genuine meaning, Simmel turns the object from one side to the other

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“until we can recognise in it the realisation of a legality embodied in many places, and he thus interweaves it in major contexts”.9 A fundamental means for this strategy is the analogy, which Kracauer defines from the opposition between it and the simile (Gleichnis ): “the former gathers two phenomena that, from some perspective, display the same behaviour; the latter wants to express, through an image, the meaning that a certain object has for us”.10 If the analogy is objective—since it is possible to attribute it some truth or falsehood value—a simile can be the object of aesthetic evaluation: it is beautiful or ugly. This does not entail to underestimate the simile; on the contrary, Kracauer intends to justify the relative inferiority of the analogy producers: The man of analogies never offers an explanation of the world, he lacks the energy of the connatural idea; it suffices him to know the laws of the events and, insofar as he observes the plenitude of the events, it suffices him to couple what is similar; he always preserves his self. The man of similes has a less objective direction, he allows the world to act upon him, the world has for him a meaning he would like to expose; his soul is filled with the absolute, his self wants to spill towards it.11

Kracauer illustrates this polarity with a comparison between Schopenhauer and Simmel. The former is an innate producer of similes and, as such, he has the keyword through which he looks into the meaning of the phenomenal world with the aim of communicating it through an image. The latter, instead, lacks the metaphysical depth that would allow him to face the phenomena with the aim of granting them an ultimate value. As can be seen, Kracauer is interested in determining both the exceptionality and the limits of Simmel’s thought, whose raw matter is the inexhaustible multiplicity of spiritual situations, of psychic events of Being that are important within community life or intimate and personal life. Incapable of understanding the world from a higher metaphysical idea— as Spinoza, the German idealists or Schopenhauer have done –, Simmel is not interested in both the macrocosmic and the merely natural. History as a whole is not meaningful for him, or, at any rate, he does not seek any meaning in it. This explains the limitations of his analysis of capitalism: in the phenomenological analysis he develops in The Philosophy of Money (1900), Simmel sketches a precise image of lifestyles under high capitalism, but he does not look into their historical becoming.

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Attracted by small-scale work, by the psychological microscopy (psychologische Mikroskopie), Simmel conquers the extreme proximity of things at the expense of declining universal comprehension principles. By contemplating the object from the most diverse points of view, he loses himself in the multiplicity of the world, in the individual, without accessing an intuition of the multiplicity as a whole. Kracauer departs from the idea that there exist two opposite philosophical tendencies. One tries to conceive of the world from an idea and condenses the inexhaustible multiplicity of the real into a unity, but reduces the field of vision: it is unilateral. The other moves in the direction to the world. Here, the spirit enjoys greater freedom, but at the expense of declining the idea capable of granting unity to multiplicity. Simmel belongs to this cast: his ductility to adapt to numerous vital processes is linked to something negative, which Kracauer defines as lack of ideas (Ideenlosigkeit ) and which could be described as an exceptional receptivity, compared to an Aeolian harp. For Simmel, to know means transmuting into the analysed object: he does not aim at inserting each essentiality (Wesenheit ) into a fixed scheme of concepts, but at understanding it from concepts that are only related to it. Hence, the thinker from Berlin transposes himself into each of the personalities he analyses, be it Rembrandt, Kant, Goethe or Nietzsche. This asseveration could be reduced to a typological classification, but Kracauer assigns it a defined historical dimension: the tragic bias in Simmel’s intellectual personality can be explained by a lack of solid faith contents that is characteristic of an entire era that, like that of high capitalism, has exposed men to ethical and intellectual relativism. All the philosophy of Simmel is the daughter of uprooting; therefore, “in several hours of his life he must have been assailed by a kind of horror vacui, by a kind of nostalgia of the soul for the mainland and the limits, for a vaulted sky above him”.12

3

Capitalism as a “Global Condition”

The location of this tragic condition—both in Simmel and in the age of which he is an outstanding exponent—leads to a kulturkritisch analysis that matches what we see in other Kracauerian works of the period. For instance, the analyses that appear on the first pages of Soziologie als Wissenschaft (Sociology as Science, 1922) or in the review of Lukács’ Theory of the Novel (1920). If Kracauer introduces Simmel as the “philosopher of Western European civilisation in the state of its highest of

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maturity”,13 this is explained by the link between Simmel’s ideas and a time marked by the effacement of the traditional community and an “authentic” culture. Among men belonging to this type of culture there prevails. […] an intimate community of thought, will, feeling; they share value convictions and the highest desires, a faith born in the depths of their being spreads out on them like a vault and houses the expressions of their lives. This is unshakeable and absolute since it is rooted in the soul [Seelentum] of the community.14

Kracauer suggests casting a look on the Middle Ages to understand what can be achieved thanks to the unity and coherence of a great and rich culture. It may be striking that a Jewish intellectual belonging to the middle classes like Kracauer, settled in the anonymous uprooted existence in big cities like Frankfurt or Berlin, manifests such intense longing for the Catholic Middle Ages and for the feudal ordo. The important thing is that—as in all the significant productions of the Kulturkritik— the postulation of a blissful past provides the basis for an acute critique of the present. The target of Kracauer’s attacks is capitalism, which he does not understand merely as an economic system, but also as a global condition (Gesamtverfassung ) that constitutes the most intensely binding supra-individual force in the era of civilization, that is to say: under the dominion of a social structure opposed to the traditional culture. It is characteristic that Kracauer—in whom is absent, for example, any precise reflection on capitalism as a mode of production, or on the historical significance of the enthronement of abstract labour—puts all the emphasis on the dissolving power of money, and that assert that “in the process of separating the individual from all the areas in which it had once obviously emerged, money plays an important role; and, indeed, it fosters differentiation, above all, insofar as it especially separates the person from its possession”.15 It is equally typical that, among the effects of capitalism, Kracauer should highlight and deplore, on the one hand, the absence of a “unitary Weltanschauung that, like a vaulted sky, covers the whole being of humanity”, on the other hand, that the full personality (Vollpersönlichkeit ) should not find the necessary forms to express itself, so that “men live separated instead of joining together, the bridges between them have been destroyed”.16 Nothing expresses so clearly how capitalism dissolves the unity of personality as the hegemony of intellect (Vorherrschen des

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Intellekts ), and, at this point, Kracauer simply draws upon the relations between intellectualism and money economy sketched in The Philosophy of Money. Corollary of these observations is the thesis about the triumph of individuality (Individualität ) over personality (Persönlichkeit ): “man experiences himself […] as this unmistakable One, and his individual soul as the foundation of the world. His self becomes, for him, the centre; he is determined to leave the community, instead of allowing it to embrace him”.17

4

The Loneliness of the Wanderer

Original is the way in which Kracauer pursues the traces of this enthronement of individualism in contemporary literature: the most influential authors of the era of high capitalism—Hebbel, Ibsen, Strindberg—have excelled in psychological analysis, investigating the most minute aspects of subjectivity in unprecedented depth. But the recognition of this exceptional capacity is only the prelude of criticism: the human beings configured by that literature “are not types marked by their habits, their cast, their profession, etc.; they are human beings with various internal tears who suffer from their own way of being; they are creatures difficult to fathom, complicated”.18 For Kracauer, the positive antitheses of these characters are the “harmonic, balanced natures, which are possible to contemplate like a beautiful mirror-like surface”.19 Such praise for normal mediocrity, filled with petty-bourgeois accents, produces a strange effect when formulated by the later apologist for extra-territoriality. At any rate, as it usually happens with Kulturkritik, the positive parameters are always weak when compared to the respective targets of criticism. Using an analogy that Kracauer would approve, we could say that the difficulty for this tradition to construct a consistent model is tantamount to that of the problematic novel to construct a positive hero. The concrete thing is that, for the young Kracauer, Simmel’s philosophy is the most conspicuous expression of this era marked by relativism at every vital level. Simmel’s own ability to identify himself with the most diverse objects, safeguarding their identity and without reducing them to abstract schemes is, according to Kracauer, the other side of the absence of a solid intellectual personality, founded upon unshakeable principles. Thus, the sociologist who lucidly examines the ethical positions of the most different personalities refuses to openly express his own ethos. For Kracauer, the image that condenses Simmel’s entire theoretical physiognomy is telling: that of the

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Wanderer. This image condenses the entire characterization of the author of The Philosophy of Money: A man walks down dark alleys. From many windows, the lights shine and beacon him. He rushes into the houses and stops at every luminous room, sharing life in them for a short while. What never becomes conscious for its own in dwellers, and will never want to become conscious, is unmasked for him; his soul gropes for hidden connections and the underground mystery. As stranger who is not inserted into the action and reaction of those who are at home in those rooms, he is granted, in every place he arrives at, the power and the freedom to speak the unspeakable. But he is just a stranger who enters only to immediately depart. For this reason: as much as he knows about the lives of those confined in that place, he has never experienced their happiness. He is a thousand times wealthier than them, since he passes by them, close and familiar to each of them for only once; and he is a thousand times poorer than them, since – unlike them – he does not have a home. This man is Simmel: a guest, a wanderer.20

For any reader of Kracauer, it is noteworthy that these words could be used without any change to describe the essayist himself as from the middle of the decade of 1920. Equally noteworthy are his criticisms to the unsystematic nature of Simmel’s philosophy, a feature that substantially defines most of Kracauer’s work. But the author of the study on Simmel thinks that every person with unshakeable faith strives to develop it and that “the more perfect this development is, the more it is necessarily represented in the shape of a system”; the great system is nothing but “the projection of a central idea on the world, nothing but a comprehensive trend of thought whose coherence and unity reflect the exclusive and coherent essence of its creator”.21 Even without mentioning it, Kracauer rejects in Simmel the appeal to the form of the essay: so, when he asserts, with critical accents, that the author of The Philosophy of Money does not offer a philosophy—he rather philosophizes—and that his works “do not reflect the result, but the process of thinking”, given that “the search of truth is more important for him than attaining it”.22 We may remember that the figures of the wanderer or the flâneur have been frequent images to define the proceeding of the essayist, and that since its birth hour the essay has stood out for being a drift in which there is a greater interest in the path than in the arrival at a certain goal. Hugo Friedrich has written about Montaigne’s Essais: “the organ of a writing that does not want to be a result, but a process; exactly like the thought that here reaches

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its own unfolding through>writing”.23 Young Lukács, in his celebrated essay about the essay, claims that the real criticism is judgement whose value “is not the verdict (as is the case with the system) but the process of judging”.24 The later Kracauer will place himself along the line of Montaigne, Simmel and young Lukács. He is focused on the realization of essay writing as a form—as can be seen in the writings produced between the middle of the decade of 1920 and the beginning of the decade of 1930—or as a method—as can be seen in Theory of Film and History. The Last Things before the Last. In regard to essay writing as a method, we may as well remember some of Kracauer’s observations in his posthumous book about history, with which he aims at “a philosophy of the provisional situation in which we are”.25 Montaigne refers to his own writing as “a road”, along which we would move forward “as long as there is ink and paper in the world”.26 In History, old Kracauer explains the historian’s the infinite road departing from a quote from Tristram Shandy, by Sterne: Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives his mule – straight forward; – for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside, either to the right or to the left, he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey’s end; but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible. For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. [...]. To sum up: there are archives to be look’d into, and rolls, records, documents, and endless genealogies, which justice ever and anon calls him back to stay the reading of: In short, there is no end of it.27

A new Simmel, the historian put forward by Kracauer is a flâneur whose wanderings have a utopian feature. His work aims at “a Utopia of the in-between—a terra incognita in the hollows of the land we know”.28 For that, it must comply with a redeeming mission: to “[f]ocus on the “genuine” hidden in the interstices between dogmatized beliefs of the world, thus establishing tradition of lost causes; giving names to the hitherto unnamed”.29 There is no doubt that, among the predecessors of this utopian labour, Georg Simmel occupies an outstanding place. It would be pertinent to ask, then, why the Simmelian works appear so scarcely mentioned in Kracauer’s ulterior writings, even though in them is possible to see, in several aspects, an approximation rather than a distancing from

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the positions and the intellectual physiognomy of the author of Philosophy of Money. Jörg Später’s answer is persuasive, saying that Simmel “was always present in a latent way, it emerged from all corners, it was the basis of all possibilities in Kracauer’s work: ‘the portal that led to the world of reality’ (Momme Brodersen)”.30 In this sense, and beyond the political and ideological differences between the two thinkers—differences that it would be wrong to minimize—the mentor’s influence on his disciple became more intense when, on the apparent, superficial plane, it became practically invisible. Kracauer’s most outstanding writings maintain, in various senses, a Simmelian element on the plane of method, of the way of approaching phenomena, and perhaps this is more important than fidelity to this or that particular thesis.

Notes 1. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Reise ans Ende der Nacht ” (1933). Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. 9 vols. Vol. 5.4: Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen (1932–1965). Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach with the collaboration of Sabine Biebl et al. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2011, pp. 409–415; p. 411. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of foreign-language quotations are the author’s. 2. Traverso, Enzo, “Sous le signe de l’exterritorialité. Kracauer et la modernité juïve”. Perivolaropoulou, Nia / Despoix, Philippe (eds.), Culture de masse et modernité. Siegfried Kracauer sociologue, critique, écrivain. Paris: Ed. de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2001, pp. 212–232; p. 228 cited here. 3. Kracauer, Siegfried, History. The Last Things before the Last. Completed after the author’s death by Paul Oskar Kristeller. Princeton, NJ: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 1994, pp. 83 et sq. 4. Benjamin, Walter, Transl. by Rodney Livinstone. Selected Writings. Volume 2, Part 1 (1927–1930). Ed. by Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp. 305–311; p. 310 cited here. 5. Agard, Olivier, “Les éléments d’autobiographie intellectuelle”. Despoix, Philippe/Schöttler Peter (eds.), Siegfried Kracauer. Penseur de l’histoire. Paris, Montréal: Maison des Sciences de L’Homme, 2008, pp. 141–163; p. 163 cit. here. 6. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Philosophie der Gemeinschaft”. Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. Vol. 5.3: Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen (1928–1931). Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2011, 148–154; p. 150. All sources not in English cited in the author’s translation.

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7. Written between 1930 and 1934, first published posthumously in 1973. 8. Kracauer, Siegfried, Georg Simmel. Ein Beitrag zur Deutung des geistigen Lebens unserer Zeit. Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. Vol. 9: Frühe Schriften aus dem Nachlaß. Ed. by Ingrid Belke, with the collaboration of Sabine Biebl. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2004, vol. 9.2, pp. 139–280; p. 150 cited here. 9. Ibid., p. 153. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p. 156. 12. Ibid., p. 187. 13. Ibid., p. 243. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 254. 16. Ibid., p. 245. 17. Ibid., p. 251. 18. Ibid., p. 256. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., p. 270 et sq. 21. Ibid., p. 271. 22. Ibid., p. 224. 23. Friedrich, Hugo, Montaigne. Berne: Francke, 1949, p. 430. 24. Lukács, György, Soul and Form. Transl. by Anna Bostock. Ed. by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010; p. 34 cited here. 25. Cit. en Agard, Olivier, “Les éléments d’autobiographie intellectuelle”. Despoix, Philippe/Schöttler Peter (eds.), Siegfried Kracauer. Penseur de l’histoire. París, Montréal: Maison des Sciences de L’Homme, 2008, pp. 141–163; p. 143 cited here. 26. Montaigne, Michel de, Selected Essays. Transl. by Donald M. Frame. New York: Walter J. Black, 1943, p. 212 cited here. 27. Kracauer, Siegfried, History. The Last Things before the Last, p. 189. 28. Ibid., p. 217. 29. Ibid., p. 219. 30. Später, Jörg, Siegfried Kracauer. Eine Biographie. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2016, p. 51.

The Novel of a Melancholy Outcast. On Ginster

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The Crisis of the Age of Individualism and the Crisis of the Individual

In 1792, Goethe (who was certainly not one of Kracauer’s favourite authors)2 accompanied the Austro-Prussian coalition army in its campaign against revolutionary France. At the sight of the bloody Valmy Cannonade on September 20 of that year, the writer, amidst general confusion in the ranks, uttered some words that, with the time, were to become famous: “From this place and this day forth commences a new era in the world’s history, and you all can say that you were present at its birth”.3 This solemn aphoristic statement by Goethe—the great genius at denying time (Heine), the aesthete in love with the noble serenity and serene grandeur (Winckelmann) of ancient art; but, at the same time, for these very reasons, an enemy to the nervous dynamism of a Modernity, that he described as velociferic 4 —may well be seen as a criticism of the disdain with which the author himself had previously judged the French Revolution. In it, the author of Faust now saw a decisive historical turning point: the beginning of an era that may arouse sympathy

Translation from the Spanish by María Inés Castagnino. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67965-1_3

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or rejection, but which in any case represents an irrevocable and patent fact. In a similar way, the early twentieth-century scenario elicited from some German artists, writers and thinkers expressions of anguished astonishment at an unprecedented present that, while different, bore several similarities to Goethe’s statement. Liberalism’s final crisis and the advent of monopoly capitalism and mass society, the loss of confidence, on the part of vast sectors of western European societies, in the institutions of bourgeois democracy, the radical questioning of scientific positivism, with all its ideological implications, the “illusions of progress” among them: all these phenomena marked the conscience and work of the intellectuals of the period. But nothing managed to impress these so deeply, because of its unusual violence, as the First World War. Under the effect of what was, to his eyes, nothing less than the general collapse of the bourgeois world, the young Lukács wrote, between 1914 and 1915, his Theory of the Novel, a work that reflects, according to its own author, “a mood of permanent despair over the state of the world”.5 After a brief period of warlike enthusiasm, Freud was also shaken by a catastrophe of hitherto unknown dimensions. In the words of Rüdiger Safranski: This war, with its mass killings, unthinkable until then, and its explosion of destructive forces, signified for him [Freud] the end of the illusion of humanity’s unstoppable progress. […] With this experience as background, after the war Freud developed his theory of the death instinct. Significantly, he considers this death instinct not only as a psychological fact, but also as a cosmic reality.6

The Great War meant a similar breakup for Walter Benjamin, as may be deduced from “Experience and poverty” (1933), or from his well-known essay on “The Storyteller” (1936). Benjamin links the death of experience, and therefore that of traditional narration, to a war that, unlike the previous ones, could no longer be estimated in human terms: No, this much is clear: experience has fallen in value, amid a generation which from 1914 to 1918 had to experience some of the most monstrous events in the history of the world. Perhaps this is less remarkable than it appears. Wasn’t it noticed at the time how many people returned from the front in silence? Not richer but poorer in communicable experience? And what poured out from the flood of war books ten years later was anything but the experience that passes from mouth to ear. […] For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly: strategic experience

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has been contravened by positional war- fare; economic experience, by the inflation; physical experience, by hunger; moral experiences, by the ruling powers.7

What lies at the base of Benjamin’s considerations is the certainty that European changes in the fields of politics, economics or everyday experience were directly correlated to the way the war was waged: in fact, it no longer pitted armed men against each other, but rather subordinated them to the war machinery. Ernst Jünger had already described this new kind of war and its ensuing experiences—certainly from a different perspective than Benjamin’s—in Storm of Steel (1920), and had stressed the impossibility of explaining the new art of war, technical and impersonal, on the basis of the ancient individualistic and heroic war paradigms. A turning point in his memory of the Great War is reached when the narrator points out that the Battle of the Somme marked the entrance to a new historical era: it was like embarking on a different [war] altogether. What we had, admittedly almost unbeknown to ourselves, been through had been the attempt to win a war by old-fashioned pitched battles, and the stalemating of the attempt in static warfare. What confronted us now was a war of matériel of the most gigantic proportions. This war in turn was replaced towards the end of 1917 by mechanized warfare, though that was not given time to fully develop.8

Of this crisis of the individual—and of individualistic society—which the First World War made most acutely manifest, Kracauer proved to be a particularly lucid observer. His early writings (especially since his approach to Marxism, which was contemporary with his work on Ginster) are run through with reflections on the decline of bourgeois individualism, which had no reason for further existence after the violent historical changes at the turn-of-the-century. In an article published in Frankfurter Zeitung on June 29, 1930, Kracauer asserts that “the world war, the political and social changes it engendered, and not least the new technological discoveries as well have indeed shaken up and transformed the daily life of so-called cultured people”.9 These profound alterations have not been without their correlates on the theoretical and ideological planes: just as Einstein’s physics turned the traditional space-time system into a limit concept, so too history’s lesson knocked down the subject from the position of sovereignty accorded to it by traditional

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philosophy and psychology: “In the most recent past, people have been forced to experience their own insignificance—as well as that of others— all too persistently for them to still believe in the sovereign power of any one individual”.10 Just as the notion of the autonomous individual has revealed its frailty, socio-historical reality has ceased to present itself to humankind as a firm and coherent structure, so that a relativized self now faces a world “the contents and figures of [which] have been thrown into an opaque orbit”.11 In this essay, Kracauer criticizes those writers who, in the face of the individualistic Weltanschauung ’s evident crisis, continue to parade in their works the old spectres of great personalities, as if they existed and as if there was anything that depended on their individual actions. More than one author of novels and biographies feels, in fact, “the power of history in its bones and is all too aware that the individual has become anonymous. Yet these insights, which impose themselves on the bourgeoisie with the force of physiognomic experiences, do not lead it to draw any conclu-sions capable of illuminating the current situation”.12 But this conviction of having entered a new historical era, in which categories pertaining to “classical”, liberal and individualistic capitalism no longer abide, was not in Kracauer from the beginning. On the contrary, in his early writings, where motifs from the German Kulturkritik abound, we find a repeated lament for the fading out of traditional cultures and of fully developed personalities as their presumed counterpart. As Olivier Agard points out, the ideal underlying young Kracauer’s views is “that of the person organically integrated into a community united by faith”. In the face of Modernity’s characteristic dispersion, “personality (Persönlichkeit ) and community (Gemeinschaft )—the opposite, as in the formulation of the sociologist Tönnies, of individualistic society (Gesellschaft )—appear as principles of order”.13 Throughout the 1920s, up to the brilliant synthesis achieved with The Salaried Masses (1930), Kracauer rehearsed several alternatives in order to settle accounts with a relativism that he had come to see as a sign of the times. He offers a peculiar attempt in his essay “Nietzsche and Dostoevsky” (1921), where some reasons are given for the exalted fascination with the “Russian idea” that gripped the German intelligentsia during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The fact that “right now the great Russian wave has overtaken us [the Germans], apparently taking our ethos with it”14 is due to various causes, but sharing a common core:

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The glorification of power devoid of soul and external brilliance, so widespread among us in the pre-war era, the permanent overvaluation of the ethics of duty lacking in that which would have turned it into an effective link among men, that is to say, the underlying experience of love in it, the rough stress on class oppositions and all the mendacious ideology of the Wilhelminian era, all these degenerations of the German spirit had to trigger at some point, sooner or later, a contrary movement.15

Germany, tired of its own idiosyncrasy, sought to extract values that were substantially alien to it from Russian culture, essentially because Russia is presented, in Kracauer, as the embodiment of a collective spirit to whom the exaltation of individuality is alien. The idea that “the elements of its soul must make an effort towards personality” is foreign to the Russian community, the contributions of art, science and philosophy are not valued in Russia as “a pure and disinterested expression of individuality”,16 but as means at the service of the people’s welfare (Volkswohl ). The Russian idea, understood in these terms, was only able to provide Germany, in its crisis, with a corrective to the excesses occasioned by the intensifying of its own idiosyncratic traits. These are presented by Kracauer as an ad extremum development of the individualism that defines Western Europe in general. For the members of an intellectual tradition beginning, in Germany, with Goethe and ending up in Nietzsche (!), the decisive identity trait is a devotion to transcendental individuality, a love for great creative singularities. In other words: The belief that […] the higher development of humanity would equal the higher development of the individual and that, therefore, everything would depend on the formation of personality, is so deeply rooted in our ethos that it seems obvious to us […]. Our supreme ideal is that of man as creator, shaper of worlds, and, with a joyous devotion to this that other spiritual races are perhaps not capable of summoning in the same measure, we affirm without reservations every authentic achievement in this area.17

The basis to this ideology ascribed to the most reputable intellectuals in modern Germany lies in the belief that the German people themselves subscribe to the individualistic ideal: the differentiation among particular men—each constituting an autonomous world—is supposed to be, to this people, of such essential value as to hinder the birth of a collective spirit. It took a catastrophe as vast as the Great War for the Germans to begin looking abroad for a counterweight, thus, young German writers

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“look longingly to the East”.18 Simplistic definitions aside, some aspects of the essay deserve to be highlighted; especially this identification of the German “spirit” with individualism, in contrast to the kulturkritisch definition of Germany as a nation of community and culture—a definition often found in the young Kracauer. His study on The Salaried Masses will offer a more lucid characterization of the problem, showing that, in the German middle classes, a manipulation-prone collectivism coexists with an affirmation of the old bourgeois values of personality and individual formation (Bildung ) that is both anachronistic and discordant, given the socioeconomic status of these same classes. In any case, the author of “Nietzsche and Dostoevsky” is aware of the crisis of the old individualism and can only offer abstract proposals to solve the problem and return to the strayed-from path. A sense of loss regarding fixed reference points—ethical, philosophical, political—is more intense than any hope of restoring the lost harmony. By then, Kracauer is clear that the reality of the early twentieth-century has placed Europeans, and Germans in particular, in an intermediate, faltering position: “we find ourselves right between two worlds; we, transitional men, at home in both worlds and, at the same time, strangers in both worlds, totally at home in neither”.19 The allusion to homelessness is suggestive: ideological insecurity accrues in Kracauer less and less negative connotations over time. Although not without hesitations and occasional setbacks, the essayist evolved towards, on the one hand, a growing rejection of nostalgia for any kind of traditional organic ordo and for complete and closed personalities, on the other, a recognition that modern impersonal societies, in their contradictory complexity, can provide humankind with compensation for the loss of the suffocating security of old communities. It could even be said that this oscillation between a critical and a celebratory view of early twentieth-century Modernity gave Kracauer’s essays not only a particular identity but also an ideological and aesthetic richness almost unparalleled at the time. In works such as The Salaried Masses or “The Biography as an Art Form of the New Bourgeoisie” (1930), this development is already consummate. It would be fair to say that Ginster. Written by himself played a decisive role in the writer’s progress. The novel shows that, beyond his belief that the bourgeois individual has become anachronistic in the context of the twentieth century, Kracauer does not promote the termination of individualism tout court, but the development of a different type of individual, in accordance with the new living conditions.

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Kracauer conceived his first novel while in the midst of an intense examination of Marx’s writings, as well as of some of the most outstanding Marxist works of those years; in particular, History and Class Consciousness (1923), by György Lukács. Some of the Frankfurt essayist’s points of view on these issues can be drawn from his 1926–1927 correspondence with Ernst Bloch. It shows that he was refractory to attempts at reading Marx in the light of Hegel, or, in any case, to present him as an heir to German idealist philosophy. According to Kracauer, “crucial Marxist categories, such as those of ‘man’ or of ‘moral’”, can only be understood “if, as it were, a tunnel is dug under the mountain massif Hegel to lead, for example, from Marx to Helvétius”.20 Still deeply influenced by Kierkegaard, Kracauer highlights Marx’s materialist defence of physical man and his sensory experience in the face of the fateful abstractions of German idealism. A projected account of these matters in a work “on the Concept of Man in Marx” is mentioned in the letters addressed to Bloch. But, according to Inka Mülder-Bach, “this study was not concluded; what may have been written of it is lost. What has been preserved is the novel Ginster […] which can be understood as an implicit literary response to Lukács”.21 In the context of a widespread attack, issued since the end of the nineteenth century, on the traditional concept of Self—formulations as diverse as those of Mach, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler or Freud come to mind—this novel is, however, characterized by promoting a new, revolutionary model of individuality.

2 The Form of the Novel and the Configuration of the “Hero” The writing of the final version of Ginster took place between 1927 and 1928, although there are previous sketches, and two short stories published between 1925 and 1926 may be considered as outlines of the last two chapters.22 At the time of its publication, Ginster was a critical success; Joseph Roth and Thomas Mann, among others, commented on it favourably, and as late as 1964 Adorno considered it as Kracauer’s most important output, while the author himself also judged Ginster to be his greatest achievement.23 Following in Adorno’s footsteps, Inka MülderBach has noted as a characteristic feature of this work that, like the book on The Salaried Masses , it eludes univocal classification: with its “overlapping motifs from autobiography, contemporary criticism and philosophy, it is a peculiar mixture through which Kracauer moves once more in

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the uncertain borderline area between philosophy and literature”.24 The comparison with The Salaried Masses makes sense: the novel, like the study, seeks to expose the barbaric aspects of “normal” daily life rather than of exceptional situations. This defines Ginster’s position against the “war novel” (Kriegsroman) as s model: unlike other works of the time, such as Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa (The Case of Sergeant Grischa, 1927) by Arnold Zweig, Krieg (War, 1928) by Ludwig Renn or All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque, Kracauer’s novel does not focus on military events, but on daily life as a continuation of war by other means. In fact, what Kracauer himself pointed out, in 1933, regarding Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, may well apply to his own work: Despite the passages devoted to the war, the book is in no sense a “war novel”, mostly because, unlike the latter, it does not conceive the war to be an extraordinary situation, but an event only slightly above daily life in peace. In Céline, war does not interrupt the peace, but peace is rather another form of war.25

This peculiarity of Ginster as a “period novel” (Zeitroman) leads into the analysis of its most outstanding and discussed aspect: its protagonist. Even more than the New Objectivity’s antiheroes, the protagonist of Kracauer’s first novel is a denial of character as understood by bourgeois literature. Lacking as he is in any inveterate desire for economic advancement and social recognition, Ginster is the prototypical image of the outcast or the outsider: of the one who, in Kracauer’s words about Louis Ferdinand Céline’s Robinson, embodies the “poor devil, the suffering creature of our time”.26 The character, intensely inspired in the actual author’s own biography, embodies a way of life that is—to use an expression dear to Kracauer—extra-territorial, alien to all official instances. As regards this aspect, the character’s very appellation is revealing: “Ginster [Broom] is a thorny shrub, with yellow flowers, that usually grows between the train tracks”.27 This brings to mind the qualities of anonymity, frailty and apparent insubstantiality, while also suggesting abandonment and outdoor exposure as defining qualities of human existence under late capitalism. But there is another sense in which the protagonist’s name is suggestive: Bloch, in a January 1928 letter to Kracauer, referred to the character’s vegetal condition (Planzenhaftigkeit ), and Inka Mülder-Bach highlights that the “passivity, lack of will and weakness through which Ginster

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manages to distinguish himself from the men around him give him something of a vegetable quality”.28 Kracauer described his antihero as an “intellectual Schweik”,29 and Joseph Roth, in his review of the novel, defined him as a literary Chaplin, referring to the way in which “when faced with department stores, wars, clothing, the fatherland, both Chaplin and Ginster are perplexed and cowardly, extravagant and clumsy, ridiculous and tragicomic”.30 However, it is well to highlight the differences that set Kracauer’s protagonist apart, the author himself warns about them when he points out that his antihero is an intellectual Schweik. Indeed, Ginster is different from the relatively unproblematic character of Hašek’s Schweik or Chaplin’s tramp in that his alienation is close to that of the intellectual. This has allowed Eckhardt Köhn to rightly affirm that Ginster’s characteristic union of intellectual distance with practical clumsiness “makes him a Chaplin of reflection, always forced to go, through the medium of reflection, beyond what he can only perform incompletely through his outward behaviour, causing hilarity in the characters that are linked to him”.31 If the parallel between Ginster’s and Charlot’s characters is to hold beyond their differences in class and formation, it is because both, not so much in spite of their weakness as because of it, possess a powerlessness as mighty as dynamite,32 which supports Lao-Tze’s proverb according to which extreme powerlessness moves the world.33 This lack of self, turning the tramp and Ginster into holes (Löcher),34 puts them both in a position of weakness against the powerful and safe; but through the hole, “the human quality that usually suffocates beneath the surface, and is unable to gleam through the layers of the conscious self, emerges. Loyalty springs from that hole; an unceasing willingness to help shines around the egoless phenomenon”.35 Just as the tramp manages to ridicule the powerful through his naivety, Ginster, lacking a political agenda or a theoretical understanding of social relations, manages to satirize the selfconfident individuals of Wilhelminian Germany, who intimately still cling to anachronistic conceptions about the individual and society. His reluctance to merge into the current order explains Ginster’s horror at the “need to become a man”: All the men he knew had strong opinions and a profession; many had, in addition, a wife and children. Their inaccessible character reminded him of symmetrical contours, which could not be altered in any way. They always figured something out and represented something. Conversation

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with them imposed silence on some matters: their dignity demanded it, they resembled countries with borders. They never opened. Ginster found them almost disgusting; mere heavy corporeal masses, asserting themselves securely, resisting division. He, on the other hand, unlike them, would have been gaseous; in any case, he could not imagine himself ever reaching that impenetrable character.36

Ginster’s flexible, “gaseous” existence is the basis for his Modernity: while others insist on fleeing the world’s reification by taking refuge in an anachronistic cult of private individual personality, Kracauer’s antihero finds fulfilment not in epiphany episodes of inner confinement, but in those instants when, as Mülder-Bach maintains, “the walls that separate the self from the external world became permeable, when the boundaries between what was one’s own and what was other people’s became blurred, and Ginster had the feeling of having found himself for an instant in this ‘being outside himself’”.37 It is this diffuse, permeable life that the character seems to have conquered in the novel’s last chapter: the war is over, oppressive family ties are broken, and Ginster—now settled in Marseille—leads an anonymous and “extra-territorial” existence as an individual blurred amid the mass. Hand in hand with this wilful anonymity goes his self-recognition as a provisional and temporary entity. Indeed, the episode with the prostitute38 allows Ginster to discover something that, paradoxically, had remained hidden from him throughout the war: his own creaturely condition. His certainty about expiration and his acceptance of the provisional nature of existence induce him to reject the bourgeois attempt to create private castles to be walled, and to appraise the importance of open and public spaces. At the end of the novel, Ginster alludes to the horror that castles inspire in him; he sees in them a symbol of “human despotism that is petrified into such castles, and all the miserydenying orders. There are also, by the way, castles of love. Constructions should be demolished: the bad beauty, the splendor”.39 At the antipodes of such enclosure lies the openness of the port area with which the character identifies: in the port district “nothing is encapsulated; here the bare terrain extends openly”.40 Ports will survive over castles “that feel so splendid and grand” but “do not know death”; hence they must “crumble, disintegrate, until they themselves become dirt. I will not be satisfied before this happens”.41

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3 The Mosaic Procedure and the Recomposition of the Disjecta Membra Ginster, who is sceptical about the supposedly eternal values of truth, good and beauty, wishes to become a peaceful spoilsport through his irony, hence the correctness of Benjamin’s characterization of Kracauer as a rag collector: perhaps this is the image that best represents a novelist who has turned collecting the waste of bourgeois society and making a tapestry or mosaic with it into an intimate feature of his art. The juxtaposition of disjointed parts is, on the other hand, a characteristic procedure of this novel, and it shows to what extent Kracauer’s narrative art is indebted to the work of the allegorists. In his Trauerspiel study, Benjamin examined the baroque allegorists’ endeavour to recover those elements legated by Antiquity in a state of ruin, with a view to shaping new and varied configurations out of their fragments. To the allegorists, poetical creation was an ars inveniendi, disposing sovereignly over its models rather than producing something out of nothing. The look that Ginster casts on the world around him has much in common with this combinatorial art, mostly because reality does not appear to his eyes as an harmonic and organic whole, but rather as a kind of kaleidoscopic or patchwork image. Thus, characteristically, in the final chapter, that constitutes an apotheosis of allegorism: The arms of a mulatto woman swayed as if they did not belong to her body; in general, the individual parts went back and forth as if they did not belong to her body. A straw hat, teeth, and the tip of a pocket handkerchief produced a ready-made black man; the Muslim consisted there of a thick beard and a rubber raincoat. A chest, the red fez of a colonial soldier, inscriptions, the vest, the turban, the helm, flowers; Ginster had the impression that the parts were incessantly mixed up and established new connections, which then fell apart again.42

Benjamin also argued that, in allegory, the primacy of the object over the person and that of the fragment over the whole go together with people’s regression to the condition of natural beings and ultimately—as seen in the dismembered corporeality of martyrs—into things. Kracauer’s novel also offers significant instances of this: the characters in it are obsessively presented as objects or, more specifically, as automata or puppets. Thus, Otto’s mother “did not walk; she moved like a clockwork automaton; perhaps because of rheumatism, hidden under the clothes”,43

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and Ginster’s aunt, after her husband’s death, “looked like a night puppet lying absently on the sofa; as if they had forgotten to put it away at dawn”.44 In his soldier’s uniform, Otto looked like “an automaton”, and office boy Willi acts in a similarly mechanical way after Ginster induces a state of hypnosis in him: “Willi became restless, rubbed his eyes and said, like an automaton: ‘I must report that the first mayor rang the bell; he would like to send a puppy to Mrs. Valentin’”.45 Benjamin mentioned the key role played by corpses in Baroque allegory, and argued that “the characters of the Trauerspiel die because only thus, as corpses, do they enter the allegorical homeland. They go to rack and ruin not for the sake of immortality but for the sake of the corpse”.46 The aesthetics of death run through Kracauer’s novel, oscillating repeatedly between the tragic and the grotesque. An example of the latter is offered by Berta, Mr. Valentin’s wife, who, when asked by Ginster whether she likes to visit cemeteries, answers the following: I was once in a corpse parlour during the holidays – Berta said, frowning –. You know, corpse parlours are common in Catholic regions. The dead rest in glass boxes and they look magnificent. Like wax dolls, slightly yellowish. The girl in the confirmation gown was such a moving creature. I would have stayed there for hours if we hadn’t had to catch a train. Men fear death for no reason.47

The death of Ginster’s uncle unfolds in a different register: the uncle’s corpse seems to Ginster an object dissociated from the person, a reproduction or a copy. Before Ginster’s astonished gaze, the corpse “reproduced the uncle with terrifying fidelity; only the face seemed to be a little smaller than before. The tender scent that still lingered around him yesterday had dissipated. Its exacerbated sharpness turned the face into an object that Ginster abandoned apathetically”.48 Given the intertwining of art and death along the novel, it makes sense for Ginster’s main artistic work to consist in designing a cemetery of honour for the soldiers killed in the war. This objectifying of the person is also expressed through the autonomous functioning of bodily parts, which seem to take on a life independent of the protagonist’s will. Thus, during military exercises, Ginster is terrified to feel that “his legs were two strange walking sticks, which he had to carry along with the carbine”.49 After the marching exercises, Ginster feels torn “into two halves: head on solid ground, legs in

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heaven. Only little by little did he come together trembling in the courtyard”. More generally he feels that “without legs one could move more easily. In fact, they were also an obstacle to the usual way of walking, which Ginster did not need to do at all: while lying in a state of repose, he ran into them”.50 This perception of persons and of organs as things has a counterpart in another typical procedure of allegory: the animation of dead matter. Benjamin alluded to the importance of props (Requisiten), which in German Baroque works assume an independent life from the characters. Similarly, in Kracauer’s novel, things possess a vitality which the characters lack. For instance, Ginster is harassed by the furniture in his student’s room: “The objects, usually invisible, emerged from their hiding place and locked him up. The sink scared him, the side shelves were barriers”.51 The episode in which Ginster feels that a baroque castle is after him and manages to escape only with difficulty is both typical of the aesthetic employ of the uncanny and, at the same time, steeped in irony: “He did a round, exhausted, chased by the castle, which tried to force its way through the alleys’ interstices. Books harried him too; he decided never again to read Truth and Poetry because of the poet’s splendid youth, which he hated as much as the façade”.52 Dr. Oppeln’s certificate, which Ginster hands in at the medical check-up, also seems endowed with life: “Not fully unfolded, the paper migrated from the doctor’s hand to the table”,53 and something similar happens with the aunt’s glasses, which “differed from the others by the fact that they ran away from her and turned up in places she would never have suspected: in the kitchen, in the hall, even in the bathroom”.54 No less ironic than this passage are those in which personification is used to show that, in mass society, individuals have been reduced to functions. For example, when it is pointed out through an effective metonymy that in the district headquarters the “uniforms spoke, paying no attention to the people who had placed themselves at some distance”.55 For the rest, in a world where people are “fenced in by their things as if by ivy”,56 it is understandable for objects to assume “the habit of spontaneously changing places”, and demand “continuous attention”.57 In the novel, words seem to be as autonomous as individual organs or things. In an age dominated by convention, where people regress to the inert passivity of inorganic matter, what happens with the aunt— who “for instance, did not jump from one subject to another, but the subjects themselves passed by her with dizzying haste, like express trains

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by a small station”58 —becomes the general rule. The militarization of society during the war is well expressed by the fact that “The whole of grammar had been modified in military terms. The main impulse behind its transformation had perhaps been the need to express men’s character as things, a feature they lacked in ordinary language”.59 Significantly, the fallacious quality of big words is revealed when death is near. This happens to Otto who, tormented by the suspicion—soon to be confirmed—that he is about to die, confesses in his last letter: “Words covered me, until now, like a blanket: profession, duty, and all the others that held me and kept me prisoner, granting me no escape at all”.60 Closer to the truth than the other characters comes Ginster, who could be defined as a façade destroyer. Scepticism towards language is even more evident in the protagonist of Kracauer’s second novel, Georg (1930–1934), who not in vain is (like Kracauer) a writer in a left-wing bourgeois newspaper. Given his profession, Georg is in a privileged position to appreciate the inessentiality of great social discourses, but he is also assisted in this task by the invaluable insecurity of someone who has never felt at home with words, which turn false in his mouth, just as words melted like mushrooms in the mouth of Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos. His insecurity when it comes to speaking and writing—the basis of his linguistic scepticism—prevents the character from accepting words without questioning them. The passage where the protagonist’s frank scepticism is confronted with other people’s determination to go on playing the game sounds like a paraphrase of the Lord Chandos Letter: He always discovered the same thing; when he [Georg] tried to engage his whole self, reality slipped away from him and the words turned false in his mouth. The rest, too, could certainly see through exaggerated thinking or notice how untrue were the impulses of the soul; but it did not stop them from asserting themselves and even mightily flaunting their ideas and experiences […].61

Georg prefers to get rid of beautiful but false appearances and be nobody; nothing remains in his hands, but “then at least the nothing left him remained safe from decay”.62

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4 The Digressive History and the “Construction in the Material” Ginster seems to be a step behind Georg, but not much more than one step. The protagonist of the first novel has a demystifying power that affects not only language but also the whole field of science. This can be seen, for example, in his conversations with Otto: against his friend’s strict justification of the philological method as a means of determining the exact period when the Platonic dialogues were composed, Ginster favours a kind of errant and vagrant philology which yields unexpected results. The point of interest here is the incongruity between abstract theory and actual exploratory practice (“According to his theory, Columbus should have reached the Indies; he found America”63 ). According to Ginster, a hypothesis applies only if it misses the intended goal in order to reach an unknown one: Through your bamboozling procedure, you wish to find out the Platonic dialogues’ interrelation, and accurately establish how it all happened. It seems to me, however, that such hidden roads make sense precisely because they do not lead to their planned destination, but farther and farther from it, in the direction of America.64

Implicitly, this works as a proposal to transfer the typical behaviour of a flâneur to the plane of historical research, that is, to go through history in the manner of an explorer entering unknown territory without directions or maps. In his last, posthumously published book on history, Kracauer still upholds a method akin to that proposed by Ginster: an approach marked by detours and digressions which is, in his view, the only genuine form of respect for the discontinuous nature of the historical and material universe.65 Ginster’s reflections in a way anticipate those of Kracauer in History, but, on a different plane, one may well point out the analogy between the model of “digressive historiography” promoted by Kracauer and the structure of the novel itself, which shirks linear development and proceeds rather in a sinuous and evasive way. Distancing itself from the bourgeois model of Bildung , with its recurring influence on the novelistic genre, Kracauer’s novel by no means shows an upward and progressive development. The narrator’s remark according to which, in the present, “there was certainly no time to develop” may be read as an

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insidious reflection on the novel itself. By the way, Ginster’s only significant learning concerns his awareness of his own character as a creature; that is to say, of his mortality. The proximity of death, whose ominous presence runs through the novel, brings Otto’s scientific views to a crisis, and closer to Ginster’s ideas, as expressed in his farewell letter: Do you still remember one of our first conversations, in which, because of a theory I put forward about determining the time when the dialogues were written, you explained that perhaps the important thing is not for a theory to reach its goal, but rather to help reach a goal that was not even sought? I deeply feel how ridiculous my serious practice of philology was; I feel the total inadequacy of the great streets that have been laid out for us beforehand, and that led to this war. The place they don’t lead to is precisely the place where we should arrive.66

These words by Otto give the lie to formation conceived as a predetermined route, a one-way street. If Otto’s philological perspectives are questionable, so are the historicist views held by Ginster’s uncle. Throughout the novel, the uncle appears as a typical practitioner of the kind of historiography that, according to Roger Collingwood, writes history using glue and a pair of scissors. The uncle does this literally: The uncle’s work, for which the records to be used had been pre-designed, was written with the help of a can of glue. Each page consisted of several parts; either because a faulty sentence had slipped in, or because there were gaps to be filled. Some sheets reached an unusual length, like flags made out of rags sewn together. The uncle had started gluing at the tenth century and meant to go up to the nineteenth century. Since he had recently lingered for two years in the thirteenth century, it was impossible to predict whether he would reach his goal or not. The many school notebooks that he always had to correct stood like barriers in his way, at short intervals.67

The uncle’s procedure is a corrosively ironic version of the one favoured by nineteenth-century historical positivism, which Collingwood had criticized harshly for being based on the illusion that “it was enough to add up the recorded facts to produce a sense of history”.68 As Olivier Agard points out, this additive method differs from Kracauer’s construction in the material (Konstruktion im Material ), which he applied in exemplary fashion in his own essay on The Salaried Masses . Construction in the

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material diverges from the uncle’s positivism by, among other things, opposing the illusion that an organic restitution of historical reality “the way it really was” (Ranke) may be effected. Again, Kracauer’s favoured procedure appears to be like that of a ragman who collects scraps of materials and turns them into mosaics69 with no claim to a sole and final truth. No less objectionable than his fetishism of the facts is the uncle’s adhesion to system: his obstinacy in subordinating the particular to abstract principles.70 At his uncle’s insistence, Ginster endeavours in vain to read about “the available philosophical systems, which he usually opened to the final pages to find out how they ended. In general, he did not then go back to the beginning. Either they demanded a perfect world, or they took that perfection for granted. Meanwhile, the soldiers fell. Pure systems”.71 The uncle’s systematism is at the source of his indifference to his nephew’s likely death at the front, since he “did not deal with particular cases like Ginster’s. Universal victories and defeats were more important than private feelings of sadness”.72 The novel illustrates the recurring collusion between systematism and Germanic nationalism; mostly, it does so through the uncle, who condemns Ginster’s aversion to war: He could not conceive of Ginster being his nephew. He claimed that the individual had to disappear into the whole. He recalled the liberation wars and compared his own nullity in staying at home with the heroic deeds of the troops on the battlefield. This nullity applied even more to Ginster, who withdrew into himself.73

These are also Otto’s views at first, as he thinks that “the individual has to submit to the totality… now he was repeating everything the uncle had said […]. If Otto agreed with the uncle, he [Ginster] was doomed. The uncle’s condemnation could be overruled; Otto’s decision was a last resort”.74 This satirical questioning of systematism is part of a general critique of philosophical idealism, seen as the intellectual correlate of the authoritarianism that expressed itself most manifestly in the Great War, but whose roots go deep into the seemingly insignificant phenomena of everyday life. Kracauer’s ideas about the responsibility of intellectuals in general, and the complicity of German idealist thinkers with Germanic warmongering and totalitarianism in particular, are developed in several essays; also, in a lucid and ironic way, in the novel Georg. But in Ginster we find an effective satire of idealistic intellectuals, as, for instance, in the

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character of Johann Caspari, ostensibly based on Karl Jaspers.75 In his lecture on “The Causes of the Great War”, Caspari lingers on reflections about the essence of the different peoples and strives to present the war as a necessary event. In History, the late Kracauer questions those historians who try to escape relativism by affirming timeless essences that live in a lost paradise that they regard with infinite nostalgia, and to which access is obtained “by way of some subterfuge or other”.76 These historians “still believe [they] are swimming in the stream of time and all of a sudden [they] find [themselves] ashore, face to face with eternity”.77 Kracauer finds “[i]t is great fun to watch these thinkers move ahead toward their castles in the air. Somewhere en route they inevitably perform what to all intents and purposes resembles the famous Indian rope trick”.78 Caspari is an essentialist intellectual of this type, who also resorts to the aforementioned trick: the lecturer’s behaviour reminds Ginster of those university professors who “before tackling their real topic, always preferred to linger on an introduction that stretched to infinity; like the Indian fakirs, who climbed to the sky with the help of a rope. Generally, they did not come back to earth”.79 Caspari’s speech, while singing the praises of the world war, is characteristically indifferent towards the suffering of actual men, like that of the uncle and Otto. Ginster prefers his aunt’s way of thinking to Caspari’s, as it had the advantage of accusing some human beings of flesh and blood, while declaring the people in general innocent. In the event that she had been informed wrong, the aunt at least could distinguish good from evil. Caspari’s essences, on the other hand, eluded attack, since they were incorporeal and, at the same time, necessary.80

5

The Demolisher of Façades

The intellectuals in the novel preach the need for the individual to dissolve within the community. In the critical and parodic attitude adopted by the narrator and, sometimes, by the protagonist in the face of a fashionable collectivism, there may be a piece of self-criticism. Kracauer, too, had been dominated for some years by the nostalgia then in vogue for a medieval class ordo, before he developed a more ambivalent view of modern life,81 one ready to acknowledge its positive aspects and contrary to attempts at returning to extinct historical stages. A fundamental aspect of Kracauer’s evolution as an essayist is, as we have seen, the fact that, in his writings,

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remonstrance aganist disenchantment of the world is replaced by a positive consideration of the possibilities for action entailed by secularization. Instead of the initial longing for a lost community, there appears a reproof of those “community fanatics” who would like to turn back the clock of history. Both novels by Kracauer offer remarkable evidence of this critical attitude towards romantic Anti-Capitalism; both seek to show that “community fanaticism” is an ideological phenomenon that affected not only influential intellectuals, but also the middle classes in general, as they looked to evade a social rationalization that they found unilaterally threatening. In their reluctance to admit the positive aspects of individualism in the face of class societies, the middle classes fail to realize that the collective entity into which they merge is not a small traditional community, but the anonymous mass society. Except on rare occasions, such collectivism is foreign to Ginster. At the beginning of the novel, when he notices the expressions of enthusiasm from the “human tide” at the outbreak of war, his feeling is one of absolute alienation: “Suddenly they became a people. Ginster thought of William Tell, the word ‘we’ did not came naturally to his lips”.82 Locked up in a wagon, turned into an object, Ginster finds the inadmissible slowness of the train distressing, but also finds that the rest of the passengers unanimously agree (and are therefore tacitly against him) in celebrating the vehicle’s immobility: “The whole wagon had turned into a secret league that was happy with the course of the mobilization, and that, as if by mutual agreement, avoided certain pending issues”.83 When the troop is punished “because of an offense that Ginster had nothing to do with”,84 Ginster again feels harried by the community spirit: The entire community should always believe in that; it was like choral singing. At a meeting a couple of years before, a speaker, invoking the happiness of communal experience, had demanded that those present give up their copper objects and their children, so that they could be melted together. In any case, communities prospered at the expense of those who were fortunate enough to be part of them.85

Ginster, almost unknowingly and unable to explain it, experiences a sense of unease every time he realizes that people “always demanded that one commit fully to a cause”.86 Like his character, Kracauer was averse to abiding blindly by any kind of orthodoxy; in individuals in general, but even more so in intellectuals, he always valued as inestimable assets an

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independent judgement, critical capacity and the tearing down of ideological false façades. That is why History: The Last Things before the Last includes a lucid eulogy of Erasmus, whose writings and actions were both sustained, according to Kracauer, by the conviction that “the truth ceases to be true as soon as it becomes a dogma, thus forfeiting the ambiguity which marks it as truth”.87 It is not by chance that, when dealing with the great ideological movements of the past, Kracauer was interested in the time when they were in statu nascendi, before their final establishment and institutionalization. Adorno tells that, upon learning that Brecht had followed his play He Who Says Yes with He Who Says No, Kracauer declared his intention to write another play with the title He Who Says Maybe. In spite of his naivety and irresolution, there are instances when Ginster becomes aware of his own outsider quality. For instance, in a conversation with Mrs. van C. that seems more like a monologue: “I racked my brains often enough”, Ginster went on, driven by an inexplicable compulsion to speak, “thinking about how I am different from others. People are interested in their lives, they have goals, they want to have possessions and achieve something. Every person I meet is a fortress. I do not want anything. You won’t understand me, but I’d rather be diluted like water. This causes people to be removed from me”.88

It is suggestive that this character, who knows himself to be so weak and dispossessed, should have the ability to make the truth evident; as Mrs. van C says: “You are a strange man […] one is obliged to be frank with you”.89 In this character’s own weakness lies his destructive force. Ginster is an architect gifted, above all, with an extraordinary talent for demolition, and interested—like the Baroque allegorists—in turning buildings and cities into ruins. His statements in the last chapter, where his desire to pull down the castles of bourgeois ideology is voiced, are quoted previously. But the destructive nature of the character runs throughout the novel. It can already be appreciated when he is overwhelmed by the appearance of the baroque castle of W.: “Ginster would have liked to tear it to pieces, destroy its columns and undo the rows of windows behind which the splendid halls slept intact”.90 Sometimes the destructive urge is applied to the task of exposing the mortal, transitory nature of people and societies; thus, when Ginster finds out that his mother is getting old:

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There was a slight curving of the back, a tooth fell out, the taste for a favourite dish was lost; nothing important really, but there was no return. Soaked through and unmoving he watched at night his mother falling apart; she was being demolished like a building, while the hands performing the task remained unseen.91

The very emphasis on the transience of men and cultures recalls the allegorical art of the Baroque. In The Salaried Masses it is stated that the fleeting images with which the middle classes seek to stun themselves is “a flight from revolution and from death”.92 By making a cult of distraction, they would like to cover up the extinction of social institutions and, in this way, consciously or not, to keep up the status quo. Ginster’s behaviour, like Kracauer’s, consists instead in snatching away masks and destroying façades. The novel’s protagonist becomes aware of this through two fundamentally illuminating instances: his encounter with a prostitute and his contemplation of the dilapidated port scene. With the vendeuse d’amour, Ginster feels “what I had not experienced during the entire war: that I must die, that I am alone”.93 The experience recurs when he traverses the port area of Marseille and finds it to represent the closest thing to a home for him (“Here I am practically at home”94 ). The setting is far from idyllic: The rooms, one next to the other, opened onto the street; cages containing a bed, a chair, the glass of a mirror, a sink. Oil lamps burned within them; some had a poster up. The bellowing of gramophone melodies, sweet and strident, covered the bare walls, surrounded the free limbs.95

The spectacle captivates the observer, not because of some organic harmony, but precisely because of its motley dispersion: because it is offered almost immediately as a promiscuous mosaic. In this context, it is especially understandable for Ginster to find an ideal companion not in Mrs. van C., who is too burdened with bourgeois prejudices, but rather in the old prostitute “dressed in black and wearing a jockey cap, like a horse rider”,96 who serves as a sort of allegory of death. Everything in her appearance, which recalls the figures of George Grosz or even those of Brueghel, evokes a corpse; the face is “a powdery mask, white as snow, which seemed to come from the grave. If one had touched her cheeks, they would have crumbled, turning into dust”.97 The mouth “wide open, toothless, could only hint at an ironic smile. Like an imposing crater

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the mouth opened in the white dead landscape of her face”.98 The old woman’s insinuating, grotesque dance immediately suggests the danse macabre. In a way reminiscent of the narrator of “The Man in the Crowd” by Poe—an author revered by Kracauer—, Ginster leaves the cafe urged by a desire to know where the old woman is going. In the square near the pier, he discovers that “the woman’s dress was adorned with military insignia”.99 Like Poe’s narrator, Ginster finds out that the wanderings of the old woman, like those of the flâneur, lack a plan and an aim: “Surely she went out every day wandering from one place to another with the military medals on her bosom”.100 In this grotesque and lonely figure Ginster may well find the only kind of fraternity to which a melancholy and malcontent outcast can aspire.

Notes 1. Except for the first period of his production, intensely idealistic. 2. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Campaign in France in the Year 1792. Transl. by Robert Farie. London: Chapman and Hall, 1849. 3. As Manfred Osten points out, the neologism used by Goethe (veloziferisch) seems to merge speed with the Luciferian, apart from the fact that the term comes from the Italian language, in which it designates “those post cars and express couriers (velocifere) that had been incorporated in Prussia in the 1820s by Postmaster General Nagler” (Osten, Manfred, “Alles veloziferisch”, oder Goethes Entdeckung der Langsamkeit. Frankfurt/M: Insel, 2002, p. 33). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of foreign-language quotations are the author’s. 4. Lukács, György, The Theory of the Novel. Transl. by Anna Bostock. London: The Merlin Press, 1971, p. 12. 5. Safranski, Rüdiger, Das Böse oder das Drama der Freiheit. Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1997, p. 247 et sq. 6. Benjamin, Walter, “Experience and Poverty”. Transl. by Rodney Livingstone. Selected Writings. Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934. Ed. by Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 731–736; pp. 731 et sq. 7. Jünger, Ernst, Storm of Steel. Transl. by Michael Hofmann. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004, p. 53. 8. Kracauer, Siegfried, “The Biography as an Art Form of the New Burgeoisie”. The Mass Ornament —Weimar Essays. Transl., ed. and with an introduction by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 101–105; p. 102 cited here. 9. Ibid.

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10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p. 103. 12. Agard, Olivier, Kracauer. Le chiffonnier mélancolique. París: CNRS, 2010, pp. 23 et sqq. 13. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Nietzsche und Dostoievski”. Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. 9 vols. Vol. 5.1: Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen (1906–1923). Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach with the collaboration of Sabine Biebl et al. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2011, pp. 240–255; p. 255 cited here. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 244. 16. Ibid., p. 242. 17. Ibid., p. 240. 18. Ibid., pp. 240 et sq. 19. Letter to Bloch dated June 29, 1926; cit. in Mülder, Inka, Siegfried Kracauer—Grenzgänger zwischen Theorie und Literatur. Seine frühen Schriften 1913–1933. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985, p. 58. 20. Mülder, Inka, “Siegfried Kracauers Antwort auf Lukács—Versuch einer Rekonstruktion”. Unpublished article, typescript, p. 9. 21. Mülder, Inka, Siegfried Kracauer—Grenzgänger zwischen Theorie und Literatur, p. 126. 22. Cf. Kracauer’s letter to Adorno dated November 3, 1964 in Adorno, Theodor W./Kracauer, Siegfried, Briefwechsel 1923–1966. “Der Riß der Welt geht auch durch mich”. Publ. by the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Ed. by Wolfgang Schopf. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2008, p. 677. 23. Mülder, Inka, Siegfried Kracauer—Grenzgänger zwischen Theorie und Literatur, p. 126. 24. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Reise ans Ende der Nacht ” (1933). Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. 9 vols. Vol. 5.4: Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen (1932–1965). Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach with the collaboration of Sabine Biebl et al. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2011, pp. 409–415; pp. 410 et sq. cited here. 25. Ibid., p. 411. 26. Traverso, Enzo, Siegfried Kracauer. Itinéraire d’un intellectuel nomade. Paris: la découverte, 1994, 13. 27. Mülder, Inka, Siegfried Kracauer—Grenzgänger zwischen Theorie und Literatur, p. 138. 28. An allusion to the protagonist of the unfinished novel The Good Soldier Schweik (publ. 1923), by Czech author Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923). 29. Roth, Joseph, “Wer ist Ginster?”. Marbacher Magazin 47 (1998) [Siegfried Kracauer 1889–1966. Ed. by Ingrid Belke and Irina Renz], pp. 52–54; p. 52 cited here.

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30. Köhn, Eckhardt, “Die Konkretionen des Intellekts. Zum Verhältnis von gesellschaftlicher Erfahrung und literarischer Darstellung in Kracauers Romanen”. Arnold, Heinz Ludwig (ed.). Siegfried Kracauer. Text + Kritik 68. Munich: Text + Kritik, 1981, pp. 41–58; p. 42 cited here. 31. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Chaplin: Filmrez. Goldrusch” (1926). Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. Vol. 6.1: Kleine Schriften zum Film (1921–1927). Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 2004, pp. 269 et sq.; p. 269 cited here. 32. Ibid., p. 270. 33. Francisco García Chicote has drawn attention to the significance of these “holes”: “The notion of ‘hole’ refers, in Kracauer, to the Charlot of The Gold Rush: hole is a form of subject that, in opposition to the closed character of the bourgeois hero, connects with the weak cunning of the fairy tales. The conclusion reached by Ginster’s hole is that the rejection of war cannot take the form of a denial of violence for the sake of pettybourgeois optimism, but is achieved from a tertium datur: search and destruction of the fundamental determinants of war where they ‘dominate’, within petty-bourgeois relations, that is, ‘at home’” (El sujeto de la emancipación. Personalidad y capitalismo en György Lukács y Siegfried Kracauer. Los Polvorines: Ediciones UNGS, 2015, p. 165). 34. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Chaplin: Filmrez. Goldrusch”, p. 269. 35. Kracauer, Siegfried, Ginster. Werke. Vol. 7: Romane und Erzählungen. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach with Sabine Biebl. Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 2004, pp. 9–256; 139 et sq. cited here. 36. Mülder, Inka, “Siegfried Kracauers Antwort auf Lukács—Versuch einer Rekonstruktion”. Unpublished article, typescript, p. 11. 37. Francisco García Chicote affirms that the prostitute has “something of Sonja (Crime and Punishment ), because her sex redeems, and of Turk (The sentimental Education), because she is not a character, does not give affection and appears as a remembrance. […] Ginster’s prostitute is framed […] within the thematizations of moral tear of the bourgeoisie: it is necessary to go beyond two preponderantly capitalist mediations, poverty and money, to access a sexuality potentially not mediated by bourgeois morality” (El sujeto de la emancipación. Personalidad y capitalismo en György Lukács y Siegfried Kracauer, p. 175). 38. Kracauer, Siegfried, Ginster, p. 252. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., p. 245; the Italics are ours. 42. Ibid., p. 83. 43. Ibid., p. 224. 44. Ibid., pp. 88 et sq.

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45. Benjamin, Walter, Origin of the German Trauerspiel . Transl. by Howard Eiland. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2019, p. 236. 46. Kracauer, Siegfried, Ginster, p. 111. 47. Ibid., p. 225. 48. Ibid., p. 175. 49. Ibid., p. 159. 50. Ibid., p. 15. 51. Ibid., p. 43. 52. Ibid., p. 90. 53. Ibid., p. 138. 54. Ibid., p. 144. 55. Ibid., p. 218. 56. Ibid., p. 165. In an article that proposes a reading of the work—which it parallels with Ernst-Wilhelm Händler’s Sturm—as an “architect’s novel” (Architektenroman), Anja Gerigk has shown to what extent in Ginster’s very architectural designs manifests itself the animation of dead matter: just as the rows of windows of the baroque castle confront Ginster as autonomous entities, so the stairways drawn by himself disappear as soon as they are inserted into the built space; cf.: “Der Architekt am Fenster”. Abraham, Lena et al. (eds.), Fenster—Korridor—Treppe. Architektonische Wahrnemungsdispositive in der Literatur und in den Künsten. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2019, pp. 57–73; p. 72 et sq. cited here. 57. Ibid., p. 226. 58. Ibid., p. 156. 59. Ibid., p. 80. 60. Kracauer, Siegfried, Georg. Transl. and with an Essay by Carl Skoggard. New York: Studio Hudson, 2016, p. 268 61. Ibid. 62. Kracauer, Siegfried, Ginster, p. 37. 63. Ibid. 64. Cf. in this book pp. 107 et sq. 65. Kracauer, Siegfried, Ginster, pp. 79 et sq. 66. Ibid., p. 47. 67. Agard, Olivier, Kracauer. Le chiffonnier mélancolique, p. 60. 68. Cf. the way in which Birgit Erdle describes the mosaic technique in Kracauer: “The epistemological process that Kracauer outlines here results in the stitching together or in the arrangement of the individual observations to form an image that is not an image, but a mosaic: non-linear, non-mimetic, more like a tableau or a collage, in which the cut surfaces and break lines remain visible. It is only the construction that joins the details into a picture of the real—a mosaic. The epistemological and the poetic practice converge here. A material construction, not an image

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69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

of the real, is what Kracauer has in mind” (Erdle, Birgit, “Zeitdiagnose als kritische Praxis: Siegfried Kracauer 1930”. Yearbook for European Jewish Literary Studies 4 (2017): Diagnoses of Modernity/Diagnosen der Moderne. Ed. by Paul Michael Lützeler, Arvi Sepp. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017, pp. 127–138; p. 133 cited here). Francisco García Chicote points out that the uncle is “the typification of a memory that configures the world from a selective process that, insofar as it has to confront the objective world of universal history […], necessarily has to construct his images through increasingly violent processes, procedures of repression increasingly visible. […]. Hence the necessary character of his death: the selective mode of construction of his prototypical image-memory […] subsumes the collective history in the individual principle” (El sujeto de la emancipación. Personalidad y capitalismo en György Lukács y Siegfried Kracauer, p. 170). Kracauer, Siegfried, Ginster, p. 233. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., pp. 47–48. Ibid., p. 51. The initials J. C. serving as an insidious inversion of K. J. Kracauer, Siegfried, History. The Last Things before the Last. Completed after the author’s death by Paul Oskar Kristeller. Princeton, NJ: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 1994, p. 196. Ibid. Ibid., p.197. Kracauer, Siegfried, Ginster, p. 125. Ibid., p. 127. Cf., in this book, pp. 108 et sq. Ibid., pp. 12 et sq. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 189. Ibid. Ibid., p. 191. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., pp. 131 et sq. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 145. Kracauer, Siegfried, The Salaried Masses . Transl. by Quintin Hoare, Introd. by Inka Mülder-Bach. London and New York: Verso, 1998, p. 94. Kracauer, Siegfried, Ginster, p. 252. Ibid. Precisely, the last chapter of the novel in Marseille is in more than one respect the foreshadowing of a utopia; something that must have induced Adorno to propose that this chapter be excluded in the reissue

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of the novel in 1963. Characteristically, the European and North American reception has tried to hide this utopian component. Thus, Michael Winkler, in a clever article on Ginster, sees in this character an evolution towards pessimism that we cannot find in the novel, no matter how hard we try: “As a young man [als jünger Mann], [Ginster] still believes in the liberating alternative of the utopian. Later, towards the end of the war, it turns out to be illusory, not this idea, certainly, but hope in other people who share his feelings” (“Über Siegfried Kracauers Roman Ginster, mit einer Coda zu Georg ”. Kessler, Michael/Levin, Thomas Y. (eds.), Siegfried Kracauer. Neue Interpretationen. Tübingen. Stauffenburg, 1990, pp. 297–306; p. 299 cited here). But do we see the character in the novel as someone different from a “young man”? On the other hand, we often feel, when faced with the contemporary reception of Kracauer’s writings, that aversion to the utopian is less a quality of the German writer than of his postmodern critics. Kracauer, moreover, has not ceased to insist (and this can be seen in the late epistolary with Adorno as well as in the posthumous treatise on History) about his firm identification with the utopian principle. Gertrud Koch has pointed out, regarding this last chapter, some affinities with Sartrean existentialism: “In the chapter in question, we can sense Kracauer’s proximity to Sartre, something otherwise hardly ever mentioned—after all, the French existentialists and the Frankfurt School are usually considered incompatible. Nevertheless, parallels are obvious, probably stemming from the joint belief in facticity, on the one hand, and the reality of the imaginary on the other, not to mention both men’s affinities to phenomenology. In this ultimate chapter we find the admixture of intensified perception as the sensualist inheritance taken on from materialism and a sense of existential determinism; it is a mixture which therefore all the more radically spawns a notion of freedom. It is a combination imbued with a coda of its own, as it were, with Ginster’s move to Marseilles, and this breaks the framework of the prior chapter” (Siegfried Kracauer. An Introduction. Transl. by Jeremy Gaines. Princeton and New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 56 et sq.). Kracauer, Siegfried, Ginster, p. 250. Ibid., p. 255. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 255 et sq. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid.

Allegories of Improvisation: Streets in Berlin and Elsewhere

1

Under the Sign of Ambivalence: Berlin’s Physiognomies

Streets in Berlin and Elsewhere (Straßen in Berlin und anderswo) brings together a selection of Kracauer’s urban essays written between 1925 and the beginning of 1933 and which appeared almost entirely in the Frankfurter Zeitung, a newspaper for which the German essayist wrote since 1921 and whose cultural section he directed since 1930 until he was fired in 1933 for easily imaginable political and ideological reasons. Published by Suhrkamp in 1964, a year after the same publisher had brought out the compilation The Mass Ornament and the novel Ginster, this volume is part of a project, partially promoted by Adorno, to reinstall Kracauer in the German post-war intellectual scene after the long years of dense oblivion into which both the person and the work of the Frankfurt essayist had been plunged by the National Socialist dictatorship. In the context of the rebirth in the critical appreciation of Kracauer’s writings taking place in recent decades, the two books published in 1963 have attracted specific attention and led to provocative

Translation from the Spanish by María Inés Castagnino. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67965-1_4

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studies. Curiously enough, the same cannot be said of Streets in Berlin… Gerwin Zohlen’s critique continues to be one of its most specific analyses, yet, despite lucidly pointing out some important particular elements in the essays, it highlights general aspects and overlooks many of the most singular and substantial motifs in the book. Zohlen rightly remarks on the formal originality of the essays, which cannot easily be classified within a specific genre, but—strangely enough—suggests there is an essential affinity with the “philosophical prose” of Bloch’s Traces or Adorno’s Minima Moralia.1 This suggestion seems wrong to us: given its specific form and content, it would be wiser to draw a parallel between Streets in Berlin... and Bloch’s travel essays (especially those in Literarische Aufsätze) or Walter Benjamin’s essays on cities and urbanism. In the latter case, not only does the travel writing present similarities to Kracauer’s—one may think, for instance, of the essays on Paris, Ibiza, Naples, Marseilles, Weimar, the Baltic or even the Moscow Diary—but there is also the attempt to observe one’s own milieu through the eyes of a foreigner or an exile, an attempt whose most significant expressions are found in Berlin Childhood around 1900 and in “A Berlin Chronicle”. This double quality in Benjamin is also found in the essays of Streets in Berlin…, but there are other significant methodological and formal similarities and differences which render their comparison not only justifiable but also productive. Even more pertinent than tracing of parallels is placing the book’s essays in the context of Kracauer’s intellectual evolution. The second half of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s are marked by the author’s assimilation and identification with Marxian work and Marxist philosophy and, therefore, by his breakup with early idealistic perspectives. Secondly, the period is equally marked by the development of an essay form aimed at revolutionizing the journalistic medium, which earned Kracauer widespread recognition from contemporary audiences and critics. In the third place, both facts are linked to a general change in the author’s position towards Modernity: while the early essays were dominated by a global rebuttal of bourgeois civilization from a kulturkritisch point of view, from the mid-1920s a more nuanced and subtle position is adopted, one in which modern life is seen as presenting not only the negative aspects already pointed out by Tönnies, Simmel or Weber and taken up by Kracauer himself—for instance, in Über das Wesen der Persönlichkeit (On the Essence of Personality, 1913–1914) or in Soziologie als Wissenschaft (Sociology as Science, 1922)—but also, and to an

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increasing extent, room for freedom and possibilities for experimentation missing in traditional communities.2 The rich quality of the writing produced since the mid-1920s partly resides in the ambivalent or even heterogeneous reactions that the most recent political, social and cultural phenomena provoked in the essayist. This double appraisal of the modern times is also manifest in the essays on streets and cities; in particular, it runs through the Paris/Berlin polarity as approached in them. On one hand, Kracauer often exalts the French capital for having managed to avoid some of the “evils” of the depersonalized and depersonalizing bourgeois era that found no resistance in infecting other large cities. As Agard points out, Paris embodies for Kracauer “the dream of a Modernity reconciled with nature, history and tradition. In Paris, monuments are harmoniously inserted into modern life. […] Paris is smaller, more human, less [North] Americanized, more respectful of the individual”.3 There is evidence of this in the essays of Streets in Berlin…; for instance, when emphasis is laid on the organic growth of Paris, given the fact that its constituent parts “have developed in relation to each other, like the limbs of a living being”.4 These reflections are complemented by a critique of Berlin as an inorganic and chaotic urban space, whose streets— especially the central and western ones—tend to efface the traces of every link with the historical past. One of the most important essays in the book, “Straße ohne Erinnerung” (Street without memory’, December 16, 1932), underlines this peculiar aspect of Berlin: in it, Ku’damm appears as the embodiment of a time that flows emptily away and in which nothing can last. Constant change suppresses memories: shops and cafes, disappearing or emerging out of nowhere as if by magic, convey the impression that only one exclusive present exists, and that the past has been plunged into oblivion from which no power could extricate it. The proverbial madeleine of Proust could not redeem lost time in Berlin: “Elsewhere, the past remains attached to the places where it was lodged when alive; at Kurfürstendamm, it vanishes without a trace”.5 While in other places the facades of buildings allow for a reading of history as it settled upon them, in modern Berlin time carries everything away with it in its dizzying course: in Ku’damm, the facades are stripped of their old ornaments, which built a bridge between before and now: “Now, the stripped facades rise with no foothold in time and are a symbol of the ahistorical change consummated behind them”.6 However, through the initially devastating criticism of Berlin streets conveyed in the essay, some qualities crop up which are highlighted

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by Kracauer in other contexts and are even key tenets of his thought. Thus, through the allusions to the rootlessness (Wurzellosigkeit ) of the Ku’damm businesses, many of which do not bother at all to try and appear as companies with solid foundations but rather give an impression of improvisation, the reader recalls the intense apologies of extraterritoriality and creative spontaneity found elsewhere in Kracauer. When it is mentioned that the shops of Ku’damm come and go like people in a harbour, the contrast between (bourgeois) castles and ports and the celebration of the latter as sites for openness, instability and invention which unfolds at the end chapter of Ginster comes to mind.7 This allows us to better specify the ambiguities present in Streets in Berlin: the essays oscillate between a kulturkritisch nostalgia for organically born and grown cities, where history is visible in the urban setting, and a tentative of reconciliation with modern life, based on the principle that the current historical conditions and their immanent future prospects provide the only space for one’s own action and reflection. But this justification of cities having no memories is not lacking in complexities. Kracauer understands that the depersonalization and individualism of the big cities are born of a ratio whose genesis and workings as a perverted form of enlightened reason (Vernunft ) are examined in the essay “The Mass Ornament” (1926). Potentially emancipatory devices in the midst of urban civilizations should be sought in the rifts and interstices of the latter, at those points where the continuum of bourgeois rationalization is interrupted—an image echoing with Benjaminian connotations—and there is room for experimentation. From this perspective, it follows that the attributes of those cities without memories, among which Berlin stands out, are not merely the depraved version of a positive archetype represented by Paris but the original form of modern urban sociability: a structure brimful of contradictions and run through with violence, but at the same time it contains the only utopian possibilities capable of realization in the present in which Kracauer writes. This view of Berlin as a force-field is exemplified by the contrast between West and East. In the former, impersonality is shown to have perverse manifestations described through an aesthetic of horror; for instance, in “Die Unterführung” (The Underground Passage, March 11, 1932) the narrator confesses he has never gone through the passage near Charlottenburg station “without a feeling of terror”, given that it is “a strident infernal passage, a gloomy set of bricks, iron and concrete built for all eternity”.8 The horror is primarily caused by the contrast between

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the compact rational unity of the building, where every item has its specific place and function within the whole, and the dispersed human beings going through the passage, like scattered particles taken from a non-existent whole: the perfection of the system made up of inert matter reveals the imperfection of living chaos. In “Schreie auf der Straße” (Screams in the street, July 19, 1930), proletarian districts like Neukölln or Wedding, where political effervescence seeps through to the streets where demonstrators with red flags circulate, are contrasted with the streets in the West, whose inhabitants “do not make up a unit, they lack the climate which promotes collective action completely. They expect nothing from each other. They move forward uncertainly, without content and void”.9 In these places, objects possess a vitality missing in people; the screams unexpectedly heard in the streets of West Berlin, which terrify the author, do not come from the inhabitants but from the streets themselves, which violently express the poverty of their experience when they can no longer bear it.

2 From the Centre to the Faubourgs of Paris: In Search of Spaces for Improvisation It is revealing for this contrast to be also projected onto Paris, in spite of the recurring idealization of this city. In “Analyse eines Statdplans” (Analysis of a city plan, ca. 1928) it is expressed through the opposition between the faubourgs and the city centre. The crowd circulating in the latter is very different from the one circulating on the peripheries: this is a purposeless flow, made up of isolated particles devoid of common substance. The brilliance of merchandise in shop windows in the daytime, like the blinding glow of lights at night time, lacks a social purpose; the lights themselves have gathered for their own pleasure, rather than shining for the sake of man. Like Marx in Capital, Kracauer sees capitalism as an era when social processes show themselves to be what they really are: not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. Kracauer elevates the “ghostly objectivity” (Marx) of the Paris boulevards to the rank of a distinguishing feature of all great city centres: “This does not only happen in Paris. All great metropolitan centres, which are also sites of splendour, are becoming more and more alike. Their differences are vanishing”.10 The faubourgs, on the other hand, lacking

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in splendour, are both wretched and human; a communal feeling issues from this conjunction and is conveyed to things, since in the peripheries poverty “brings things closer to the realm of human warmth”.11 While the absence of opulence and splendour explains why the faubourgs have traditionally been the birthplace of revolutions, it also explains the peculiar distribution of crowds there. This is especially to be observed at the fairs: there the masses in search of sustenance enjoy, “between purchases, the spectacle of permanent disintegration of the complex entities where they belong. This spectacle keeps them on the margins of life”.12 In that open-air haven represented by the faubourgs, the lost existences share in a common life which is human not only because it retains the remains of the natural life that fill it, but also because that full life is lived under the sign of rupture (Abbruch). Rupture is the signature feature of the lower classes in East Berlin or on the Paris outskirts, and it leaves its mark on urban spaces. Through this break with predetermined schemes, these classes seek to avoid the unifying action of the ratio: bourgeois society, as stated in “Straßenvolk in Paris” (People in the streets of Paris, April 12, 1927), “insists on obtaining assurance beyond the instant and moves along a system whose ways are as straight as the avenues”13 even if that system is unstable and continually open to crisis. The people, on the other hand, evade petrification, “as if an unknown impulse prevented them from coming together in a legible pattern”.14 As early as 1919, Kracauer introduced his own social utopia as a permanent revolution aimed at keeping the community in a state of continual turmoil, so that vital creative forces and thoughts remain constantly active and reject consolidation of any kind.15 His reflections on the Paris people, written eight years later from a materialist perspective, retain the vitalist background, although it is now supported by a belief in the inherent transience of societies. If the flight of images promoted by mass culture represents a flight from revolution and death,16 as is to be asserted in The Salaried Masses (1930), the Paris people—according to the 1927 essay, where a degree of idealization is still to be found—do not seek to translate their experience into configurations aimed at eternal existence but rather into shapes meant to disintegrate soon: “The image by which common people are represented is an improvised mosaic. It leaves many gaps”.17 As a category, mosaic plays a significant role in Kracauer’s social theory; it crops up at a salient point in The Salaried Masses , when the author distinguishes his

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own methodology from the misleading “photographic” representations of social life offered by ordinary reportage: 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 results of reportage; rather, it is to be found solely in the mosaic that is assembled from single observations on the basis of comprehension of their meaning. Reportage photographs life; such a mosaic would be its image.18

A subtle elective affinity links Kracauer’s method for portraying social life with the experimental behaviour of the Paris popular classes governed by improvisation. It should be noted that the mosaic concept plays a prominent role in the “Epistemo-Critical Foreword” at the beginning of Benjamin’s study of the Trauerspiel , a book reviewed by Kracauer in very positive terms and that exerted a productive influence on him. Kracauer’s concept of improvisation bears similarities to Benjamin’s concept of allegory; in the Trauerspiel study, allegorical configurations highlight the transience of human history, the fleeting quality of its works and institutions. As explained in a well-known passage in Benjamin’s treatise: “History” stands written on nature’s countenance in the sign-script of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of natural history, which is brought onstage in the Trauerspiel , is actually present as ruin. In the ruin, history has passed perceptibly into the setting. And so configured, history finds expression not as process of an eternal life but as process of incessant decline. […] Allegories are in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things.19

The Baroque allegorists received their materials from Antiquity in a state of ruin, and it was their métier to compose new and varied configurations out of the fragments. Poetical creation thus became an ars inveniendi, freely availing itself of its models, rather than producing something out of nothing. This fragmentary and discontinuous construction is assimilated to the cult of improvisation carried on in the Paris popular fairs, whose dispersion coincides with that in the allegories described by Benjamin, also escaping identification of any kind with the idealist concept of beauty: Since decorative unity is absent, the whole is not present. Things are intermingled, reeling and absorbed, or they appear isolated, like dental prostheses gleaming in their cases as pompously as precious pearls. […]

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In any case, there is enough space between the exhibition pieces; and no matter how close they are, it is still possible to add many other things without the pieces noticing in their distraction.20

In ihrer Zerstreuung: here as elsewhere Kracauer plays on the term’s ambiguity, which refers to the distraction as well as the dispersion of the individual pieces exhibited at the fairs on the outskirts, while “if one approaches the more distinguished shopping streets” the pieces “fold back behind the glass and insert themselves forming shapes”.21 The merchandise on display in the streets frequented by the Paris bourgeoisie aspires to totality and beauty, while the people who attend the fairs, as stated at the beginning of the essay, live among things that resist their evaporating into abstract objects. This at once fragmentary and liberating experience Kracauer also finds in the bars in the south of France where existence loses all stability, as can be seen in “Stehbars im Süden” (Bars in the South”, August 10, 1926): “Thus, in moving away from the port area one loses a sense of the proportion of life that remains behind. Life breaks down into purely individual pieces with which the fragments of a different life may be improvised. The value of a city is determined by the number of places than in it have been destinated for improvisation”.22 The assessment of the perspective of the exile has, in this 1926 essay, an almost prophetic character. Its importance will intensify in the author’s later work, through the exile into which he was forced by Hitler’s rise.

3 Fighting Fatalism: The Peripheral Zones of the Aesthetic One might well ask what this apology of improvisation is set off against. Several essays in the volume provide an adequate answer: it is set off against the fatalism imposed by current economic and social conditions as a natural law. Adorno has rightly pointed out—contrary to what the essentially positivistic official interpretations of Capital have held—that when Marx refers to the logic of capitalism as a “natural law” he regularly does so from a critical perspective: that inescapable legality is a mystification, an illusion imposed on men: “The illusion signifies that within this society laws can only be implemented as natural processes over people’s heads, while their validity arises from the form of the relations of production within which production takes place”.23 Kracauer’s reflections are

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based on a similar reading of Marx’s work; hence, in his exploration of the Berlin employment offices (“Über Arbeitsnachweise”, ‘On the employment offices’, June 17, 1930) he asserts that in them the unemployed talk about production in a fatalistic tone, as if it was destiny: “Purely typical findings of the natural sciences, without a word of criticism […]. So it is, so it must perfectly be. Deaf submission to the juncture’s vicissitudes is a direct characteristic of the employment offices”.24 The employment offices, the heated rooms for the homeless and the waiting room of the Münzstraße movie theater in this volume are the urban settings closest to the (Berlin) underworld. In the antipodes there are a number of artistic practices that, as usual in Kracauer, do not belong in the cultural sphere consecrated by the cultured bourgeoisie but—as is often the case in Kafka—in the peripheral, marginal areas of the aesthetic. In them, improvisational activities and mosaic construction, those features arising almost spontaneously in the Paris faubourgs or the East Berlin neighbourhoods, become a deliberate constructive principle. This can be noted in “Drei Pierrots schlendern” (Three Pierrots wander, October 14, 1926) where the clowns of the Cirque d’hiver in Paris display in their acrobatics structures that, in line with the baroque allegories, do not build on organicity of any kind: the pleats in their pants, the white buttons, their slightly separated fingers are lines, dots and surfaces in a construction obliterating even the slightest trace of the human. They shape “a monogram in an unknown language that researchers cannot decipher. The hieroglyph stands solemnly in the void. The spaces it leaves free are decorative”.25 This concept of art is more explicitly developed in “Akrobat – schöön” (“Acrobat… beautiful”, October 25, 1932) where the clowns’ number is presented as a correlate of the author’s poetics in a barely veiled way. In the number by the three Andreu-Rivels, their inversion of the established hierarchies of the essential and the accessory is decisive: while apparently busy building a bridge, their actions are devoted to preventing the achievement of that purpose. Nothing could be further from the concept of an organic and closed work or—coincidentally—from the bourgeois ratio: “It is as if, in a baroque park, one was forced to spurn the grand perspectives aimed at by its design for the benefit of the unintended effects offered perhaps in the side paths”.26 In the clowns’ art, as in Chaplin’s—who is explicitly alluded to in this essay—the usual order is reduced to a trifle while what seemed to be a trifle is pushed towards the centre.

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This remark is based on a cardinal principle in Kracauer’s thought: in his view, the relationship between the essential and the accessory is altered in ordinary experience, and it is the function of art and critical reflection to bring reality back to its true position and proportions. This redemptive work on the apparently accessory requires a peculiar combination of humour and melancholy; a combination often noted in Kracauer himself and in some of his most prominent tutelary shadows: Chaplin’s tramp, Offenbach, the protagonists of his two novels (Ginster and Georg)… This coincidence is emphasized in the essay about the Andreu-Rivel show: Melancholy and humour are only two means of expression for the same behaviour, conditioning them so effectively that there almost cannot be the one without the other. […] As clowns, the Andreu-Rivel understandably push the melancholy element into the background and sabotage the building of the bridge in a purely comic way. Undoubtedly, they behave […] like children continually in need to play and stray.27

The insistence on straying (abschweifen) is crucial: while the building of the bridge would be essential in a ratio-driven practice, in Kracauer’s view, this ludic activity based on a true cult of digression is linked to a deeper essence that does not belong in the realm of the irrational, but in a broader and deeper concept of rationality than the one guiding purposeful actions. This perspective anticipates later developments in Kracauer’s thought. For instance, in History. The Last Things before the Last (published in 1969), the historian’s journey is equated to that of the narrator in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It is not by chance that Tristram Shandy is mentioned in the Andreu-Rivel essay, written over three decades earlier. Yet it is advisable to examine in more detail the constellation of childhood and digression here proposed, as it is connected with Kracauer’s reflections on the emancipatory efficacy of the fairy tale running through his writings of this period: what the clowns’ art makes evident is the strict logic behind childish ideas and thoughts. Adults often consider children to be absent-minded or inattentive, but this is so because they do not perceive that the children’s “dispersion” is not arbitrary but intensely coheren. They fail to realize that the fantasies born out of distraction are under strict control, and that the flow of arabesques follows a regulated course:

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But is it not really the case that these whimsical childish associations are actually completely interconnected and by no means whimsically developed? Are they not carried out, in fact, on the basis of the legality that remains unnoticed only because unconditioned by the awakened conscience and the crucial goals of adults?28

The puerile logic regained through the clowns’ conscious and deliberate action is not the one considered “normal” by Modernity, but that of fairy tales (Märchen): by virtue of this particular rationality ruling infantile and artistic practice, there emerges a kind of reality related to the apparent reality of ordinary life in the same way as dreams and fairy tales. Hence the provoking nature of the bridge built through the rigorous childishness of the clowns, greater than that of any actual material bridge: it could be easily crossed, thanks to some acrobatic exercises, by human beings freed from seriousness and introversion.

4

Allegorization of Melancholy: “Memory of a Parisian Street”

“Erinnerung an eine Pariser Straße” (Memory of a Parisian Street, November 9, 1930), the first essay in the collection, is especially important because of its aesthetic qualities which allow for a comparison with Benjamin’s best city essays, but also because it displays key aspects of Kracauer’s urban ethnography. It may be read as an autobiographical essay or as narrative fiction—it bears many similarities with the novel Ginster – and it is one of the several instances where Kracauer rewrites Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”. The narrator is, in fact, a flâneur who begins by confessing his affinity with the proletarian neighbourhoods of Paris— in this case the Quartier Grenelle, to which he is irresistibly drawn by chance and inebriation (Rausch). The importance of this term need not be emphasized: it is also crucial in Benjamin, and it has permeated the entire German cultural sphere since the second half of the nineteenth century. What must be borne in mind is the state of bewilderment of the intelligence—bewilderment of Verstand and ratio—it describes, which oscillates between literal drunkenness and Bacchic fury. The winding path traced by the flâneur, like the children’s games or the clowns’ acrobatics, does not answer to a narrow rationality but neither is it aimless (ziellos ): it has a precise destination, albeit a forgotten one, and is looking for it like a word at the tip of the tongue that one cannot find. Thus, there

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is to it an element of the Proustian recherche and of the psychoanalytic search for that which has been erased through repression; that is why the walker does not only move in space but often exceeds spatial limits and enters time. The narrative Wendepunkt is reached when the narrator feels besieged by an abandoned theatre and finds a perpendicular backstreet opening up at the end of what looked like a blind alley. What should be interpreted as a productive contradiction is here introduced in the essay: at the beginning the flâneur had insisted that Paris streets, unlike those in other cities, scoff at decomposition into heterogeneous elements. They are always organically interconnected, like the limbs of living beings. But as soon as he enters the street where the unheard-of event (Goethe) of history takes place, the scene is stripped of symbolic organicity and offers the heterogeneous dispersion of allegorical figuration as defined by Benjamin in his treatise on the Trauerspiel and as previously discussed here. The essay revives devices formerly employed in Ginster as it presents a scene where inert matter, like the stage props in the Trauerspiele, possesses a vitality and autonomy that people lack. At first the flâneur feels trapped by the street: “I realized invisible nets were holding me back. The street I was in would not set me free”.29 The scene, like many in Ginster, appeals to typical procedures of the aesthetics of horror: semi-paralyzed, the walker laboriously manages to approach a half-demolished hotel whose façade—like the House of Usher’s—looks like a human face, or better still, a skull: “its windows, behind which the curtains were mostly missing, looked like toothless mouths”.30 To his surprise, the narrator suddenly realizes that he is being watched from the nearby windows by a number of people looking and behaving like ghosts: “A horrible power emanated from their mere presence, and I was almost certain that they were the ones who had chained me. As they remained mute and motionless, it seemed to me that they had been bred by the houses themselves”.31 As he slowly advances, like in a nightmare or a horror film, to the end of the street it crosses his mind that maybe the women beckoning him from the windows are not ghosts but prostitutes, and then, more relaxed, he prepares to exclaim something. But then he is abruptly stopped by a tableau vivant (“ein lebendes Bild”) standing in his way as “punishment for his recklessness”.32 It is a hotel room with open windows, through which it is possible to see a bed that has been slept in, a sink and a cupboard. The objects remain fixed, as if rooted, and stare at me as insistently as if they had been painted

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in extremely light colors. The dirty washing water is a pond without a drain; the cupboard shamelessly exposes its scratches and cracks.33

In the middle of the room, a young man sits on a chair, his head in his hands, before a half-closed suitcase into which some soiled clothes have been carelessly thrown. The young man with tousled hair is as indifferent to the flâneur observing him as to his own suitcase: “Nothing is present for him; in total solitude he remains seated on his little chair, amid the void. He is frightened; it is fear that paralyzes him…”34 This tableau vivant takes up elements from the large iconographic tradition of allegorized melancholy: the dilapidated and decadent setting, the dispersed and disorderly objects, the solitary forlorn figure sitting with bowed head in hands recall various figurations of the saturnine mood, but mostly Dürer’s famous Melencolia I , a work that fascinated the European intellectual scene in the first decades of the twentieth century: in addition to playing a role in the Trauerspiel study, in Aby Warburg’s research and in the famous study by Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl—to mention only a few significant representations—it profoundly influenced Sartre when writing La Nausée, whose original title was meant to be, precisely, Melencolia I . The angelic figure consumed with ennui, with his cheek resting on his fist, surrounded by measuring instruments and construction pieces and accompanied by a haggard dog, has gone down in history as an emblem of the tedium of Modernity. Kracauer’s identification with atra bilis is dealt with in greater detail in another article in this book35 ; what is meant to be highlighted here is that the almost supernatural terrors in this street and the living picture of the melancholic, as in certain horror stales, or in some short stories and essays by Borges, represent a kind of journey through time or even beyond time. The configuration of the proletarian neighbourhoods, the narrator presented as a flâneur, the ghostly images of prostitutes and criminals, the characterization of the melancholy subject itself, all these motifs refer to a setting recurrently associated with them: the Paris of the Second Empire, analysed in Benjamin’s studies on Baudelaire and in the drafts of his work on the Paris Arcades, but also in Kracauer’s Offenbach. What is particular about the situation described in this essay is that the street, the room in which the melancholy figure is found and the figure itself assume, in the narrator’s description, fantastic nuances that seem to pluck the situation out of contingent time and project it towards a kind of momentary (and fictitious?) timelessness. The impression of unreality is broken when the sudden apparition of a group of schoolchildren brings

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the flâneur back to regular life. The spectral aura seems to have vanished and the disturbing street happily left behind, when suddenly “the cloud disintegrated” and the melancholy figure reappears before the eyes of the observer, as if outside time: The young man in the hotel room: the extremely vivid image had remained untouched by time. The young man was still sitting in his chair in the room. The suitcase is still half packed, as before; the washing water had not been thrown out. And the seated person continued to have his head supported by his hand.36

This sense of timelessness is an essential ingredient in the construction of the urban setting as unheimlich. The feeling of unreality experienced by the narrator recalls in very concrete terms Borges’s description of feeling in death (“sentirse en muerte”) in The Language of the Argentines (1928) and later in A History of Eternity: a young Borges, in the course of a nocturnal flânerie through the southern neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires, sees a pink-coloured wall that seems to radiate its own light. It is then the narrator feels as if he had been pulled from his immediate space and time and fantastically projected into eternity: The easy thought I’m in eighteen-something-odd ceased to be a few approximate words and deepened into reality. I felt dead, I felt like an abstract perceiver of the world: an indefinite fear imbued with science that is metaphysics’ best clarity. I did not believe, no, that I had gone up the presumptive waters of Time; I rather suspected myself in possession of the reticent or absent meaning of the inconceivable word eternity. Only later did I come to define that imagination.37

The experience of Kracauer’s walker is very close to this feeling in death (sentirse en muerte): at the sight of the dejected young man surrounded by scattered poverty-stricken objects, he again disbelieves the solidity of reality: “Against my will, I feel the wall of the hotel building: it is solid and made of stone”.38 Meanwhile, it is dark, and the narrator discovers that the children have vanished; only their laughter continues to be heard, and he runs after it, clinging to it for salvation. The street closes again behind his back. This memory of a Paris street, approaching the great literature of horror, in a certain resemblance to the Berlin underground tunnel, concludes with a reflection on the vitality of Paris streets, each of which— unlike the bland impersonality of other European cities—has its own

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aroma and history. The past lives on in the present in them, just as, conversely, there are always glimpses of the past in Paris’s present. In the construction of this collection of essays, the memory of a Paris street is thus strictly the reverse of the street without memory.

Notes 1. Zohlen, Gerwin, “Text-Straßen. Zur Theorie der Stadtlektüre bei Siegfried Kracauer”; Arnold, Heinz Ludwig (ed.), Siegfried Kracauer. Text + Kritik 68. Munich: Text + Kritik, 1981, pp. 62–72; cf. p. 62. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of foreign-language quotations are the author’s. 2. It is remarkable how, in the critical reception of Kracauer’s mature work, the negative aspects continue to stand out, and not the utopian ones that the German essayist recognizes in Modernity. In an otherwise extremely subtle analysis of Streets in Berlin and Elsewhere, Graeme Gilloch argues that “Kracauer’s critique of mass culture and distraction unmistakably prefigures Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘culture industry’ thesis”, Siegfried Kracauer. Our Companion in Misfortune. Cambridge, UK and Malden, USA: Polity Press, 2015, p. 83. Para Kracauer, según Gilloch. “Autonomy, spontaneity and distinction have no place in the modern world of heteronomous and homogeneous entertainment” (ibid.). According to this interpretation, the vision of Modernity offered in the volume of essays is apocalyptic and, in this sense, consistent with the kulturkritisch interpretation developed in the early essays: “the disenchanted cityscape of Kracauer’s time as the fully recognizable precursor of our own; an urban environment and existence beset by abstractness and alienation, by reification and ruination; modernity as myth, progress as catastrophe” (p. 82). Kracauer’s gaze “privileges the spontaneous, the improvised and the contingent in opposition to the predictable, the predetermined and the routinized—in short, those features characteristic of modern mass metropolitan culture” (p. 88). Gilloch’s interpretation—which not in vain presents Kracauer as a companion in misfortune—overlooks that the scenarios of contingency and improvisation are precisely products of Modernity itself, and that what makes the mature Kracauerian perspective at the same time dialectical and productive is the intention of considering modern times as essentially contradictory and, therefore, susceptible to contain both infernal and utopian dimensions. 3. Agard, Olivier, Kracauer. Le chiffonnier mélancolique. París: CNRS, 2010, pp. 168 et sq. 4. Kracauer, Siegfried, Straßen in Berlin und anderswo. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1964, p. 9. In order to maintain the unity of the book of

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

1964, our citations refer to this edition, and not to volumes 5.1–5.4 of Kracauer’s Werke. Ibid, p. 23. Ibid. Cf. in this book pp. 37–93. Kracauer, Siegfried, Straßen in Berlin und anderswo, p. 49. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 128. Ibid. Cf. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Sind Menschenliebe, Gerechtigkeit und Duldsamkeit an eine bestimmte Staatsform geknüpft, und welche Staatsform gibt die beste Gewähr für ihre Durchführung? Eine Abhandlung”. Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. Vol. 9: Frühe Schriften aus dem Nachlaß. Ed. by Ingrid Belke with Sabine Biebl. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2004, vol. 9.2, pp. 78–136. Kracauer, Siegfried, The Salaried Masses . Transl. by Quintin Hoare and Introd. by Inka Mülder-Bach. London and New York: Verso, 1998, p. 94. Kracauer, Siegfried, Straßen in Berlin und anderswo, p. 128. Kracauer, Siegfried, The Salaried Masses , p. 32. Benjamin, Walter, Origin of the German Trauerspiel . Transl. by Howard Eiland. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2019, p. 188. Kracauer, Siegfried, Straßen in Berlin und anderswo, p. 129. Ibid. Ibid., p. 68; Emphasis mine. Adorno, Theodor W., History and Freedom. Lectures 1964–1965. Ed. by Rolf Tiedemann. and Transl. by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006, p. 118. Kracauer, Siegfried, Straßen in Berlin und anderswo, p. 72. Ibid., pp. 136 et sq. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., p. 141. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid. Cf. pp. 175–193.

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36. Kracauer, Siegfried, Straßen in Berlin und anderswo, p. 15. 37. Borges, Jorge Luis, Obras completas I (1923–1949). Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2004, p. 366. 38. Kracauer, Siegfried, Straßen in Berlin und anderswo, p. 15.

Fascism as a Farce of Farce: Totalitarian Propaganda

1 The First years of Exile and the Transformations in the Form of the Essay Composed between 1936 and early 1938, the study Totalitäre Propaganda (Totalitärian Propaganda) occupies, together with the novel Georg (written between 1930 and 1934) and the “social biography” Offenbach and the Paris of his Time (1937), an intermediate place between the great essay and narrative works written by Kracauer during the second half of the Weimar Republic, and the first works produced during the North American exile, among which stands out, due to its extension and influence, From Caligari to Hitler (1947). The conditions of production of these three works are, visibly, the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism, but also, at a deeper level, an existential, intellectual and ideological crisis in the person of the author: the expectations placed on the creation of a democratic public opinion in Germany and on the possibilities of influencing, in this project, through the instruments of the journalism, collided with fascist barbarism, whose expansion confirmed how weak the roots of democratic impulses in the German masses were. The three cases constitute attempts to elaborate circumstances that had intensely affected the author, not only in personal and political terms, but also depriving him of the material means of subsistence and the opportunities of publication. In Georg, Kracauer offers an © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67965-1_5

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overview of the German intelligentsia at the end of the Weimar period, highlighting, under the subtly satirical gaze of the outsider, the ways in which intellectuals capitulated to the crisis of the Republic and the fascisticization of Germany. In the Offenbach—which has many similarities, but also important differences with Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and writings on Baudelaire—Second Empire Paris emerges as a prefiguration of fascist Germany; Napoleon III, as a precursor to Hitler.1 Like the Führer, Napoléon le Petit too seeks to aestheticize politics and disguises, under a deluge of images, the deepest social antagonisms, whose naked manifestation could promote revolutionary action. Masked under illusory phantasmagorias,2 the Second Empire is, for Kracauer, a farce or an operetta society that, as such, has perhaps found its most complete artistic expression in Offenbach. The historical significance of the German musician exiled in Paris—an ostensible Kracauer alter ego—is based above all on the fact that the genre cultivated by him most successfully, the operetta, was the appropriate vehicle of representation for a reality that had become essentially satirical. The “high seriousness”, the tragic elevation that could perhaps characterize the times of the Great Revolution or the First Empire had become useless to account for the prosaically degraded world that follows the crushing of the insurrection of June 1848. Kracauer, whose preparatory studies for the Offenbach include a detailed reading of Marx’s major historical studies on the period— The Class Struggle in France, 1848–1850 (1850), The Civil War in France (1871), and above all The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)—had been intensely impressed by the Marxian interpretation of the Second Empire as farcical version of the First. It is suggestive that, in a card with annotations extracted from the beginning of the Eighteenth Brumaire, he wrote: “The coup d’État as farce” and that, in the margin, he wrote in red: “Operetta society”. On the other hand, the Offenbach also relies on the definitions developed in the Eighteenth Brumaire, but also by Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution (1930), of Bonapartism as an atypical bourgeois regime in which the State, placed in the hands of a supposedly charismatic leader, acquires such a relative autonomy that it renders its services to the ruling classes without seeming to be subject to it, and with the support of sectors of the oppressed classes. Bonapartism thus creates the momentary illusion of reconciliation between antagonistic classes and employs a whole arsenal of ideological (and aesthetic) devices in order to hide its own repressive bases. Hence

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the horror of the Second Empire before a satirical art that could reveal the illusory, farcical nature of its foundations. It may be pertinent to emphasize that neither in the Offenbach nor in Totalitarian Propaganda do we find the stylistic brilliance, or depth and originality of thought, that characterizes the great essays of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In part, this could be explained by the fact that both studies have been written under extremely difficult and dangerous conditions, and with the immediate purpose of procuring financial means, once employment ties with the Frankfurter Zeitung had been severed—to say it elegantly. On the other hand, it has been indicated that the very form and, in particular, the dimensions of the two books did not agree very well with the style of the Frankfurt essayist. According to Agard, Kracauer “excelled in short forms, towards which he had also been led through a theoretical journey. Now he is forced to resort to long forms, in which he is undoubtedly less comfortable”.3 Agard’s hypothesis requires some revision: some of the most outstanding works of the preceding period—and of Kracauer’s work tout court—such as the novel Ginster or the impressive book on The Salaried Masses , cannot simply be classified into the short forms. Perhaps more accurate would be to affirm that the case of the Offenbach, which in itself is far from being the resounding, failure that Adorno and Bloch said it was, suffers a great deal from the author’s ignorance in matters of musical aesthetics. And, in the case of Totalitarian Propaganda, it must be said that both in the theoretical and critical planes, as well as in the stylistic one, the essayistic form previously cultivated by Kracauer was largely incongruous, and the thinker did not know how to find a style of thought and exposition at the height of his previous productions. We believe, however, that Totalitarian Propaganda, without representing one of the highest points in Kracauerian work, offers a sharp and original approach and should be taken into account as a useful contribution to the analysis of fascism, not only in conjunction with substantial works such as Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944) or The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), but also with works that have not yet received the attention they deserve, such as Lukács’s studies How did fascist Philosophy emerge in Germany? (1933), “On Prussianism” (1943) and How did Germany become the Centre of reactionary Ideology? (1941). This study had its own destiny—unfortunate from its origins. Written on behalf of the Institute for Social Research, it was rejected by it, primarily at the suggestions of Theodor W. Adorno, and the latter was given the task of abbreviating the text. With Adorno’s intervention, the

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study was reduced to less than a quarter of its length, and presented such profound modifications that practically not a single sentence of the original version remained intact. Under these conditions, Kracauer refused to allow the study to be edited by the Institute and began to look for other possibilities to publish it. The typewritten version and the various hectographed copies of the version presented to the Institute have disappeared, and the study was considered permanently lost for decades. In the context of the edition of Kracauer’s Werke at Suhrkamp, it became possible, above all thanks to the intensive work of Bernd Stiegler, to publish an edition based on a handwritten version and some preliminary annotations. This edition was first published in 2012.

2

The Theatricality of Fascism and the Exegesis of Its Masks

Totalitarian propaganda is, in several ways, a continuation of the Offenbach study. Already due to the fact that not only the fascist cliques themselves, but also their entire propaganda apparatuses emerge, from Kracauer’s perspective, just as the person and political project of Napoleon III were presented from the Offenbachian point of view, namely: as an operetta reality, a purely apparent construction that, as such, experiences a mythical horror at the possibility of its farcical nature being publicly exposed. If the masses became aware of the conditions in which they live and for a second weakened the hypnotic influence of the totalitarian dictatorship, this would collapse: “Hence the lack of humour of modern dictatorships; humour could damage the fine network of propaganda: hence the determination of dictatorships to support so-called acts of propaganda through precautionary measures aimed exclusively at preventing the sphere of pseudo-reality from being abandoned”.4 Silone’s quotes in the study refer to the fascist march on Rome as a “masquerade” and define fascism as a “carnival comedy” in the same vein. In this respect, Kracauer’s ideas resemble (and, to a large extent, anticipate) Brecht’s reflections on fascism; thus, those that are displayed in the article “The Theatricality of Fascism” (1939), which examines the way in which “the oppressors of our time act, not in their theatres, but in the street and in meeting houses as well as in their homes, in their diplomatic chancelleries and their meeting rooms”.5 There can no longer be the slightest doubt “that the fascists act in a particularly theatrical way. They have a very developed sense of show. They speak of régie themselves, and have

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drawn a number of effects directly from the theatre”.6 But, in addition, the essay tries to associate the theatricality of fascism with a form of acting based on empathy: a system founded on lies requires an emotional performance and an audience that is immersed in it, since only in this way it is possible to drive blindly the masses towards a barbarism against which all the rational faculties rebel. Kracauer places a similar emphasis on highlighting the link between the intense and bombastic theatricality promoted by the fascists, and their affinity for an art aimed at stunting the willingness of the masses to reflect intellectually on social processes. Suggestive is the fact that already in the studies of the late 1920s and early 1930s devoted to analysing cultural goods and the ways in which they are consumed by the middle classes, Kracauer already underlined this complex. Thus, for example, when, in The Salaried Masses , he affirms that almost all the products of mass culture “serve to legitimize the existing order, by concealing both its abuses and its foundations. They, too, drug the populace with the pseudo-glamour of counterfeit social heights, just as hypnotists use glittering objects to put their subjects to sleep”.7 Illustrated newspapers and magazines, as cultural magic formulas, pretend “to cast certain contents once and for all into the abyss of imageless oblivion: those contents that are not embraced by the construction of our social existence, but that bracket this existence itself. The flight of images is a flight from revolution and from death”.8 The fact that bureaucratic employees experienced such an intense desire to escape from real misery into the sublimated pseudo-reality— the “flight of images”—of mass culture makes it understandable that they could have been so easily seduced by fascist propaganda. First of all because this is proposed as an exacerbation of evasive phantasmagorias; this propaganda “moves in the sphere of appearance and the sparkle of real social forces; and the symptomatic image is for her the ultimate fact; a fact that in any case has more weight for him than the origin of the image”.9 Hence the insistence that human beings be persuaded not by facts, but by a barrage of words; hence the stubbornness in which ideological superstructures are presented as a foundation; in which “the illusion appears as reality; appearance, like being itself”.10 The denunciation of these strategies does not imply that Kracauer, from the height of the “true” doctrine, quickly and superficially limits himself to condemning these structures as expressions of a false consciousness. Like the Bloch of Heritage of our Times (1935), Kracauer questions dogmatic Marxist perspectives that, on the one hand, reduce ideological structures to the

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function of mere reflections of the material base and that, on the other, underestimate the natural, instinctive impulses, leaving them free for its exploitation by fascism. From its first pages, Totalitarian Propaganda is concerned with discrediting the blind arrogance with which mechanist Marxists persist in asserting that all official culture is at the service of legitimizing the dominant interests. For Kracauer, ideological concepts are not limited to fulfilling the function of bastions of the hegemonic economic system. Hence he questions Arthur Rosenberg’s definition according to which fascism is nothing more than a modern form, masked as populist, of the bourgeois capitalist counterrevolution: if the defeat of the left parties in Italy and Germany provides the practical denial for this “is nothing more than”, the persuasive efficacy of totalitarian propaganda requires an analysis that goes beyond the denunciation of the ideological stupidity of an ideology that would be only an invention of the financial capital, destined to deceive the masses and tie them to the yoke of its hegemonic power. The purpose is to carry out an immanent analysis of the ideological constructions created by fascism, in line with the principle according to which it is not enough to unmask them, but rather it is necessary to carefully examine the mask itself , understand its modes of operation and give an account of the reasons for its effectiveness.

3

The Social Sublayers of Nazi-Fascism: Anatomy of the Lumpenproletariat

In a subtle and convincing way, Kracauer highlights both the banality of attempts to explain fascist propaganda as an ideological expression of monopoly capital and the undeniable reality that the passage from liberal to monopoly capitalism constitutes the socio-historical humus from which that ideological construction emerged. This is already evident in the way in which this propaganda exalts the masses only for the purpose of consummating the liquidation of the individual. Along with this, fascism seeks to exterminate all autonomous thought, hence, it finds its supportive base in those social sectors that would not want to rationally face the dilemmas of developed capitalism, but rather feel a regressive need to escape it by sheltering in an intoxicating pseudo-reality. Relegated by the economic crisis to a forced existence as outsiders, they are captivated by a propaganda that projects the dreamlike fantasy of reconciliation between the classes, achieved by a higher power; first of all, because they instinctively know that such a reconciliation, within the framework

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of the dominant economic system, could only be imposed and maintained by an unlimited authority. Invoking the force of magical attraction of this pseudo-real fantasy, Hitler and Mussolini—who in this respect reissued the strategies of Napoleon III—sought to amalgamate the most varied victims of the economic crisis of capitalism into a mass hypostatized under the concept of people. As a common enemy stood not only the chimerical image of the capitalist Croesus, but also, as we know, the “threat” of communism, whose social bases in the proletariat constituted the demonized counterpart of the Volk hypostatized by fascism. The unity of the mass as “people” is perhaps the main ideological device of Nazi-fascism: if it cannot de facto achieve popular unity, it must instead produce an artificial reality in which unity is presented as real. The social bases for this construction have been heterogeneous, although they suggestively present common elements. It is characteristic that the tutelary figure to which Kracauer refers to justify his positions is precisely Marx, who in the Eighteenth Brumaire had shown that the band grouped around Napoleon III cannot be classified in a specific social stratum: A bunch of blokes push their way forward to the court, into the ministries, to the head of the administration and the army, a crowd of the best of whom it must be said that no one knows whence he comes, a noisy, disreputable, rapacious bohème that crawls into gallooned coats with the same grotesque dignity as the high dignitaries of Soulouque.11

In another passage, Marx describes in greater detail the motley composition of that band: Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars – in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la bohème.12

It is known that these descriptions also inspired Benjamin in his reflections on Parisian bohème to which the first pages of “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (1938) are dedicated. In the group of the lumpenproletariat described by Marx, Benjamin includes the conspirateurs

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de profession, whose destructive and irrational action differs from the revolutionary behaviour promoted by Marx in the same terms in which, according to Kracauer, totalitarian propaganda is distinguished from communist propaganda. Or at least from the ideal of the latter, to which, according to the Frankfurt essayist, the way of proceeding of the Soviet or German communist parties does not fit. In order to explain the procedure of the conspirators, Benjamin quotes a review by Marx: For them, the only condition for revolution is the effective organization of their conspiracy… They embrace inventions which are supposed to perform revolutionary miracles: fire bombs, destructive machines with magical effects, riots that are to be the more miraculous and surprising the less rational their foundation. Occupying themselves with such projects, they have no other aim but the immediate one of overthrowing the existing government, and they profoundly despise the more theoretical enlightenment of the workers regarding their class interests. Hence their anger-not proletarian but plebeian-at the habits noirs [black coats], the more or less educated people who represent that side of the movement and of whom they can never become entirely independent, since these are the official representatives of the party.13

The essentially irrational nature of the lumpenproletariat is transferred to the behaviour of the conspirators, but it also finds its correlate in the politics of Napoleon III, whom Marx does not in vain define as the chief of the lumpenproletariat; a chief “who, in this refuse, offal and wreck of all classes, recognizes the only class upon which he can depend unconditionally”.14 If here Napoleon III is the precursor of Hitler and the French conspirateurs, predecessors of the fascist horde, in Totalitarian Propaganda (whose composition precedes that of the Benjaminian article) stands out the intimate affinity between the express political irrationality of Hitler or Mussolini and the nihilism that defines the heterogeneous social base of fascism, in which converge, together with the urban lumpenproletariat, “proletarianized employees, disempowered petty rentiers, bankrupt self-employed workers, former officers, representatives of the overabundant liberal professions, academics, intellectuals”, as well as “peasant groups, mobilized civil servants”.15 If the social position of this bohème, in its reaction to the expansion of monopoly capitalism, is confused and anarchic, so is the propaganda promoted by the fascist apparatus and the basic conduct of its leaders. According to some reflections by Hans Michael Müller cited by Kracauer, National Socialism

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“arose through the affirmation of the incalculable, the renunciation of programmatic clarity, the will for the uncertain, by virtue of the certainty that is alive in it. Indeterminacy of the postulation of aims, conditioned by divergent interests”.16 This will to the uncertain, which is, according to Kracauer, “the will not to admit consolidations, not to recognize any objective instance”, is what differentiates “fundamentally the fascist and the National Socialist movements from communism”.17 The passion of the fascist bohemian for war, which comes to satisfy her will to power, draws an arc between the totalitarian fantasies of the fascist cliques and the will to destruction that defined the ancestor of those gangs, the conspiratorial tradition. This irrationality is fed by a resentment that, in times of crisis, promotes the transformation of the masses into mobs dominated by masochistic and sadistic impulses.

4

Sociology of the Middle Classes

An even greater significance than lumpenproletarian bohemia possessed, in the Kracauerian theory of fascism, the middle classes. We know that reflection on these social strata has occupied a central place in Kracauer’s earlier essays and has found a prominent crystallization in The Sallaried Masses. Here was emphasized the curious disregard for a class whose considerable expansion during the Weimar Republic had gone hand in hand with its intense proletarianization. Economically delayed by the expansion of big capital, the middle classes nurture a false consciousness. They would like to defend differences, the acknowledgement of which obscures their situation; they devote themselves to an individualism that would be justified only if they could still shape their fate as individuals. Even where they struggle as wage-earners in and with the unions for better conditions of existence, their real existence is often conditioned by the better one which they once had. A vanished bourgeois way of life haunts them. Perhaps it contains forces with a legitimate demand to endure. But they survive today only inertly, without getting involved in a dialectic with the prevailing conditions, and so themselves undermine the legitimacy of their continued existence.18

In Totalitarian Propaganda, where it is again deplored that, no less than the Italian, German communism has not reached the slightest understanding of the economically crushed middle classes, it is argued that these constitute the natural basis of National Socialism and that “[i]t is

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not by chance that Hitler in the first instance and fundamentally reached the most diverse petty-bourgeois groups”.19 These classes, which harbour the illusion of being apolitical, non-partisan (parteilos ) and of being extraterritorial in class terms, do not dream so much of a revolutionary change that effectively suppresses classes, as of reconciliation between classes “from above” that, as such, could only constitute the illusory image of their abolition. Hence has found such wide acceptance in the middle strata the pseudo-reality constructed by fascism, that appeals to regressive impulses from those sectors. The “powerful force of suggestive drunkenness” (Hitler) captivates social subjects who yearn to anesthetize their thinking; for this reason totalitarian propaganda, in the words of the Führer himself, should “be directed more and more to sentiment and only in a very limited way to so-called understanding”.20 Fascist oratory would like to return the mass to an infantile, primitive stage, through apodictic affirmations and repetitions of slogans whose hypnotic rhythms aim to liquidate the capacity for reflection and doubt, since, as all doubt reaches the dormant conscience, “the possibility of a doubt should annihilate the spell”.21 In The Salaried Masses Kracauer had already shown to what extent, in the same bureaucratic spheres in which Taylorist rationalization and division of labour processes are imposed, is publicized, from the sphere of entrepreneurs, the ideal of the whole personality, coming from “the dictionary of a defunct idealist philosophy”.22 A similar antinomy is presented by totalitarian propaganda, which invokes all the more the whole personality the more it promotes its factual liquidation by dissolving the individual in the mass. Hitler and his propagandists preach reverence for the outstanding personality; but a careful look allows us to notice that “genius is a safe operator in his calculation of power. Personality counts only insofar as it represents authority”.23 In essence, the inoculation of the myth of the total personality in a society that is constrained to degrade itself to the condition of a submissive and disciplined mass is one of the many expressions of the fascist effort to construct apparent realities. At the base of this sophistry is a Realpolitik that leaves the arguments of August von Rochau and Bismarckian politics far behind. In our own present, when the jargon of After Truth has reached such a wide diffusion and in which Latin American neoliberal politicians insist on appealing to the masses with a propaganda aimed at nullifying in them the capacity to reflect autonomously, and at provoking their confusion spreading fake news, it is appropriate to remember that one of the most direct and express antecedents of this irrationalistic rhetoric is the

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advertising apparatus of National Socialism. Given that, for the latter, the justification of propaganda is measured only by its success, it can be understood that its persuasive strategies ooze a nihilism that is inherent to the regime. This is also expressed in that a central purpose of fascist propaganda is not to clearly differentiate the truth from the lie, but to promote a structure of thought in which both are equally insignificant; the effect is a kind of mirror cabinet destined to dazzle and confuse, at the same time, the spectators.

5 Social Reality as a “multimedia Work of Art”: The Aestheticization of Politics “Public opinion is fabricated”: this maxim of Goebbels is also connected with aesthetic politics and with the aestheticization of politics promoted by the fascists. It seeks, by radicalizing the practices of the Second Empire, to turn the masses into participants in ostentatious public spectacles: This art, systematically led by fascist and National Socialist propaganda, consists in integrally composing the whole of the masses in such a way that it exerts an aesthetic stimulus. To the extent that it transfers the mass demonstration from the political or social dimension to the aesthetics of the monumental spectacle that, like the nihilist parade, fascinates the senses, it not only enhances the consistency of the mass, but also suffocates in its origin […] all questions about the purpose of the massive.24

Many of the practices adopted by fascist propaganda aim only to fascinate aesthetically. In any case, the effect derived from it consists of anesthetizing the masses: by converting phenomena susceptible to analysis into exclusive objects of aesthetic contemplation, it is sought that these phenomena are petrified and preserved from intellectual reflection. The mass spectacles of fascism, as Kracauer aphoristically states, are configurations from which it is not possible to divert one’s gaze. By consciously staging a theatre that is truly a public theatre, they provide the model that fascism would like to impose on all artistic expressions. The similarity between this aestheticism and the cultural project of Napoleon III, as analysed by Kracauer in the Offenbach study, is ostensible. As Agard points out, “Hitler (like Napoleon III in the past) is compelled to transform reality into […] a ‘multimedia work of art’. This is the role of propaganda, which recomposes the real by procedures that blur its perception,

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transforms it into a spectacle, gives it a ‘character of exteriority’”.25 The nihilist substrate of this aestheticism makes the fascists the modern exponents of the principle of l’art pour l’art; and the stubbornness with which they influence souls is only the envelope that covers despair: “the artists of the fin-de-siècle rescued themselves and rescued their things as in an ark on the Drunken Boat of art”.26 In this aspect, Totalitarian Propaganda presents more than one similarity to the Lukács of “Grand Hotel ‘Abyss’” (1933). Also with the Benjamin of “The Work of art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility” (1936): Kracauer highlights to what extent the idealist concept of art, as an elusive concealment of the contradictions of social reality—as a beautiful appearance (schöner Schein)—re-emerges in the fascist spectacle, whose splendour aestheticizes the rags of those who are illuminated by it, so that they are convinced that they are not wearing rags, but party costumes. When the fascists invoked the existence or necessity of an art that has its roots in the people and condemned “degenerate” contemporary art for its individualistic, intellectualist and international character, they were basically doing nothing but producing one of its pseudo-realities: what, for National Socialism, is popular art, is not “one that has its roots in the people, but one that has the people as its target; even more important: an art that has to produce, to the broad masses, the impression that they are the people”.27 No art seems to be so dear to fascism as that which leaves reflection aside and is based on the primal force of rhythm (Urkraft des Rhytmus ). Rhythmic configurations—and military parades and group gymnastic exercises immediately spring to mind—favour the hypnotic effect under which totalitarian regimes yearn to keep the masses disciplined. But art rebels, by virtue of its own nature, from the state of servile subjection to which totalitarianism would like to relegate it; dictatorships feel obliged to prescribe a fixed orientation to artistic and cultural productions, but they cannot help but face a contradiction. According a statement of Erich Wernert reproduced by Kracauer: “They have seen that there was an antinomy between the duties imposed on the artist and the freedom that is necessary for all artistic creation that deserves the name of such: they tried to find a solution, in general, simply by denying that such an antinomy existed”.28 This is a fundamental aspect of Kracauer’s theory: he believed that fascism had to fall into networks of antinomies that, in the long run, would make pseudo-realities ineffective and reveal their true essence. This is particularly true of totalitarian propaganda, which “precisely because of its claim to totality, in the course of time

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will be implicated in antinomies and, therefore, increasingly forced to get rid of contents and to exhibit more and more bare the will to power from which it comes”.29 Just as the antinomies of Napoleon III progressively undermined the pseudo-realities of the Second Empire and produced its collapse, Kracauer—an Offenbach of reflection—had pinned his hopes that the deepening of the internal contradictions of fascism would lead, sooner rather than later, its fall. Exposing the farcical essence of totalitarian regimes before the eyes of public opinion can be a step to accelerate dissolution, in a way similar to how the Offenbach operetta had helped to undermine the solidity of the Bonapartist regime. The Offenbachiade had originated in an epoch in which social reality had been banished by the Emperor’s orders, and for many years it had flourished in the gap that was left. Thoroughly ambiguous as it was, it had fulfilled a revolutionary function under the dictatorship: that of scourging corruption and authoritarianism, and holding up the principle of freedom. To be sure, its satire had been clothed in a garment of frivolity […]. But the frivolity went deeper than the world of fashionable Bohemia could see. [...] At a time when the bourgeoisie was politically stagnant and the Left was impotent, Offenbach’s operettas had been the most definite form of revolutionary protest. They released gusts of laughter, which shattered the compulsory silence and lured the public towards opposition, while seeming only to amuse them.30

As in many pictorial representations of the danse macabre, the emaciated laughter of the skulls questions the claims of eternity of earthly powers. In the notebooks for the Theory of Film (1940–1941) outlined during the exile in Marseille, there are recurrent references to the danse macabre and the skull. So it is said that the face “is worth nothing for the cinema if the skull is not included behind it: ‘Danse macabre’”.31 Next to this annotation appears, in the column “Instructions”, the comment “KERMESSE FUNÈBRE”, which refers to the famous final episode of Eisenstein’s Que viva México, where scenes from the feast of the Day of the Dead are captured. According to a draft of an index in the Marseille Notebooks drawn up on November 19, 1940, the final chapter was to bear the title of “Kermesse Funèbre”. An article by Mary Seton, read and extracted by Kracauer, underlines the significance of this scene: The natives there mock the generals, the priests and death, they get drunk, they dance on the graves… and life goes on. This great epic of the Mexican

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people had to end with the image of a child who tears off the traditional mask of death from his face and shines with his joy of living.32

For the Kracauer of the Marseille Notebooks, the tragic death perceived ecstatically by the ruling classes is opposed by the perception of death proper to the emerging popular classes: the revolution is the death of the established orders. Some of this enjoyment in the transitory nature of despotic powers radiates in Totalitarian Propaganda; this is what the words that conclude the study allude to: “Behind the tumult of totalitarian propaganda a skull appears”.33

6

Physiognomy of the New Radical Rights: The Actuality of Totalitarian Propaganda

It can be seen that Kracauer’s study explores, from an original perspective, important dimensions of historical fascism. Now then, beyond this, we could ask ourselves on its current significance: about its potentiality to tell something about our own times. In some respects, it could be said that Totalitarian propaganda has, in the neoliberal era, an even greater validity than at the time it was written. In the first place, because neoliberal political propaganda—largely thanks to the means provided by new technologies—has managed to exploit the creation of pseudo-realities with an intensity unimaginable for the ideologues of Hitler or Mussolini. An era hypnotized by simulacra—as a succession of analyses on neoliberal capitalism and postmodern culture has shown, from Guy Debord to Fredric Jameson, from Jean Baudrillard to David Harvey—and governed by a logic of the capital that has fostered, in a measure hitherto unprecedented, fetishisms and mystifications—as highlighted in particular by the main exponents of the “Neue Kapital-Lektüre”—offers, at the same time, the target and the social substratum for the new radical Rights, who have been able to effectively take advantage of the democratic deficits of broad sectors of society; in particular, from the middle strata. Much of the jargon about After Truth is based on disorientation—ideological homelessness, to speak in Kracauerian terms—characteristic of our time, since, as Jameson has written, “there have been few moments of modern social history in which people in general have felt more powerless: few moments in which the complexity of the social order can have seemed so forbidding and so inaccessible, and in which existent society, at the same time that it is seized in ever swifter change, has seemed endowed with

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such massive permanence”.34 Such disorientation has favoured neoliberal common sense to feed, too often, on the pseudo-realities that the hegemonic media spread to induce citizens to enthusiastically embrace those policies that cannot but oppress them. For reasons that we cannot investigate in depth here, the consolidation of a neoliberal common sense—deeply undemocratic—has made citizens vulnerable both to fake news and phantasmagorias projected by the hegemonic mass media, as well as to the criminalization of opposition movements and to lawfares. At a deeper level, the democratic fragility of this common sense, magnetized by pseudo-realities, is horrified by the abstraction of economic and social relations and seeks infantile refuge in pseudo-beliefs—a phenomenon that Kracauer lucidly analysed in the essays of the Republic of Weimar; for instance, in “The Biography as an Art Form of the New Bourgeoisie” (1930). Hence the constant search for saving leaders, as well for culprits towards whom to project responsibilities and guilt, turning them into scapegoats whose sacrifice could heal the economic and social ills of our time, which cannot be personalized. Political processes such as that of Mauricio Macri in Argentina or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil can be partly explained by this desire for concretism and personalization—no to speak of Trump’s propaganda apparatuses, which, as is known, constantly feed on fake news and conspiracy theories. When it comes to sketching the physiognomy of the new Rights, it is possible to extract some fundamental elements from the theory of fascism elaborated by Kracauer in the mid-1930s.

Notes 1. Agard, Olivier, Kracauer. Le chiffonnier mélancolique. París: CNRS, 2010, p. 224. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of foreign-language quotations are the author’s. 2. Carlos Eduardo Jordão Machado has examined the importance that the category of phantasmagoria has in Kracauer and has established illuminating comparisons with the function that the term has in Benjamin; cf. “Anmerkungen über Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin und das Paris des Zweiten Kaiserreichs: Anknüpfungspunkte”. Buchenhorst, Ralph/Vedda, Miguel (eds.), Urbane Beobachtungen. Walter Benjamin und die neuen Städte. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010, 99–114, pp. 102 et sq. In a detailed analysis of the Offenbach, Wilson José Flores has recently examined the phantasmagories that Kracauer detects in the Second Empire as an anticipation of Nazi pseudo-realities “Uma Offenbachiada: Siegfried

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3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Kracauer, as operetas de Offenbach e a farsa do Napoleão III”. Cerrados 52 (2020), pp. 152–165; cf. especially p. 157. Agard, Olivier, Kracauer. Le chiffonnier mélancolique, p. 201. Kracauer, Siegfried, Totalitäre Propaganda. Werke. Ed. by Inka MülderBach and Ingrid Belke. 9 vols. Vol. 2, 2: Studien zu Massenmedien und Propaganda. Ed. by Christian Fleck and Bernd Stiegler, with the collaboration of Joachim Heck and Maren Neumann. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2005, pp. 17–173; p. 140 cited here. Brecht, Bertolt, “Über die Theatralik des Faschismus”, Gesammelte Werke in 20 Bänden. Vol. 16: Schriften zum Theater 2. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1977, pp. 558–568; p. 560 cited here. Ibid. Kracauer, Siegfried, The Salaried Masses . Transl. by Quintin Hoare, Introd. by Inka Mülder-Bach. London and New York: Verso, 1998, p. 94. Ibid. Kracauer, Siegfried, Totalitäre Propaganda, p. 43. Ibid., p. 48. Marx, Karl, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. No transl. data. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972, p. 115. Ibid., p. 63. Qtd. in Benjamin, Walter, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”. Transl. by Harry Zohn. Selected Writings. Volume 4 (1938–1940). Ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 3–94; p. 4 cited here. Marx, Karl, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, p. 83. Kracauer, Siegfried, Totalitäre Propaganda, p. 131. Even the style of the Kracauerian enumeration recalls that of Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid. Kracauer, Siegfried, The Salaried Masses , pp. 81 et sq. Kracauer, Siegfried, Totalitäre Propaganda, p. 140. Qtd. in ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 103. Kracauer, Siegried, The Salaried Masses , p. 35. Kracauer, Siegfried, Totalitäre Propaganda, p. 34. Ibid., p. 115. Agard, Olivier, Kracauer. Le chiffonnier mélancolique, pp. 224 et sq. Kracauer, Siegfried, Totalitäre Propaganda, p. 74. Ibid., p. 116. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., p. 113.

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30. Qtd. in Frisby, David, Fragments of Modernity. Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin. Oxon: Routledge, 2013, p. 181. 31. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Marseiller Entwurf” zu einer Theorie des Films. Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. 9 vols. Vol. 3: Theorie des Films. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2005, pp. 521–779; p. 531 cited here. 32. Cit. en Agard, Olivier, Kracauer. Le chiffonnier mélancolique, p. 284. 33. Ibid., p. 173. 34. Jameson, Fredric, Valences of the Dialectics. London: Verso, 2009, p. 392.

The Tradition of the Lost Causes: History. The Last Things Before the Last

1 The Exploration of Unknown Territories and the Form of the Essay Rediscovered and reappraised in the last years, Kracauer’s posthumous study on history had aroused little interest in the decades subsequent to its publication. His book “was ignored even by the first specialists in Kracauer’s work and received little appreciation by those who only saw in him the intellectual and great stylist from Weimar Republic”.1 The specific modality that this reception assumed is explained, to an important extent, by the gravitation of Theodor W. Adorno, who both through the active role he took in the German edition (or re-edition) of Kracauer’s works, and with his well-known conference “The curious realist. On Siegfried Kracauer” (1964), succeeded in propagating a view of Kracauer’s physiognomy in which only those features that revealed greater affinities with the positions of the Institute for Social Research were clearly outlined, while divergent lines were overlooked or were subject to a radical disapproval. On the other hand, Adorno’s attention, focused on Kracauer’s early work, was little attracted to the exile publications, in which he seemed to see a

Translation from the Spanish by Cecilia E. Lasa. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67965-1_6

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paralysis of the intellectual and stylistic capacities of the friend from his youth. Paul Oskar Kristeller, responsible for the first edition of History. The Last Things before the Last,2 also sets a marked distinction between the two periods, though his reasons are the opposite to Adorno’s. Obstinate in questioning the appropriation of the author of The Salaried Masses by the members of the Institute and their supposed followers— among whom he mentions, curiously, Inka Mülder-Bach and Gertrud Koch—, Kristeller maintains that the content of History differs fundamentally from the early writings of Kracauer. He is particularly exasperated by the fact that Koch and Mülder-Bach “refer to Kracauer’s earlier books as if the book about history were in complete agreement with them”.3 The interest of Kracauer’s friend of his old age is to point up the importance of the posthumous work, by highlighting its singularity when compared to his early essays. It would be misguided to deny the huge discrepancies between Kracauer’s essays and fiction before the rise of Nazism and the great projects of his old age. His early work reveals a disposition to grasp and analyse the newest phenomena of the incipient mass society which we to no avail would search in his late writings. The editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung carried out with uncommon skill—in the footsteps of his mentor Georg Simmel—the project of examining areas ignored or insufficiently explored by the philosophy and sociology of the early twentieth century: the detective novel, the entertainment movies, the “palaces of distractions”, the white collars’ work and leisure. The numerous articles published between 1921 and 1933 mean a renewal for Feuilleton as a genre: in Kracauer’s texts, the journalist’s sensitivity, the sociologist’s analytical skill and the prose stylist’s expertise originally merge.4 In his articles from that period, there is a dynamism that permeates his style and themes and that recalls both the vertigo of modern life in big cities and the accelerated tempo of the work in a great newspaper with three daily print runs. Belonging to the journalistic milieu explains that Kracauer, unlike other intellectuals close to him on the biographical and intellectual levels—among whom it is possible to mention Adorno, Horkheimer, Bloch and, partially, Benjamin—knew, as Dagmar Barnouw pointed out, the art of “writing for a plurality of readers with different backgrounds and interest and was thus sharply aware of the entangled motivations behind language use”.5 Kracauer’s essayistic oeuvre does not fit easily into that esoteric tradition which, in Germany, “has not placed much value on the ‘common reader’; that is, on a discourse aware of the implications of

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plural language use and of the importance of accessibility”.6 It is telling that his conception of the essay is articulated with a vision of contemporary reality as a disenchanted world, where men, since the dissolution of traditional communities, have to lead a “spiritually homeless” existence. At the height of a reality marked by provisionality places itself a style of thought that remains attentive to surface phenomena.7 According to Agard, Kracauerian essayism tries to find, starting from the “bad infinity” of Modernity, the traces of a meaning that is no longer given a priori: To the extent that the modern world is by definition a surface world, this essay writing has, moreover, necessarily a “phenomenological” dimension, in the sense that it takes surface phenomena as its starting point. Kracauer withdraws, then, towards the “small form” that renounces a total grasp of what passes for reality, and objects to the coherence and validity of this.8

The method consists in discovering an “exoticism of daily life”: in analysing that daily reality that, precisely because it is exposed to the sight of all, like the purloined letter in Poe’s tale, is not perceived.9 This method of construction in the material (Konstruktion im Material )10 — exemplary applied in The Salaried Masses —demands, just like Brechtian distancing effect, to immerse oneself in the milieu to be analysed so as to tackle it from within, but, at the same time, to keep a distance from it that allows to inspect it as if it were an unknown territory. It is not accidental that Kracauer’s early essays show the interaction between an analytic procedure, aiming at unmasking the myths of Modernity and a thought in analogies which is one of the substantial components of his philosophical writing. The convergence of dissection and analogy, together with a peculiar use of irony and an austere and precise style, of a rigorous economy, is a signature of the essays and narrative works of the young Kracauer. With such qualities is also associated, as a fundamental attitude, a permanent distrust of what is fixed and a predilection for keeping objects and ideas in a fluid state.11 Such an attitude reveals the purely essayistic quality of Kracauer’s early work; above all because the essay, since its birth in Michel de Montaigne, has stood out for its aversion to the immobility of doctrines and its preference for dynamic and unfixed thinking. The essay writer does not aim at documenting knowledge already treasured but at fostering a heuristic praxis. In Ludwig Rohner’s words, “he explores an uncharted territory and describes his experiences; he proceeds, in nature and position, in a phenomenological way”.12

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The affinity of the essayist with the figure of the explorer who visits terra incognita is shown in a privileged way in the “urban ethnographies” practised by Kracauer in the Weimar period. According to the writer, the redemptive power of extracting a story from the streets without memory of the big cities is only available to those who can observe them with the eyes of the exile, that is to say: to those who—like Poe’s Dupin— keep enough distance from what is immediately visible so that the latter does not go unnoticed by their eyes. As much as the preservation of his own lucidity, Kracauer was interested in provoking the awakening of consciousness in the urban masses, and just as we find, in the articles published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, a critique of trivial cinema that tries to anesthetize the reflection of the general public, we also find a critique of the “New Objectivity”, and of photography and journalism that confuse the contingent appearances of reality with its underlying essence. In “The Storyteller” (1936), Benjamin links the death of traditional narration to the expansion of newspapers; even more sceptical of any proposal to revive the forms of the past, and convinced that art must work with the materials at its disposal, Kracauer aspires to transform the resources of journalism with a view to transform them into aesthetically and ideologically revulsive instruments. If the newspapers educate the reader to passivity and the unconscious assimilation of shocks, the German essayist tries to present as strange the—supposedly—too well known and, in this way, facilitate an awakening. Convinced of the limitations of abstract thought, he promotes—like Proust, like Benjamin—a thought lavish in images and, above all, in metaphors. Gerwin Zohlen points out that thinking through analogies is a fundamental component of Kracauer’s philosophical method: In the introductory chapter of the book on his philosophical mentor Georg Simmel, he points out the constraints of rational discursivity, which “makes things become uniform within its rigid conceptual frameworks”. He contrasts it with the subversive power of analogy, which can free reality from its “grotesque conceptual petrifactions”. From analogical thought develops the allegory.13

The allegory here becomes a cognitive means to decipher the hieroglyphs of the big city. It serves above all—in an almost Brechtian sense—as a device of estrangement aimed at defamiliarize everyday perception. Hence, when analysing Modernity, Kracauer often establishes analogies

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with the past or the exotic: thus, he refers to the magical effect of the certifications that allow access to certain spheres of the hierarchy of civil servants; or try to find out what kind of magical powers a phenomenon must possess in order to open the doors of the firm. On the other hand, an expedition through modern companies is presented as an adventure perhaps more dangerous than a trip through the African jungle. The exploration of the essayist should also stimulate in the reader an interest in venturing into unknown land. This concern leaves its marks on the argumentative structures and, even more, on the style of Kracauer. Related to the search for such an effect is, as Harry Craver has argued, the German author’s conviction about “the priority of ‘indirect’ expression, as opposed to essays seeking to persuade the reader of a particular point of view”.14 The journalistic essay should be conceived, not as a space to propagate revealed truths, but to promote a heuristic practice: “There was more value in articles that encouraged readers to dismantle the constructed realities that surrounded them, rather than just setting down guidelines. Thus, the feuilleton should not give ideological instruction, but rather offer a way of seeing how and when ideology came into play in the public sphere”.15

2

A Philosophy of the Provisional Situation in Which We Are

We should ask ourselves what remains in Kracauer’s late writings from his early essay-writing disposition. It is notorious that the style of writing and thinking has altered with exile; the author of From Caligari to Hitler (1947) or Theory of Film (1960) is no longer the journalist who used to grasp objects in movement and commented phenomena au jour le jour for the Feuilleton. Instead, he is a scholar devoted to long-term research, who holds a greater distance from immediate experience. To this it should be added that the abandonment of the German language and the adoption of English played a part in the dissipation of the former regard to style. Kracauer himself highlighted the relationship between the abandonment of the German language and that of the essay form in the strict sense. In a letter to Adorno from September 5th 1955, he comments: I know you have the best intentions at heart when you warn me that we can only tell the decisive things in German. What you say is certainly true in some areas of literature: poetry, novels and, possibly, essay writing, too.

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(I no longer feel a great attraction to essay writing, though I have not attempted to formulate my distrust towards this form). But your sentence of Cato does not concern intellectual, theoretical works at all […]. My stylistic ideal is that language disappears into matter, just like the Chinese painter within the painting; although I am aware that the painter and the painting, the thinker and the matter, are one and the same thing… up to a point.16

However, far more components of the pre-exile period are present in the late work than Kracauer himself seemed willing to admit. Under diverse circumstances and with a different mode of both reflection and writing, the books written during his stay in the United States keep some qualities that have early defined him as an essayist. Remains intact in them the preoccupation with building a thought in accordance with the ephemeral and changing nature, with the transcendental homelessness —to use a term of the young Lukács dear to Kracauer—of contemporary life. One of the drafts of his introduction to History reads: “So what I really have in view is a philosophy of the provisional situation in which we are”.17 A similar statement can be applied, in retrospect, to Theory of Film (1960). In both books, the author also emerges as someone who undertakes an exploration into an unknown territory, deprived of the certainties provided by traditional cultures. The essay writer has often been characterized as an adventurer who embarks on a discovery journey without being fully aware of the path or the goal to be reached; his march is unsteady.18 If the first chapter in The Salaried Masses is entitled “unknown territory”, in the first paragraph of the introduction to History, Kracauer states that his whole intellectual life has been devoted to “the rehabilitation of objectives and modes of being that still lack a name and hence are overlooked or misjudged”.19 Among those modes is history, that “marks a bent of the mind and defines a region of reality which despite all that has been written about them are still largely terra incognita”.20 Along these lines, the book finishes by putting forward a utopia, that of the construction of “a terra incognita in the hollows between the lands we know”.21 It is understandable that the metaphor of historical inquiry as a trip abroad runs through the book, and finds the most relevant point of condensation in the fourth chapter, whose title, suggestively, is “The Historian’s Journey”. It contrasts the behaviour of conventional tourists, who travel abroad only to confirm what they already knew in advance, with authentic exploration, consisting of maintaining a permanent openness towards what is different

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and gathering new experiences, by virtue of which the traveller, upon returning home, is no longer the person he was before his departure for the unknown. The journey of the historian has, on the other hand, in common with that of the essayist, the fact of avoiding linear developments and engaging in infinite digressions. Montaigne had considered rambling and disorder essential elements of his Essays; he says, in the course of one of his recurring drifts: This stuffing is a little out of my subject. I go out of my way, but rather by licentiousness than carelessness. My ideas follow one another, but sometimes it is from a distance, and look at each other, but with a sidelong glance. […] The titles of my chapters do not always embrace their matter; often they denote it by some sign […]. I love the poetic gait, by leaps and bounds. […] It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room. I seek out change indiscriminately and tumultuously. My style and my mind alike go roaming.22

The ideas expressed here are related to those of the author of History, who also has an connatural fondness for wandering thinking. In History, the historian’s path is compared to the digressive narrator’s in Tristram Shandy: in the same way as Tristram cannot take his story beyond his childhood, since as “there is so much to tell, so much to look into […] it is impossible for any historian following him ever to reach Loretto”.23 The structure of History keeps a bit of this nonlinear and morose advance: the decision to put the path ahead of the goal as well as the determination to remain in the anteroom leading to the last truths can be understood if, as Agard states, Kracauer’s ideal is that of the journey that reaches no place.24 If the German thinker’s path is, like Burckhardt’s, that of “an indolent pilgrim who […] never penetrated […] into the very temple of thought but all his life was content to entertain himself in the courts and halls of the Peribolos, being content to think in images”.25 This allows us to point out the similarity between the essayist’s mission and the historian’s, or, better yet, the essayistic nature of the model of historian Kracauer hints at. Novalis placed the essay between the letter and the philosophical treatise26 ; similarly, history fills in Kracauer an intermediate position between the impressionism of personal statements and the formalism of abstract thinking. Kracauer’s criticism to abstract thinking recovers his early statements (so when, in History, he praises

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Erasmo’s or Burckhardt’s aversion to everything that is definitely fixed), adding a reflection on the devastating effect of orthodoxies nurtured both on the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century and on the shortcomings of an emancipatory thought with which Kracauer felt identified. Hence Kracauer—which in the letters to Adorno highlighted the positive value of ideologies as visions of the world—subject to criticism, in History, those systems of thought that, degenerated into dogma, blocked with their “formulas and recipes” the development of a genuine utopian praxis. Hence, instead, his attempt to keep, like Erasmus, his ideas in a fluid state, preventing them from jelling into institutionalized programs.27 Ossified systems of thought, on the other hand, foster regressive attitudes since they lead the masses to pacify “this feeling of being lost in uncharted and inimical expanses” and “to scramble for the shelter of a unifying and comforting belief”.28 The reluctance towards thought petrified in doctrine makes understandable the sympathy that Kracauer feels towards the great ideological movements in statu nascendi, before their conversion into orthodoxy: primitive Christianity, the first years of the Reformation, the beginnings of the communist movement. Sceptical, from early on, of the virtues of collectivism, Kracauer denounces in History the risks of subordination of the intellectuals to a doctrinaire cause29 : the person who decides to unconditionally “belong” to a clique sacrifices a large part of his possibilities and qualities to completely fulfil his role as sectarian member of the Cause. The place assigned to Erasmus in the introductory chapter of History bears witness to this determination to safeguard the intellectual praxis from its subordination to orthodoxy. The Dutch humanist, with his fondness for the ideal of tolerance and his determination “to wreck the wall of fixed causes with their dogmas and institutional arrangements”,30 emerges here as the positive counterpart of Luther, whose criticisms of the bureaucratization of Catholicism soon degenerated into a new zeal for institutionalization, supported by the agreement with established powers. Nia Perivolaropoulou and Philippe Despoix have suggested observing in the antithesis Luther/Erasmus, as set by Kracauer, a response to the opposition Luther/Münzer, set by Ernst Bloch in Thomas Münzer as Theologian of Revolution (1921), a book harshly criticized by Kracauer. In fact, the author of History seems to address his criticism against Blochian leftism when he criticizes those voluntarists who, unlike Eramus, think that a new world can be created overnight. Incapable of tolerating those who do not share the same perspectives, “[u]topian visionaries condemn

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those who stick to the middle of the road on the ground that they callously betray mankind by trying to perpetuate a state of imperfection”.31 Let us recall that Bloch insists upon affirming that the objective conditions for the social revolution “are never completely ripe or so perfect that they are in no need of a will to action and an anticipatory dream in the subjective factor of this will”.32 All great revolutionaries, according to Bloch, have known that the revolutionary subject’s tenacious perseverance can often overcompensate (überkompensieren) the immaturity of external conditions—can speed up the tempo of history so that it can be adjusted to the revolutionary subject. Like the author of In Defence of Folly, Kracauer adopts an unyielding attitude towards the manipulation of history that aggressively imposes on it a necessity that it does not have. On the contrary, it could be stated that, for both Kracauer and Erasmus, history can only be dominated with legitimacy when it is obeyed—paraphrasing Bacon’s formula: natura non nisi parendo vincitur. Far from any historical fatalism, both believe as well in the need to escape pure revolutionary spontaneism, on the assumption that people certainly do their history, but only under conditions they have not created.

3 The Fascination for the in-Between Spaces and the Ambivalences of History Erasmus, “the most elusive of men”,33 opts to remain invariably lucid about himself and his own position in history and to prevent that mental clarity from being undermined by the blind adherence to a sect. As his alter ego, Kracauer is gripped by fear for what is fixed. Such fear leads him to identify with Erasmus’s determination to place himself at the crossroads between the various ideological trends of his time, pondering the importance of each of them, but avoiding falling into fanaticism. The fascination for in-between spaces appears very early in Kracauer’s work; in the treatise on the detective novel, existential man’s own space is designated as an “intermediate state” (Zwischenzustand), and History closes by putting forward “a Utopia of the in-between – a terra incognita in the hollows between the lands we know”.34 It can be said that this fascination is at the base of his understanding of history. Hence, Kracauer emphasizes the singularity of history, whose peculiar nature consists in being situated between literature and science, between philosophy and communis opinio, moving between them but without subordinating himself to the imperatives of only one of those contending fields. The determination to

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place history in a moving and intermediate area, whose importance had been little acknowledged, is one of the main goals of the book, as it is to delimit with precision, though without bureaucratic scrupulousness, the peculiarity that distinguishes the historiographical consideration from the other just mentioned fields. Above all, its interest lies in preventing the historian’s journey from being threatened by the Scylla of totalizing philosophical speculations and the Charybdis of scientific law and regularities. Against them and, particularly, against the faith in the intrinsically evolutionary nature of science proclaimed by the partisans of progress, Kracauer asserts the epic quality of history: the component of freedom that human history contains makes it depart from that iron causality that governs natural history and that allows its subordination to universal laws. The contingency that permeates human events, on the other hand, makes the most adequate way to account for historical events is to narrate them, to tell “a story the historian conforms to a necessity founded on a peculiar quality of historical reality”.35 The historian needs to make use of literary devices, just like the artist devoted to moulding his materials; however, this fact must not conceal the divergences between historiographical narrative and literary narrative. The former does not count on the latter’s freedom to mould its materials. As Kracauer points out, the historian’s métier imposes on him some restrictions: the demand to restore what men from other periods have done deprives him of the autonomy that the novelist or playwright can authoritatively enjoy, who can form their material at will. On the other hand, historians tend to be sceptical of aesthetic beauty, understood above all as an aestheticization of reality. Kracauer fosters a historiographical writing that—in partial resemblance to essay writing—is placed between science and art, and that remains attached to the rigorous qualities of its material. Even when it is stated in History that the historian must be able to “feel with words” in order to adequately convey his intuitions, it is also said that the art of prose represents, for him, something contingent. In the light of the particular relationship it maintains with its subject, historiographical writing reveals a closeness to literature and art that cannot be seen in other sciences. In this regard, it has a close affinity with an artistic language which, due to the peculiarity of its expressive means, is close to scientific objectivity, and which has been the object of a meticulous and original analysis by Kracauer: photography.

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4 The Historiographic Method and the Photographic Approach The effort to rescue fleeting events from oblivion is a trait that the author of History attributes positively to the historicist tradition; a tradition that, as already stated in the article “Photography” (1927), emerged at approximately the same time as modern photographic technique. This vindication of historicism in view of its affinities with the redemptive powers of the photographic medium is developed by Kracauer on the basis of a discussion—implicit, to a great extent—with Walter Benjamin’s Theses On the Concept of History (1940), with which it shows important coincidences. In his theses, Benjamin questioned historicism, among other reasons, for entering into empathy with the victors of the past, as well as with the present ruling class. No less interested in wrecking the victor’s historiography, Kracauer still ponders a merit in historicism: to have committed to saving the past from oblivion. According to Kracauer, there exists a contradiction in On the Concept of History: in the third thesis, Benjamin asserts that the chronicler who narrates the events from the past without making a distinction between major and minor events acts in accordance with one truth: nothing of what has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. Such statement, which Kracauer may endorse without objections, represents, as can be read in a draft of History, “a proper defence of this historicism that Benjamin repudiates”.36 Olivier Agard, who has studied in detail Kracauer’s dialogue with Benjamin present both in History and its preparatory notes, highlights that this disagreement stands out against the background of an essential agreement: the interest in “the small, the details; that is, that which is on the margins of tradition, the lost causes, the victims, that which could have happened”.37 On a note dating from November 25, 1960, Kracauer highlights this coincidence: “Benjamin may exaggerate the indifference of Historicism for the exploited, the poor and the weak, but he is right in claiming that history only hits upon the essential if it moves away from the highways and the more or less official worldviews”.38 We have seen how the 1927 essay already hints at a correlation between photography and historicism. The author himself, in his introduction to History, refers to that comparison drawn in the early article, a comparison he has in the meantime forgotten, but which, when he meets it again in the 1960s, he nevertheless celebrates as proof of the continuity of his thought.39 A more careful consideration allows us to recognize

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divergences between the correlation established in the 1920s and the one presented four decades later. Above all because, in “Photography”, historicism and photographic media appear in not very propitious terms: unlike memory, which only takes incomplete notes from reality and in which neither the totality of a spatial phenomenon nor the totality of the temporal course is included, historicism and photography strive to create a continuum. Historicists believe they can explain any phenomenon purely in terms of its genesis. That is, they believe at the very least that they can grasp historical reality by reconstructing the series of events in their temporal succession without any gaps. Photography presents a spatial continuum; historicism seeks to provide the temporal continuum. According to historicism, the complete mirroring of a temporal sequence simultaneously contains the meaning of all that occurred within that time.40

Against this obsession to construct continuities without fissures, Kracauer offers a valid alternative in Kafka’s work, whose constructive principle consists—in the manner of the Trauerspiel studied by Benjamin—in tearing the natural unity of things and reordering the fragments. Provides also a legitimate option for the film, which has the possibility of abolishing the ordinary relations between natural elements: it realizes that possibility when it “combines parts and segments to create strange constructs”,41 producing a distancing effect from the habitual. If the anarchy of the photographs in illustrated magazines produces an effect of confusion, cinema’s free play with images generates an impression akin to dreams, where fragments of daily life intermingle. Both in Theory of Film and History, the opposition between photography and cinema is substituted by the introduction of an element of kinship between them; better yet, by the assertion of film’s essentially photographic nature. As the French editors of History suggest, cinema includes photography and both are adequate to capturing a reality that is external to meaningful relations and that escapes man’s intentionality: that which Kracauer also calls “the flow of life”. The fugitive, the indeterminate, the amorphous, the singular, the unnamed are his main components.42

The fact of showing, precisely, a reality that escapes human consciousness is no longer disapproved, but sustained: as a disposition in accordance

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with the transcendental homelessness that defines late Modernity, and as an instrument to redeem the Lebenswelt of the menaces of abstraction and oblivion. In both cases the functions of photography and film coincide with those which late Kracauer identifies in historiography. To this should be added the different link established, in the early essay and the late studies, with violence and death. In “Photography”, the obstinacy to accumulate images through the camera appears as surrender—as a sign of the fear of death: What the photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the recollection of death, which is part and parcel of the every memoryimage. In the illustrated magazines the world has become a photographable present, and the photographed present has been entirely eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it all the more.43

In The Salaried Masses it was to be affirmed later that in the trivial cinema, and perhaps more in the magazines and illustrated newspapers, “the image-motifs constantly recurring in them like magical incantations are intended to cast certain contents once and for all into the abyss of imageless oblivion […]. The flight of images is a flight from revolution and from death”.44 And Benjamin in “The Storyteller” (1936) highlights to what extent the bourgeois society has increasingly managed to dismiss the consciousness about death “by means of medical and social, private and public institutions […]. Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death-dry dwellers of eternity; and when their end approaches, they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs”.45 In the Kracauer of the 1920s and in Benjamin, memory provides an antidote to the cult of distraction and forgetfulness about death promoted by late capitalism. Different is what happens with the Kracauer of the 1960s: in him the impersonality of the photographic apparatus manages, inversely, to make visible the mortal, creaturely character of the human being. The comment on a passage Remembrance of Thing Past in which the narrator attributes the neutral objectivity of the photographs to the emotional distance of the photographer, gives Kracauer, in History, the occasion to highlight the importance of photography and film as indispensable means for man to learn to contemplate death face to face: without eluding it, but without feeling annihilated by an observation deprived of mediations. But already Theory of Film offers

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suggestive indications in this regard, departing especially from an original reinterpretation of the myth of Medusa; in Traverso’s words: Like Perseus who, advised by Athena, manages to behead Medusa without ever beholding her face, by looking at his reflection on his own shield, we can grasp an unbearable reality – from which we otherwise we would look away in horror – thanks to its reflection on the movie screen. […] The images of killing fields offer the possibility of incorporating “into […] memory the real face of things”.46 It is precisely in this dialectic relation between image and memory where film’s redeeming potential resides, according to Kracauer.47

The importance that the Holocaust and exile have had for Kracauer in the construction of his late reflections on photography and film could not be overstated. If Theory of Film is, as Nia Perivolaropoulou asserts, an aesthetic of cinema after Auschwitz,48 it is so due to the author’s concern, to a great extent, about reflecting upon the instruments that cinema offers to face a reality marked by the experience of horror. Kracauer thinks that, in front of this horror, the most appropriate strategy consists of adopting a distanced perspective, that aspires to a sobriety faithful to the facts and that excludes the appeal to the fascinating and “culinary” (Brecht) effect of the beautiful images. History states that human suffering seems to demand detached reporting: the artist’s consciousness laid bare in artless photographs.

5

The Exile’s Perspective

These considerations about cinema and philosophy could be extended to History, which somehow is a Theory of History after Auschwitz. Like from the photographer or the film director, Kracauer also expects from the historian a treatment free of beautifying proceedings: the fact that history is traversed by human suffering demands, on the historian’s part, an essential austerity: the attitude of the one who tries to convey a message directly and with “photographic simplicity”. The impassibility that Kracauer celebrates in Flaubert and Proust, and that operates at the same time as the only legitimate form of approximation and distancing from natural and human suffering, requires the historian to maintain, in relation to his subjects, an intermediate distance: in The Salaried Masses , and even in his

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early essays, Kracauer makes sure to place himself quite near his objects to tackle them from within and far enough to unravel them on the basis of lucid reflection. Over time, the German essayist will keep on insisting on the importance of going deep into the unknown territories of the own culture, with the gaze of those who do not “belong” to it, of those “who do not belong to the house”.49 Kracauer’s identification with the exile, which dates from much earlier than his emigration from Nazi Germany, can be explained by the fact that the former constitutes, for Kracauer, the representative figure of a Modernity marked by the dissolution of traditional communities and by the expansion of societies characterized by the acceleration of the rhythms of life, instability, impersonality, anonymity. The experience of a social universe that—to use a statement from Lukács’s Theory of the Novel (1914–1915; published as a book in 1920), a work highly appreciated for Kracauer—is no longer a paternal home, but a prison, already encouraged in the German thinker the conviction that the only existence in accordance with the new times is that of the vagabonds and exiles. The writings of the 1920s—in an eminent way, the treatise on the detective novel—investigated the existential homelessness of contemporary man, and over time Kracauer was having a growing identification with the image of the uprooted. As Traverso points out: His style of thought and his intellectual stance are derived from the inescapable verification that, in the modern world, God escaped the gaze of men, a conviction whose most penetrating literary formulation he discovered in Kafka’s novels. It was not about questioning the existence of God, but about accepting the impositions of a secularised and disenchanted world, where the eclipse has submerged men and women in an “iron cage” (Weber) in such a way they were forced to live a reality split between technical progress and inner poverty, condemned to the terrible condition of a “spiritually homeless” life.50

In Kracauer persisted, over the decades, the affinity for the point of view of the outsider or, in his words, of the “extra-territorial”, as he saw it represented in figures for whom he felt a deep sympathy: Jacques Offenbach, Franz Kafka, Chaplin’s tramp. In History, Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, embodies the condition of being a foreigner: this legendary character—the quintessential incarnation of extraterritoriality—is presented by Kracauer as an individual with innumerable faces, each of which reflects one of the periods travelled, while the set of

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countenances is combined to form always diverse patterns. In his incessant wanderings, Ahasuerus tries to build, from the past times that shaped him, the unique time he must embody. In History, the condition of foreigner has a heuristic value, since the exile (whose double or perhaps multiple existence, constituted by the superposition of various life experiences, has the character of a palimpsest) is forced to live in an intermediate state, in which past and present, identification and distance are mixed. Turning necessity into virtue, Kracauer extols the non-fixed, fluid existence that the emigrant lives: “since the self he was continues to smolder beneath the person he is about to become, his identity is bound to be in a state of flux; and the odds are that he will never fully belong to the community to which he now in a way belongs”.51 And it is this intermediate state that he recommends to the historian, who only by preserving the state of a perfect homelessness can make genuine contact with the material that concerns him. The material, on the other hand, will only open to historians its hidden truths if they approach it, not with the purpose of doing violence to it, but with the purpose of asking it to communicate its mysteries. Voluntarism has also terrible effects on historiographical research: the aggressive manipulation of the materials causes the past to withdraw from the historian. Kracauer, who in one of his earliest articles speaks in favour of waiting, understood as a “hesitant openness” that does not imply a pure passivity, but a “tense activity and engaged self-preparation”,52 and who in his later work will not stop affirming that truly creative action is inseparable from intense passive observation, believes that the past only agrees to speak to those who turn to it to listen. There is on this point a coincidence with Benjamin’s theory of knowledge; above all, with the one that appears developed in the preface to the Trauerspiel study. Indeed, what is proposed as a method in this Vorrede is an immersion in the object, in order to ascend from the mere intention (Meinen) of knowledge to the knowledge (Wissen) of the truth. Unlike what happens in a reified reality, in which the natural and social world assume the false appearance of having been created for man, the truth sought by Benjamin corresponds to an existence that exceeds the human being, and that does not agree to reveal her secrets to those who seek to do violence to it, but only to those who approach it with the perspective of the lover. In fact, Benjamin points out that truth is beautiful not so much in itself as for the one that seeks it. This criticism against subjectivism and utilitarianism in relation to the object of knowledge can be more clearly appreciated in the objections

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to the possessive nature of knowledge (Erkenntnis ). Benjamin questions the subject’s tyrannical disposition when approaching his matter through methods alien to it. If the approach of systematic philosophy presupposes working with methods that can be applied to diverse matters, the treatise calls for the elaboration of a special method for each particular object, similar to what happens with the form-content dialectics in the work of art. Benjamin delves into this autonomization regarding consciousness to such an extent that he asserts the need for the object to represent itself— in analogy to what happens with mystical revelation—, regardless of any relation to the subject. An example of this is the anecdote, told by the philosopher himself, about the painter who, once his work is finished, decides to hide in it.53

6

The Tradition of the Lost Causes

In a spirit analogous to Benjamin’s, Kracauer invokes, in History, the recommendation that Schopenhauer gives to the art student to behave, in front of a painting, as if he were in the presence of a prince, namely: obsequiously awaiting what the painting is interested in telling him. If the observer decided to speak first, he would end up hearing only himself. Waiting, in this sense, amounts to an active passivity on the historian’s part. Concerned about eluding all types of violence on facts and, rather, about listening to them with devotion, Kracauer criticizes the historians who, like Croce and Collingwood, assert that all history is contemporary history. The “present interest historians” found their perspectives upon two assumptions: in the first place, the one that highlights the effect that the milieu to which the historian belongs has on his (unconscious) thinking; secondly, the one that affirms that the historian is a son of his time completely devoted to it. Although Kracauer grants this theory some amount of truth, he questions it not only for this aggressive contempt for the facts of the past, but for building itself upon the untenable belief in the unity of historical periods. These are not so much unified entities as precarious conglomerates of tendencies, aspirations and heterogeneous activities that often express themselves independently of one another. This perspective, in which the formative tendency prevails over the realist, should be complemented with its opposite: the one that approaches the past with the interest of the antiquarian, represented by Lovejoy, Huizinga and Proust. Important in itself and as a correction to

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the excesses of the “present interest” theories, “antiquarian historiography” should also avoid its own excess: to become lost in the “once upon a time” of the past and forget all commitment to the current life, to “the provisional situation in which we are”. As can be seen, there is in History a recurrent concern for establishing mediations between opposite positions, but also for studying each of them in their particularities, without submitting it to reducing generalizations. This respect for different positions—a healthy antidote against the thoughtless aggressiveness that characterized both the bourgeois intelligentsia bent on attacking socialism and the intellectual bureaucrats of the Diamat—is related to tact, a term that plays a central role in History. As Barnouw points out: The place that he [Kracauer] created in History for the thoughts of others was spacious enough so that they could be balanced, tactfully judged in terms of their relative usefulness, and above all related. Positions that seems diametrically opposed emerge changed by such mediation. When Kracauer counselled to link, rather than to choose between, Ranke’s and Dilthey’s historiographical positions […], he echoed the advice given in Theory of Film that photographic perspective should combine “formative” and “realistic” tendencies.54

Kracauer makes reference to tact when tackling the conflict between macro- and microhistory. The advocators of the former—among whom Toynbee is mentioned as an extreme case—fall into the excesses that could be expected to be criticized by a thinker who, like Kracauer, had so often directed his attention to the small and apparently banal. In History, Kracauer draws upon Tolstoy to question those historians who attribute the power to destroy or create great empires only to the Napoleons and Alexanders of the social world and exclude ordinary men and everyday facts from their field. Less predictable (but equally worthwhile) is that the study also highlights the limitations of microhistory, which runs the risk of pernicious myopia. The observations of the aforementioned Tolstoy and of historians such as Namier, who are interested in the life stories of ordinary men and give little significance to the “great men”, by whom professional biographers are fascinated, lose an important share of their value when they drastically exclude any reference to a wider perspective. Kracauer thinks that the good God is not only—pace Aby Warburg—in the details: the repercussions of long-term events and ideas carry a life of their own, independent of microevents. Historical

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truth does not rest, then, only on details, but it also unfolds in the macro dimension: “There exist long-enduring events, such as wars, social or religious movements, slow adjustments of well-defined groups to changing environmental conditions, etc., which can be said to be tangible entities. Unfolding in lofty regions, some of them presumably escape the micro-historian’s attention”.55 For Kracauer, it would be too simplistic a solution to think that the problem is solved half the way between the two dimensions, or by putting forward collaboration between them without any conflict. Proposals of this kind are based on the wrong belief that the different historical components make up an ultimate unit: a belief as fallacious as the ingenuous faith in the unity of human personality. The plan to merge (as Toynbee wanted) the perspectives of the bird and the fly is unrealizable: the two visions can coexist, but without being reconciled. Kracauer’s solution to this problem is summarized in what he calls the law of levels , linked to the persuasion that the historical universe has a non-homogeneous structure. Indeed, this law assumes that each of the levels of generality presents the analyst with a relatively autonomous perspective: the historical process unfolds somewhat in the manner of Chinese concentric spheres, each of which rotates with complete independence from the rest. Hence, to achieve a rich and deep view on the historical reality, the historian must place himself at different levels, like the wanderer who explores a landscape: panoramic views alternate with the observation of particular and ever-changing details. In this way many films also proceed (and the parallel is, by the way, characteristic of Kracauer), which are constructed from an alternation between close-ups and general shots, thus observing their objects from varying distances. The other principle Kracauer offers to account for the circulation between macro- and microhistory is the law of perspective. It refers to the obvious fact that macroscopic analysis hinders the view of a great number of elements from the microlevel. That is why it is necessary to become aware of both the effectivity of those unnoticed details and the existence of other macroperspectives independent of one’s own: this diversity is, as Kracauer asserts quoting Raymond Aron, an expression of life. A particular weight has, in History, the attempt to safeguard the proper space of historiography, resisting any effort to subordinate it to philosophical abstraction. Here Kracuer faces two opposing philosophical projects to co-opt history. The two solutions, which represent a false alternative, are, on the one hand, transcendentalism—which, adhering to secularized

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theological concepts and remnants of past metaphysics, upholds the possibility of timeless truths and postulates a realm of absolute values and norms—and, on the other, immanentism—which, from a relativist point of view, rejects any ontological postulate, denies the existence of timeless truths outright and, placing itself in the immanence of the historical process, leads historicity to its last logical conclusions. Both trends rely on their own traditions of important thinkers, but Kracauer focuses his attention on the two exponents closest in time: Karl Löwith and Adorno. Löwith’s philosophy of history represents an escape into the ontological transcendentalism. As far as Adornian’s immanentism is concerned, History challenges the evanescence of the concept of utopia, the postulation of an infinite dialectics deprived of ontological substance, the lack of attention to the “mere” empirical world and the contingencies of history.56 In his essays and narrative work of the 1920s and 1930s, Kracauer had dealt with the death of that concept of individual belonging to the already obsolete arsenal of bourgeois culture. At the same time, he had tried to prevent the disappearance of the old individualism from leading to an irrational collectivism. He thought, instead, that a new model of individual should emerge, in keeping with a mass society in full expansion. The protagonist of Kracauer’s first novel, Ginster, is a typical expression of the new subject its author seeks. He can be in part labelled as an antihero who finds his moments of fulfilment, not in the nostalgic refuge in the old interiority, but in moments when he feels that his own subjectivity has merged with the external world.57 Ginster has one of these epiphanies in a train station where he is ecstatic with “the feeling of beatitude derived from finding himself thus lost in the midst of this hive that devours itself unceasingly”.58 Kracauer feels the same fascination for hotel lobbies, in fact, he devotes to them an original analysis in his book about detective novels. In the light of the above, it is telling that, in History, the historical period does not appear as a meaningful spatial-temporal unit, but as a kind of meeting place for chance encounters, like the waiting room of a train station. A waiting room represents a kind of intermediate state. A similar state is the realm of history: an anteroom before the ultimate truths, but separate and connected, at the same time, with the field of communis opinio. In this anteroom places, the Kracauer of History, his own and peculiar utopia: that of an in-between space. The German thinker considers that the most valuable is “hidden in the interstices between dogmatised beliefs of the world”, so it is a question of

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establishing “the tradition of lost causes, giving names to the hitherto unnamed”.59

Notes 1. Perivolaropoulou, Nia/Despoix, Philippe, “Postface. L’histoire est un amusement de Vieillard”. Kracauer, Siegfried, Histoire. Les avant-dernières choses. Transl. by C. Orsoni. Ed. by N. Perivolaropoulou and Philippe Despoix. Pres. by J. Revel. Paris: Stock, 2006, pp. 295–313; p. 310 cited here. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of foreign-language quotations are the author’s. 2. Published for the first time in 1969. 3. Kristeller, Paul Oskar, “Preface to the First American Paperback Edition”. Kracauer, Siegfried, History. The Last Things before the Last. Completed after the author’s death by Paul Oskar Kristeller. Princeton, NJ: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 1994, pp. i–ix; p. viii cited here. 4. Despoix, Philippe, Ethiken der Entzauberung. Zum Verhältnis von ästhetischer, ethischer und politischer Sphäre am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts. Transl. by Annette Weber. Bodenheim: Philo, 1998, p. 189. 5. Barnouw, Dagmar, Critical Realism. History, Photography and the Work of Siegfried Kracauer. Baltimore, etc.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, p. 6. 6. Ibid., p. 21. 7. Cf. Traverso: “unfulfilled times, abandoned by the absolute and removed of its spiritual contents, can be directly grasped by means of a phenomenological approach”. Traverso, Enzo, Siegfried Kracauer. Itinéraire d’un intellectuel nómade. Paris: la découverte, 1994, p. 83. 8. Agard, Olivier, Kracauer. Le chiffonnier mélancolique. Paris: CNRS, 2010, p. 44. 9. Cf. Kracauer, Siegfried, The Salaried Masses . Transl. by Quintin Hoare. Introd. by Inka Mülder-Bach. London and New York: Verso, 1998, p. 29. 10. Cf. letter to Adorno, dating from August 27th, 1965, in which Kracauer describes his method: “history as construction or, better yet […], as construction in the material”. Adorno, Theodor W./Kracauer, Siegfried, Briefwechsel 1923–1966. “Der Riß der Welt geht auch durch mich”. Publ. by the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, ed. by Wolfgang Schopf. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2008, p. 477. 11. Cf. Tanner, Jakob, “Le voyage de l’histoirien. Temps et contingence chez Kracauer”. Despoix, Philippe/Schöttler Peter (eds.), Siegfried Kracauer. Penseur de l’histoire. París, Montréal: Maison des Sciences de L’Homme, 2008, pp. 65–75; p. 66 cited here.

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12. Rohner, Ludwig, Der deutsche Essay. Materialien zur Geschichte und Ästhetik einer literarischen Gattung. Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1966, p. 381. 13. Zohlen, Gerwin, “Text-Straßen. Zur Theorie der Stadtlektüre bei Siegfried Kracauer”. Arnold, Heinz Ludwig (ed.), Siegfried Kracauer. Text + Kritik 68. Munich: Text + Kritik, 1981, pp. 62–72; p. 68 cited here. 14. Craver, Harry T., Reluctant skeptic. Siegfried Kracauer and the Crises of Weimar Culture. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2017, p. 156. 15. Ibid. 16. Adorno, Theodor W./Kracauer, Siegfried, Briefwechsel 1923–1966, p. 484. 17. Qtd. in Agard, Olivier, “Les éléments d’autobiographie intellectuelle”. Despoix, Philippe/Schöttler Peter (eds.), Siegfried Kracauer. Penseur de l’histoire, pp. 141–163; p. 143 cited here. 18. Montaigne, Michel de, Selected Essays. Transl. by Donald M. Frame. New York: Walter J. Black, 1943. 19. Kracauer, Siegfried. History. The Last Things before the Last, p. 4. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. p. 217 22. Montaigne, Michel de, Selected Essays, pp. 280 et sq. cited here. 23. Kracauer, Siegfried, History. The Last Things before the Last, p. 190. 24. Agard, Olivier, Kracauer. Le chiffonnier mélancolique¸ p. 162. 25. Kracauer, Siegfried, History. The Last Things before the Last, p. 217. 26. Novalis, Das Allgemeine Brouillon. Materialien zur Enzyklopädistik 1798/1799. Introd. by Hans-Joachim Mähl. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1993, p. 11, § 68. 27. Kracauer, Siegfried, History. The Last Things before the Last, p. 11. 28. Ibid., p. 5. 29. Cf., in this book, pp. 127–145. 30. Kracauer, Siegfried. History. The Last Things before the Last, p. 15. 31. Ibid., p. 14. 32. Bloch, Ernst, The Principle of Hope. Transl. by Neville Place, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995, vol. 2, p. 580. 33. Kracauer, Siegfried. History. The Last Things before the Last, p. 11. 34. Ibid., p. 217. 35. Ibid., p. 32. 36. Qtd. in Agard, Olivier, “Les éléments d’autobiographie intellectuelle”, p. 161. 37. Ibid. 38. Qtd. in ibid., n. 53. 39. Carlos Eduardo Jordão Machado draws a parallel between the 1927 essay and Kracauer’s late writings, regarding this affinity between the photographic approach and the historiographic method, in the last section of his

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41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

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article “Walter Benjamin: ‘montagem literária’, crítica à ideia do progresso, história e tempo messiânico”. Machado, Carlos Eduardo/Machado, Rubens/Vedda, Miguel (eds.), Walter Benjamin. Experiência histórica e imagens dialéticas. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2015, pp. 131–143; cf. pp. 141–143. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Photography”. The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays. Ed. and Transl. by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 47–63; p. 49 et sq. cited here. Ibid., pp. 62 et sq. Perivolaropoulou, Nia/Despoix, Philippe, “Postface”, p. 302. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Photography”, p. 59. Kracauer, Siegfried, The Salaried Masses . Transl. by Quintin Hoare. Introd. by Inka Mülder-Bach. London and New York: Verso, 1998, pp. 88–95; p. 94 cited here. Benjamin, Walter, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”. Transl. by Harry Zohn. Selected Writings. Volume 3 (1935– 1938). Ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 143–166; p. 151 cited here. Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality. Introd. by Miriam Bratu Hansen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 306. Traverso, Enzo, “Sous le signe de l’exterritorialité. Kracauer et la modernité juive”. Perivolaropoulou, Nia /Despoix, Philippe (eds.), Culture de masse et modernité. Siegfried Kracauer sociologue, critique, écrivain. Paris: Ed. de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2001, pp. 212–232; p. 231 cited here. Cf. Perivolaropoulou, Nia, “Le travail de la mémoire dans Theory of Film de Siegfried Kracauer”. Protée 32/1 (2004), pp. 39–48; p. 48 cited here. Carlos Eduardo Jordão Machado placed this aspect of Kracauer’s work with that “sociological literature” whose birth the same essayist celebrates. In contrast to the (petty)bourgeois travel literature, this sociological literature “could also be defined as a kind of ‘expedition trip’, only that the destination is not Africa or another remote region of the globe, but rather the everyday terrain that surrounds us; it does not turn its back on us, but seeks to clarify the social being that conditions our doing and thinking […]. They are expeditions that strive to dispel the fog that obscures the everyday world, showing that the closest is at the same time the most distant and, for that very reason, they are ‘voyages of discovery in the proper sense of the word’. What is The Salaried Masses but an attempt in the direction of this new ‘literary genre’, this ‘sociological literature’, which allows a ‘concretion of the intellect’, which seeks to investigate an ‘unknown territory that is paradoxically shown to everyone’s eyes?’” (“La

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50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

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peculiaridad de la forma ensayo en Siegfried Kracauer: la literatura sociológica”. Ciordia, Martín/Machado, Carlos Eduardo J./Vedda, Miguel (eds.), Filosofías provisorias. Reflexiones en torno a ensayos y ensayistas. Buenos Aires: Gorla, 2012, pp. 161–168; p. 164 cited here). Traverso, Enzo, “Sous le signe de l’exterritorialité. Kracauer et la modernité juive”, p. 222. Kracauer, Siegfried, History. The Last Things before the Last, p. 83 Kracauer, Siegfried, “Those Who Wait”. The Mass Ornament, pp. 129– 140; p. 139 cit. here. It is telling that Kracauer also make reference to this anecdote; cf. letter to Adorno, note 15. Barnouw, Dagmar, Critical Realism, p. 169. Kracauer, Siegfried, History. The Last Things before the Last, p. 115. This topic is developed in more detail in another article in this book; cf. pp. 211–220. A more detailed analysis of these questions in Ginster can be read in pp. 37–63. Kracauer, Siegfried, Ginster. Werke. Vol. 7: Romane und Erzählungen. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach with Sabine Biebl. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2004, pp. 9–256; p. 151 cited here. Kracauer, Siegfried. History. The Last Things before the Last, p. 219.

Part II

“The Great Rift of the World”. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and the Discussions About the Character and Function of Critic-Intellectuals

1 Between the Fronts: The genesis of the modern Intellectual It is well known that Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin devoted intense efforts to show the correlations between, on the one hand, the Paris of the July Monarchy, the Second Republic and, particularly, the Second Empire and, on the other, the European context between the wars. The main results of this exploration can be seen, in the case of Benjamin, in the writings on Baudelaire and in the vast material for the Arcades Project; in Kracauer’s, in the “social biography” on Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of his Time (1937). The similarities and differences between the two investigations on the Restoration Paris, understood as the prehistory of the context of the early twentieth century—signed by the world war, the economic crisis and the rise of Nazism—were made explicit on various occasions.1 But it was not emphasized, however, to what extent could have been decisive, in the choice of the two German essayists, the awareness that in the capital of the nineteenth century first emerged a model of intellectual in accordance with the critical and changing conditions of Modernity, and to which both the author of The Salaried Masses and that of One Way Street fit. The earliest expression of this model is found in Heinrich Heine, whose Ludwig Börne (1840) is one of the earliest and boldest attempts to define the peculiarities and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67965-1_7

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function of the modern intellectual. About the dispute between Börne and Heine wrote Hans Magnus Enzensberger that it represents “possibly the richest controversy in consequences in German literature. The discussion around it has been going on for 150 years, and no end is in sight”.2 Our intention is, in this study, to extract, in the first place, Heine’s proposals from the course of history, and to establish with them a constellation that allows us to shed better light on the reflections of Kracauer and Benjamin on the intellectual. In the context of the polemics with the essayist and untimely Jacobin Ludwig Börne, Heine expressed his conviction that the only reasonable option for the modern intellectual could not be the affiliation to a doctrinaire Weltanschauung that would have already resolved all the theoretical problems and which should, therefore, only be propagated and applied by its supporters, but rather an exploratory practice for which there are no paths or goals set in advance. Located between the fronts, the intellectual does not find a place of refuge neither in the aesthetic retreat, nor in the comfort that a political doctrine offers him, but in a search stripped of certainties that represents his only genuine commitment to the wretched of the earth. The tearing of Modernity demands from intellectuals both the abandonment of dogmatic self-reliance and the uncertainty characteristic of the torn consciousness. In Pictures of Travel (1826–1831), Heine alluded to the significance of this homology between the fragmentation of the world and the internal fragmentation of the writer’s mind: Ah dear reader, if you would complain of morbidness and want of harmony and division, then as well complain that the world itself is divided. For, as the heart of the poet is the central point of the world, it must, in times like these, be miserably divided and torn. He who boasts that his heart has remained whole, confesses that he has only a prosaic out-of-the-way corner-heart. But the great world-wound passed through my own heart, and on that account I know that the great Gods have highly blessed me above many others, and held me to be worthy of a poet-martyrdom.3

Such an attitude allowed the “torn” Heine to become the initial model of a central figure of Modernity: that of the critic-intellectual. It is known that Sartre identified, as the birth time of the modern intellectual, the last third of the nineteenth century, in the circumstances of the arousal around the Dreyfus affair; but Gerhard Höhn4 rightly pointed out that “before

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there were ‘les intellectuels’,5 there were already individual intellectuals”, and that the Paris of the Restoration had already offered a propitious terrain for them to emerge.6 The fact that, according to Sartre, the tearing (déchirure) is a decisive trait of the intellectual does nothing but endorse Höhn’s proposal; especially if one thinks to what extent Heine felt torn between the rigorous cultivation of the profession of writer and the need to go beyond the limits of his own métier to commit himself to the political reality of his time. It is suggestive that Heine was not only the target of the conservative offensive due to his political radicalism, but also questioned by revolutionaries who found his respect for artistic perfection inadmissible. But Heine has also been harassed for not putting his criticism at the service of one party and for preserving his autonomy as an independent intellectual.7 Heine anticipated one of the dilemmas that the critic-intellectual would have to face throughout the twentieth century: the difficulty and necessity of maintaining the lucid position of the independent individual and yet keeping an unwavering commitment to social reality. Heine thus embodies the attempt to play the role of the intellectual who ventures to carry out his explorations by tracing his own paths and avoiding the routes travelled by his predecessors. It is not by chance that the German poet questions the paralyzing effect that orthodoxies produce. Less enthusiastic than his republican or conservative contemporaries, he is drawn towards scepticism; or, better still, he is dragged by a pendulum movement that balances him between certainty and doubt, between action and thought, between pathos and satire; each of the extremes contributes, dialectically, to relativize the abuses to which the other could drag. This problematic appears in the essay on Börne as an alternation between revolutionary ebb and flow, or between the fervour of empathy and the coldness of critical distance. The talent for discovering the satirical aspect of reality helps Heine avoid the one-sided view of the tendency poets and of Börne who, in their effort to maintain an invariably serious attitude, fall into the ridicule. Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas 8 : this maxim could be used as a warning against the supposed tragic elevation of the republicans. But the consciousness with which she connects explains the rejection of which Heine was the victim, insofar as, as Windfuhr comments, “Pathos and extremism were always preferred in Germany over ironically mitigated and reflective behaviour”.9 The combination of proximity and distance saves Heine from the danger of becoming a doctrinaire, and allows him to react subtly to the smallest changes in the social landscape without losing

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sight of underground developments. Such a perception is linked to taking advantage of the possibilities offered by the condition of exile—a condition that Heine knew how to transform from a necessity into a virtue. Exile is a “painful joy” (Schmerzjübel ) to which Heine owes his breadth of vision: the panoramas about France and Germany that unfold both the Börne and other essays by Heine—it is enough to mention German Circumstances (1833) and De l’Allemagne (1835)—owe their originality to the fact that they were drawn by someone who observes these areas from an internal and external point of view at the same time. Heine’s dynamism belongs to the very substance of the essayistic form, which has always assumed as its own the task of capturing objects in full motion. Persuaded of the transience of all that exists, Montaigne has written: I cannot keep my subject still. It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness. I take this in this condition, just as it is at the moment I give my attention to it. I do not portray being: I portray passing […]. My history needs to be adapted to the moment. I may presently change, not only by fortune, but also by intention.10

The perpetual mobility of the subject and the object is the premise for the development of essayistic exploration: “If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial”.11 Three centuries later, Kracauer made an observation about Erasmus that alludes to his own essay work: “his aversion to formulas and recipes with their congealed contents prompted him to keep his ideas, so to speak, in a fluid state, they did not, and could not, jell into an institutionalized programme”.12 Situated between the two authors, Heine maintains a position consistent with that of these two great essayists, insofar as, fascinated by the vitality of the object, he refuses to immobilize it within a dogmatic scheme.

2 Trascendental Homelessness and the Intellectual as Refugee “The world-wound passes through me too”13 : this paraphrase of Heine that we find at the end of a letter from Kracauer to Adorno dated April 5, 1923, already evidences a trait that unites the author of Theory of Film with the poet and essayist of the Restoration. Like this, Kracauer presents the image of a homo duplex in which there is an interest both in

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promoting a politicization of intellectuals (Benjamin), and in placing the autonomy of thought safe from all utopian enthusiasm and, in particular, of all submission under an ideological programme, be it that of a political party, an orthodox theory or a clique like the one represented, in his eyes, by the Frankfurt School. His vocation as an extra-territorial—which led him to say, in a letter to Leo Löwenthal, that the only true existence is that of vagabonds—made him a personality completely incompatible with the immobility of a system. The aversion for the stationary runs through his work from the first articles—composed under the intense influence of Simmel—to History. The Last Things before the Last, and allows us to understand the insistence that, in this posthumous treatise, the thinker puts on highlighting his fear in front of everything that has been definitively fixed, as well as on witnessing his deep affinity with Erasmus, who was sustained by the conviction “the truth ceases to be true as soon as it becomes a dogma, thus forfeiting the ambiguity which marks it as truth”.14 It is not by chance that, when confronted with the great ideological movements of the past, Kracauer has been interested in the moment in which they were in statu nascendi, before their final establishment and institutionalization. This is valid for his relationship with Marxism, in which he saw less a doctrine capable of offering an answer to all social problems, than a perspective from which to unmask ideologies, exposing the false consciousness that sustains them. The unique combination of political responsibility and radical scepticism gave Kracauer a specific identity as “an engagé intelectual, a Marxist […] without thereby being militant or respectful of any orthodoxy. Kracauer was an ‘interpreter’ of the society of his time who never wielded any power except that of his critical intelligence; he was not an ‘organic intellectual’ in the Gramscian sense”.15 The concern to keep critical lucidity alive at any cost advocated in Kracauer the belief that the only way in which the intellectual can access an original, non-reified vision of socio-historical reality is to observe it with the gaze of the outsider. As Heine, Kracauer understands that extra-territoriality represents both a privileged perspective for understanding the bourgeois world and a defining condition of the modern subject; it is suggestive that the vindication of the exile’s gaze long precedes the emigration imposed by the rise of Nazism. Already the early writings often refer to the provisional and wandering existence to which the inhabitants of big metropolises are condemned since the dissolution of traditional communities. In such circumstances, it is a pernicious anachronism to seek a nostalgic refuge in the security of old and

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stable Weltanschauungen. Such conservatism would be as sterile as that of those artists and writers who persist in cultivate the old closed forms in the midst of a reality marked by transience and openness. The realization that modern life is governed by a relativism driven to the extreme, as a result of which individuals “lack ties and firm ground”, so that “their spirit/intellect drifts along without direction, at home everywhere and nowhere”,16 is at the base of the way in which Kracauer conceives the modern intellectual. In view of this imperative of attention to the present, Dagmar Barnouw has rightly said that if “Kracauer emphasized the importance of a more informed and self-critical questioning of the intellectual’s position in cultural space and time, he did so out of his concern, on a daily basis, with the complex temporal actuality of a modern culture in flux”.17 Deprived of absolute certainties, the intellectual of (late) Modernity can only respond to the demands that his time places on him by maintaining—as a torn consciousness—a permanent state of attention towards himself: permanently reviewing his own convictions and, above all, questioning himself for its function and place within social life. In a polemical commentary on Wissen und Verändern! (Know and Transform!) by Döblin, Kracauer finds the book’s real merit in “having intervened […] in a debate that, between us, has long lived an underground life. It is a question, in this debate, of determining the place of the stratum of the German intelligentsia. Where does it belong, where is it or is it not at home?”18 Despite the fact that Döblin’s positive proposals seem unacceptable to him in every way, the author of the review thinks that the book has managed, at least, draw attention to the fact that the place of the intellectuals is between two fronts. Whether they have gone over to reaction, joined the workers’ movement sacrificing their convictions, or still do not know what problem they are trying to resolve, the majority of German intellectuals are refugees (Flüchtlinge) and are not willing to bear all the consequences of their situation. As in other plans, in this one Kracauer’s proposal is to restrict the field of choice to those options that are at the height of contemporary reality, avoiding the search for shelter in conceptions that the advance of Modernity has made obsolete. This is associated with the emergence of a new type of writer, who renounces the aroma of eternity that previously hung around him and that, according to Kracauer, already smells rotten. The writer according to this time no longer strives to meditate on the absolute, but rather thinks that his mission is “to give an account, for himself (and for the general public) of our current situation”,19 approaching with it to the function

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traditionally performed by the journalist. This displacement, which once again bears similarities to the alterations in the literary system produced during the Vormärz in relation to the “closing of the artistic period” (Heine), implies denying the “transcendent layer of being” by which the old idealists were enthralled, and approach—voluntarily or involuntarily—dialectical materialism. The new writers: “Instead of behaving in a contemplative way, behave in a political way; instead of looking for the universal over the particular, they find it in the march of the particular; instead of pursuing developments, they aspire to produce ruptures”.20 Deep coincidences with Benjamin can be seen here: with a Benjamin who, from 1924 to 1925 onwards, slid, in the words of Palmier,21 from esoteric criticism to a critique of “intervention” located within the field of history, but who further radicalized his positions since 1929, in the context of an ever closer collaboration with Bertolt Brecht. Since then, his conception of the historical responsibility of the intellectual in times of crisis was asserting itself with increasing clarity, unlike the metaphysical perspective that prevailed in early writings. The crisis in the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism make Benjamin, like Kracauer, increasingly concerned with delving into the preconditions of his own work. The failed project, undertaken jointly with Brecht, of publishing the review Krise und Kritik is in itself significant, since it had the purpose of promoting a critique that would reformulate its entire field of reflection “in a permanent crisis; that is, that it conceived the time as a ‘critical time’, in the double sense”.22 In Benjamin, the awareness of living in a critical age was singularly clear. Hence, since the late 1920s and early 1930s, run through his essays like a red thread, as Momme Brodersen points out, the “reflections on social position, importance and the task of the intellectual”.23 At the time, he was interested in finding answers to the questions about “where does the intellectual stand, what role and importance does he have in society, what tasks does he have to seek for himself?”24 The search for a place for the intelligentsia implied establishing a distance both from intellectuals who simply proclaimed themselves revolutionaries, and from those who tried to find a comfortable position within the bourgeois order. Unlike both types, Benjamin postulates the figure of the intellectual “aware of the crisis of his image and function, and who no longer recognizes himself in stereotypes”.25

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3 Unmasking Ideologies: The Functions of the (New) Writer Already in the article on Surrealism Benjamin referred to the crisis of the traditional intelligentsia associated with the crisis of the humanist concept of freedom. But it is in the writings of 1933–1934 where his ideas about the character and function of intellectuals appear most expressly developed. Like Kracauer, Benjamin thinks that the crisis has contributed to creating a situation in which, for the intellectual, it is no longer possible to act spontaneously, and in which he has to consciously examine the presuppositions of his own activity. It is suggestive that, in “The Author as Producer” (1933), he relies on a passage by Brecht to warn about the enormous consequences that the then prevailing confusion about their situation must have on artists, writers and critics. The allusion to Brecht is not anodyne, given that Benjamin’s purpose is to induce the “spiritual workers” to assume a rationally critical distance from their own production: in the face of a critical situation, it is not a question of arousing indignation in them, but to turn strange—in keeping with the epic theatre programme—the circumstances in which they live. If today, “more than ever, what is decisive is the idea a writer forms of his work”,26 it is understandable that Benjamin celebrates those contemporary authors who refuse to consider their activity as automatic and obvious and who seek the highest possible degree of awareness about the bases of their production. This is the case of Valéry, who is openly praised in the study “The Present Social Situation of the French Writer” (1933–1934): in his desire to rationalize poetic creation, the author of the Cimetière Marin is, in the level of technique, at the height of a time that made unprecedented advances in the rationalization of material production processes. But he has failed, on the other hand, to transfer the concept of planning from the realm of the work of art to that of the human community: Valéry stopped at the threshold that Gide would have crossed when he decided to collaborate with the cause of communism. Here we see that Benjamin’s purpose is to place artists and thinkers before a double imperative: on the one hand, to abandon the forms and methods of the “old” bourgeois world, based on inspiration and the old eternal values of the Beautiful and the Good, in order to replace them with conscious experimentation and work; on the other, that of going beyond nihilistic individualism by embracing the cause of the proletariat. In both cases, the purpose is to remove the intellectual from that conformism that is about to subjugate

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him. More debatable is the link that Benjamin perceives between both imperatives, made explicit at the beginning of “The Author as Producer”, where an affinity between political tendency and literary quality is postulated: “this literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct political tendency of a work, alone constitutes the quality of that work. The correct political tendency of a work thus includes its literary quality because it includes its literary tendency”.27 The affinity asserted here is, in our opinion, problematic, as is the general view that Benjamin offers of the Soviet literary milieu. An example of the latter is offered by the place assigned to Tretyakov, in whom Benjamin sees the most obvious example of functional dependence between correct political tendency and progressive literary technique. Kracauer’s position on these issues is less enthusiastic and, to that extent, more realistic. The fact that he devoted several articles to discussing Tretyakov’s approaches attests that he attributed an undeniable relevance to them, although he maintained some reservations that he regularly expressed with circumspection. Thus, in a review published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, Kracauer admits that the “operative” writer model is not “the only type of writer who today could claim validity; but it is nevertheless of extraordinary importance, and deserved to be publicly discussed in Germany as well”.28 It is revealing that the author of the review judges, unlike Benjamin, that the ideas of the Russian writer were completely inapplicable in Germany, so that his essential contribution consisted only in “inciting some of our writers to ever think exhaustively and precisely its relationship with praxis ”.29 As in Döblin, here too criticisms (direct or indirect) are judged more important than positive statements; indeed, Tretyakov’s book is for Kracauer a pretext to attack the idealism of the German intellectual milieu: The concrete reality is described, instead of tracing its construction defects; an evasion in aesthetics is sought and is avoided the mobilization of actionoriented forces; metaphysics is cultivated, where one would have to enter into economics, etc. […] Tretyakov’s book could at least draw the attention of many authors to how the rough fusion of theory and practice should actually be understood.30

Kracauer is sceptical of the effects that an unconditional subordination of the intellectual to the demands of the class or the party could have—something in which he must have seen a risky instance of sacrificium intellectus. In clearer and more provocative terms are

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expressed Kracauer’s proposals in “Minimalforderung an die Intellektuellen” (Minimal Demand upon Intellectuals, 1931), perhaps the writing in which Kracauer’s ideas on the role of the intellectual are better and more detailed expressed and, in itself, an essay that has not received due attention. He expresses here the decision—as Heine and Benjamin—to uproot the revolutionary intellectuals from the conformist installation in the inherited doctrinal apparatuses; what is required of them is that they “radically question all the positions given. That is, they must confront their inherited concepts and precisely those that are apparently unshakable, with the results of the revolutionary theory, and then give account of the concrete reality that those concepts preserve”.31 The genuine solidarity of the intellectual with the cause of socialism does not lie, then, in the repetition of litanies, but in a continuous revision of the instruments of thought, in view of the fact that the “rigid, non-dialectic affirmation of the enumerated socialist ideals easily degenerates into sabotage of socialism” and “the intellectuals who capitulates to what is given, lay down their weapons before a utopia”.32 We are facing a programme that takes up, politically radicalized, some of the theses already formulated in “The Mass Ornament” (1927): what is demanded of the intellectuals is that they apply their weapons to the dismantling of the mythological, to whose sphere belongs all fossilized concepts and opinions. The intellect is defined here as a weapon of destruction of every mythical element in man and around him. Thinkers and artists who do not undertake the substantial task of unmasking ideologies and putting all received knowledge to the test, remain trapped in a natural irrationality. Relevant is that Kracauer defines this demystifying work as a mission that must be assumed by individuals. In the article “Über den Schriftsteller” (On the Writer, 1931), this conviction is enunciated in more detail, but also with less forcefulness, evidently so as not to carry out a frontal attack on the Soviet writer. Indeed, Kracauer argues here that, in a country like Germany, the conditions for the direct incorporation of the intellectual into the collective are not in place. Economic anarchy, the persistence of old ideologies and the fragile structure of the intelligentsia imply that, for the moment, the German writer maintains a position of isolation: “Only as an individual (or, in the best of cases, associated with those who think similarly) can he, for now, destroy the false consciousness, prepare a correct one and fulfil all the other decisive functions that present society poses to him”.33 It is, however, ostensible (and thus shows it, for example, the correspondence with Bloch) Kracauer’s scepticism

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of any subordination of the intellectual to the impositions of a collective organization. Among the few coincidences that he finds between his positions and those of Döblin, one is the latter’s attack against “immoderate collectivism” (überspitzer Kollektivismus ) that “conducts itself in an anti-individualist way far beyond the advisable measure. How would that human being that he previously took care to exterminate was to be born for him?”34 Here we touch on a fundamental aspect of Kracauer’s early thought: the reflection on the alterations that late capitalism produced in the human personality. With the passage from liberal to monopoly capitalism, the old concept of the individual on which the ideology of the early bourgeoisie was based became anachronistic. But, unlike other thinkers and artists of the early twentieth century, Kracauer believes that these alterations have no led to the death of the individual, but rather to the emergence of a new model of person, in accordance with the new social conditions. It is characteristic that the main outlines of this new individual appear designed in the aesthetic essays and, above all, in the novel Ginster. Von ihm selbst geschrieben (Ginster. Written by himself ).

4

The Torn Conscience of the Intellectuals

In his review of The Salaried Masses , Benjamin reveals the extent to which he has managed to grasp the defining attributes of this paradoxical individualism. In the author of the book—for whom unmasking is “a passion”—, he meets someone who penetrates dialectically into his themes not “as an orthodox Marxist, and even less as a practical agitator, but because ‘unmasking’ is what is meant by ‘forcing a dialectical entry’”.35 Beyond presenting, on this plane, greater ambivalences than those observed in Kracauer, Benjamin is also sceptical of the advantages of the submission of the intellectual under party discipline. It is true that, in the face of Kracauer’s aversion to collectivism, Benjamin longs for the death of individualism, the fading of the opposition between public and private life, the liquidation of the bourgeois intérieur and its replacement by a porosity to which he had attributed utopians traits in the Naples travel diary. But these wishes represent more a utopian desire than a concrete programme of action; and the Moscow Diary 36 reveals the German essayist’s doubts about Soviet cultural policy. The most radical positions in favour of a transformation of the intelligentsia in direction to a collectivist Weltanschauung appeared around 1930, in the context of the discussions related to the Krise und Kritik project. Convinced that

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the intellectuals could not assume (as Brecht does) the role of leaders of the proletariat, Benjamin goes so far as to argue that they should go to the factories and fulfil the servile functions assigned to them there, in accordance with Tretyakov’s thesis.37 But this should only happen after the seizure of power by the proletariat, which betrays the historical circumstances in which this formulation was born: the expectation of an imminent revolution in Germany. When these hopes began to be revealed illusory, Benjamin resumed the position according to which it was not necessary to “see in him a representative of dialectical materialism as a dogma, but rather a researcher to whom the position of materialism seems, in scientific and humans terms, more productive, in all matters that move us, than the idealist”.38 Benjamin’s praise for Gide as an intellectual who has been associated with communism, but without becoming a partisan activist, also defines his own position. As Palmier points out: At a time when intellectuals were tempted by militantism, he stood aside from it. He never thinks of creating a programme of political reflections […]. Collaborator of newspapers and magazines, situated in the heart of the present, he remained oblivious to the ideological complaints of the Weimar Republic; he did not sign any petition, no manifesto.39

This attitude was maintained during the Nazi period, in the course of which he preserved the “role of outsider that he claimed under the Weimar Republic. […] Benjamin did not participate in propaganda work, in militant involvement; he rarely published in exile magazines”.40 Beyond his occasional sympathy for Tretyakov, he remained an outsider, a ragman, to resort to the expressions used in the review of The Salaried Masses . Marginality is precisely, as in Kracauer, what helps to found a critical disposition vis-à-vis society and the intellectual himself, rescuing both from conformism. Contrary to those who overvalued the role of the intelligentsia in relation to the working class and the entire era, the German philosopher is also traversed by the great world-wound. We can subscribe to the statement made by Wizisla regarding Benjamin, Bloch and Brecht—specifying that we could add the name of Kracauer to this triad: They did not believe that public commitment called into question the autonomy of art and science and, with it, damaged creative capacities, nor did they confuse the assumption of influence with incorporation into a

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power apparatus to which origin, thought, and creative action had to be sacrificed.41

It would be better to dwell a little longer on the analysis of the torn consciousness, to which Heine had devoted himself—in the footsteps of Hegel, who had been one of its teachers and mentors. We know that, in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel relies on a unique analysis of the novel Rameau’s Nephew to affirm the essential Modernity of the tearing of consciousness. According to Hegel, Diderot’s novel is based on an opposition between two modes of consciousness that basically belong to two historical eras. The narrator-philosopher is the noble consciousness (edelmütiges Bewußtsein), positive and integrated into his society, convinced of the justice of existing institutions and oriented to accept the norms that sustain them. In front of him, Rameau’s nephew is a torn consciousness (zerrissenes Bewußtsein): cynical, fickle and “vile” (niederträchtig ) is, in any case, more congruent with modern times than the defenders of an uncorrupted morality. The bohemian is the representative figure of a world in which wealth is everything, in which the spirit feels like a pilgrim on earth and in which the “absolute and universal inversion and alienation of the actual world and of thought”42 take place. In these conditions, the noble soul means depravity and hypocrisy, while the base consciousness reaches a paradoxical probity: “The language of this disrupted consciousness is, however, the perfect language and the authentic existent Spirit of this entire world of culture”,43 in contrast with the apparently noble and essentially base language of hypocrisy. Jean Hyppolite remarks that in this passage of the treatise: The bohemian strips the veil off a world and a social system which have lost their substantiveness, a world whose moments lack all stability. The consciousness of this loss transforms action into a stage comedy and pure intentions into hypocrisy. Ambition and the desire for money, the wish to master power, these are the truth of this comedy.44

The torn consciousness sarcastically speaks the language of economy, whereas the noble consciousness keeps on using the language of an anachronistic moralism. To this model of the torn consciousness Heine remained tenaciously attached, contrary to Börne and the members of the Young Germany. Against their insistence on the construction of a unitary and seamless personality, Heine seems to harbour within himself

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a multiplicity of personalities. It is a trait that already characterized—paradoxically—Rameau’s nephew: the perpetual variability made him a man without attributes, “without character”. The bohemian had a remarkable variability, which ended up having repercussions on the philosopher’s own character: I found myself torn between two conflicting emotions, between a powerful desire to laugh and an overwhelming surge of indignation. I was in agony. Again and again a roar of laughter prevented my rage bursting forth; again and again the rage rising in my heart became a roar of laughter. I was dumbfounded by such shrewdness and such depravity; by such soundness of ideas alternating with such falseness; by so general a perversity of feeling, so total a corruption, and so exceptional a candour.45

The confluence of the satirical disposition with the lack of unity of character also typifies the poetics and the philosophical-political thinking of Brecht, who was always fascinated by the work of the French philosopher and set out to found a “Diderot Society”. These perspectives reveal affinities with Benjamin, who also insisted on the need to destroy the bourgeois concept of character. Central to the conception of “destructive character”, according to Dag Andersson, is the fact that it “does not create any new type of character. He simply wants to destroy the idea of ‘character’. Already in ‘Destiny and Character’ (1919) Benjamin criticizes the idea that character is the motor centre in a causal relationship between the internal and the external”.46 No less relevant is the fact that Benjamin has seen in Brecht an exemplary incarnation of the destructive character, which, according to a 1938 journal entry, always “calls into question what has just been achieved”.47 The scepticism towards the unitary and sovereign subject of the bourgeois novel coexists in Benjamin with the enthusiasm before the anonymity of Mr. Keuner, who is not a “character”, but “none” (Keiner) and who, like the destructive character, assumes within himself the historical situation.48 Kracauer relies on a similar criticism of character: in his articles and reviews published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, but above all in Ginster. In another context we have shown to what extent the absence of character of the protagonist of the novel, his “vegetable” (Bloch) character, goes hand in hand with his ability to demolish the security and thought structures of other characters endowed with a firm character and clear objectives.49 Authentic destructive character, the “torn” Kracauer insisted

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on assigning to his writings the mission of dismantling the bourgeois ideological constructions, as well as the received preconceptions and ideas by which a revolutionary movement immobilized in the repetition of litanies is oriented. It is towards these stagnant structures of thought that are directed Kracauer’s satire, which is inscribed in the same tradition as Heine and Brecht, and which, in its determination to carry out a radical critique of language, had to awaken in Benjamin an interest comparable to that of the one who had encouraged in him the work of Karl Kraus. This brings us back to the problem of the intelligentsia, which is at the centre of Kracauer’s second novel, Georg, written between 1930 and 1934, and which we could define as a kind of (literary) sociology of the intellectuals. The heart of this work is the satirical representation of the most varied ideological discourses in force in the Weimar Republic; as Dirck Oschmann points out, “there is practically no commonplace or slogan of contemporary intellectual discourse that is not expressed and […] ‘reviewed’ at least once”50 in the novel. It offers a unique mix of evolution novel (Entwicklungsroman) and social novel (Gesellschaftsroman). As for the second, it shows the process of decomposition of a republican society that hides its selfish interests through empty ideological constructions and abundant phraseology. As regards the first novelistic type, Georg approaches the novel of disillusionment (Desillusionierungsroman) by showing that the protagonist’s initial desire to enter public life leads less to an effective integration of the outsider than to a greater consciousness, on the part of this, on the emptiness and anachronism of the existing systems of ideas. Kracauer himself described the hero of his second novel as “a sort of Parsifal” whose defining features are “great naivety and utter sincerity”.51 All the characters of the novel expose its weak points or its hidden value when coming into contact with him; without Georg himself needing to judge or evaluate them, through the mere existence of the character – and not, for example, through any reflections –, he reveals the degree of reality that the others possess in each case. (Perhaps the reference to Charlot (Chaplin) or Schweik helps to understand my hero. He is connected with these characters by the fact that in him resides the function of separating the human from the inhuman, the true from the false).52

As journalist—in the image and likeness of Kracauer himself—of a leftwing bourgeois newspaper, Georg finds himself in a privileged place to

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perceive the inessentiality of the great social discourses, but he is also assisted by the invaluable insecurity of someone who had never felt at home, anyway, in his words. The insecurity to speak and write, on which his linguistic scepticism is based, helps the character not to accept the words without questioning them. At the end of the novel, Georg is fired from the newspaper, his initial expectations of social integration fail, and he is once again alone as an extra-territorial intellectual. But at least he has been able to carry out, almost unwittingly, his task of destruction. Through this, he has laid the foundations for the construction of a new society and a new subjectivity. Furthermore, in Kracauer, as in Benjamin, the destructive dynamic already contains within itself a constructive impulse. The thought of both seems to be sustained in that Talmudic legend according to which the same day that the destruction of the Temple occurred, the birth of the Messiah took place.

Notes 1. Cf., for example, Agard, Olivier, “Jacques Offenbach ou l’archéologie de la modernité”. Perivolaropoulou, Nia / Despoix, Philippe (eds.), Culture de masse et modernité. Siegfried Kracauer. Sociologue, critique, écrivain. Paris: Sciences de l’homme, 2001, pp. 179–211, v. pp. 187– 191; Machado, Carlos Eduardo Jordão, “Notas sobre Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin y el París del Segundo Imperio: puntos de contacto”. Buchenhorst, Ralph / Vedda, Miguel (eds.), Observaciones urbanas— Benjamin y las nuevas ciudades. Buenos Aires: Gorla, 2008, pp. 95–105, v. pp. 95–105; Agard, Olivier, Kracauer. Le chiffonnier mélancolique. Paris: CNRS, 2010, pp. 210–218. 2. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, “Editorische Notiz”. Hans Magnus Enzensberger (ed.), Ludwig Börne und Heinrich Heine. Ein deutsches Zerwürfnis. Leipzig: Reclam, 1989, p. 385. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of foreign-language quotations are the author’s. 3. Heine, Heinrich, Pictures of Travel. Transl. by Charles Godfrey Leland. 8th revised ed. Philadelphia: Schaefer and Koradi, 1879, p. 312. 4. Höhn, Gerhard, “Heinrich Heine und die Genealogie des modernen Intellektuellen”. Höhn, Gerhard (ed.), Heinrich Heine. Ästhetischpolitische Profile. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1991, pp. 66–84, p. 67 cited here. 5. Höhn, Gerhard, Heine-Handbuch. Zeit, Person, Werk. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987, p. 67. 6. “Without having had to do a change of place, but with a clear chronological postponement, Paris 1832 and not Paris 1898 can be identified as the

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7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

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authentic hour of birth of the modern intellectual—with the ‘contestation permanente’ of the old German society and with the radical criticism of French modern society; with, in short, the Preface and the French Conditions as documentary act” (ibid., p. 31). According to Laube, Heine has made the following comment to him in the course of a conversation: “[…] how can you expect […] that I should renounce to all that for the sake of the wisdom of your party! I do not belong to any party; or only—he finished with a laugh—to my party” (Ludwig Börne und Heinrich Heine. Ein deutsches Zerwürfnis, p. 109). From the sublime to the ridiculous there is only one step: this maxim was enunciated by Napoleon during the flight from Russia in 1812; Heine quotes it in The Book Le Grand and in The Romantic School. Windfuhr, Manfred, Heinrich Heine: Revolution und Reflexion. Stuttgart: Metzler & Poeschel, 1969, p. 174. Montaigne Michel de, Essays. Transl. by Peter Coste. London: C. Baldwin, 1981, p. 177. Ibid., p. 178. Kracauer, Siegfried, History. The Last Things Before the Last. Completed after the author’s death by Paul Oskar Kristeller. Princeton, NJ: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 1994, p. 11. Adorno, Theodor W. / Kracauer, Siegfried, Briefwechsel 1923–1966. “Der Riß der Welt geht auch durch mich”. Published by the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv. Ed. by Wolfgang Schopf. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2008, p. 11. Kracauer, Siegfried, History. The Last Things Before the Last, p. 10. Traverso, Enzo, Siegfried Kracauer. Itinéraire d’un intellectuel nomade. Paris: la découverte, 1994, p. 10. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Those Who Wait”. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Ed. and Transl. by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 129–140; p. 131 cited here. Barnouw, Dagmar, Critical Realism. History, Photography and the Works of Siegfried Kracauer. Baltimore y Londres: The Johnn Hopkins University Press, 1994, p. 7. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Was soll Herr Hocke tun?”. Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. 9 vols. Vol. 5.3: Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen (1928–1931). Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach with the collaboration of Sabine Biebl et al. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2011, pp. 486–493, p. 492 cit. here. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Über den Schriftsteller”. Werke. Vol. 5.3: Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen (1928–1931), pp. 578–581; p. 579 cited here. Ibid., p. 580. Palmier, Jean-Michel, Le chiffonnier, l’Ange et le Petit Bossu. Esthétique et politique chez Walter Benjamin. Ed. by Florent Perrier. Preface by Marc Jimenez. Paris: Klincksieck, 2006, p. 225.

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22. Brecht, Bertolt. “Entwurf zu einer Zeitschrift Kritische Blätter”. Gesammelte Werke in 20 Bänden. Vol. 18: Schriften zur Literatur und Kunst I. Frankfurt/M, Suhrkamp, 1967, pp. 85–87; pp. 85 et sq. cited here. 23. Brodersen, Momme. Spinne im eigenen Netz. Walter Benjamin: Leben und Werk. Bühl-Moos: Elster, 1990, p. 197. 24. Ibid., p. 198. 25. Palmier, Jean-Michel, Le chiffonnier, l’Ange et le Petit Bossu, p. 599. 26. Benjamin, “The Present Social Situation of the French Writer”. Transl. by Rodney Livingstone. Selected Writings. Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934. Ed. by Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 744–763; p. 755 cited here. 27. Benjamin, Walter, “The Autor as Producer”. Transl. by Edmund Jephcott. Selected Writings. Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934, pp. 768–780; p. 769 cited here. 28. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Der ‘operierende’ Schriftsteller”. Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. 9 vols. Vol. 5.4: Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen (1932–1965). Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach with the collaboration of Sabine Biebl et al. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2011, pp. 39–42; p. 40 cited here. 29. Ibid., p. 41. 30. Ibid. 31. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Minimalforderung an die Intellektuellen”. Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach e Ingrid Belke. Vol. 5.3: Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen (1928–1931), pp. 601–606; p. 603 cited here. 32. Ibid., p. 604. 33. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Über den Schriftsteller”, p. 581. 34. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Was soll Herr Hocke tun?” p. 490. 35. Benjamin, Walter, “An Outsider Makes His Mark”. Transl. by Rodney Livinstone. Selected Writings. Volume 2, Part 1 (1927 –1930). Ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 305–311; p. 306 cited here. 36. Composed by Benjamin during his stay in the former Soviet Union in 1926–1927. First published in 1980, after the death of Asja Lacis. 37. Cf. Wizisla, Erdmut, Benjamin und Brecht. Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft. Mit einer Chronik und den Gesprächsprotokollen des Zeitschriftenprojekts “Krise und Kritik”. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2004, p. 143. 38. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Briefe. Publ. by the Theodor Adorno Archiv, ed. by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. 6 vols. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1995–2000, vol. IV, p. 19. 39. Palmier, Jean-Michel, Le chiffonnier, l’Ange et le Petit Bossu, p. 233. 40. Ibid., p. 276. 41. Wizisla, Erdmut, Benjamin und Brecht, pp. 161 et sq.

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42. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit. Transl. by A. V. Miller. Oxford, NY and Toronto, VIC: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 316. 43. Ibid. 44. Hyppolite, Jean, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Transl. by Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1974, p. 412. 45. Diderot, Denis, Rameau’s Nephew and First Satire. Transl. by Margaret Mauldon. Introd. and notes by Nicholas Cronk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 19 et sq. 46. Andersson, Dag T., “Destruktion/Konstruktion”. Opitz, Michael / Wizisla, Erdmut (eds.), Benjamins Begriffe. 2 vols. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2000, vol. 1, pp. 147–185; pp. 166 et sq. cited here. 47. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Briefe, vol. Vi, p. 538. 48. Cf. Ibid., p. 172, n. 28. 49. Cf., in this book, pp. 37–63. 50. Oschmann, Dirk, Auszug aus der Innerlichkeit: das literarische Werk Siegfried Kracauers. Heidelberg: Winter, 1999, p. 245. 51. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Analyse meines Romans”. En: Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. Vol. 7: Romane und Erzählungen. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach with the Collaboration of Sabine Biebl. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2004, pp. 603–605; p. 603 cited here. 52. Ibid., pp. 603 et sq.

Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of the Fairy Tale

1

Marx, Lukács and the Liberating Spells of Fairy Tale

We could start by making reference to the noteworthy fondness of various Marxist thinkers for the genre of the fairy tale. The series takes back to Marx himself, who, unlike later advocates of “socialist realism”, was not only an enthusiastic reader of works belonging to that genre—above all, of literary fairy tales (Kunstmärchen) of writers like Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann or Adalbert von Chamisso—, but also a dilettante author of fairy tales. Eleanor Marx tells us that her father “was a totally unique and unrivalled storyteller” and that his daughters often enjoyed this talent. Eleanor’s favourite story was the one about Hans Röckle: he was a magician, such as those Hoffmann loved. He owned a toyshop and was heavily in debt. The most marvellous things could be found in his shop: wooden men and women, giants and dwarfs, kings and queens, artisans and apprentices, four-legged animals and birds, as many as those in Noah’s ark, tables and chairs, big and small suitcases and boxes. But alas!, even though he was a magician, he was always in economic trouble,

Translation from the Spanish by Cecilia E. Lasa. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67965-1_8

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and so, against his will, he must sell all his beautiful things, piece by piece, to the devil. After going through many adventures and wrong paths, however, those things always come back to Hans Röckle’s shop. Some of those adventures were chilling and terrifying, like Hoffmann’s tales; others, instead, were comical, but all of them were told with an inexhaustible source of inventive talent, fantasy and humour.1

In a letter to Engels of December 27, 1863, Marx tells of the excruciating pain produced by an anthrax, which he significantly refers to as a “second Frankenstein on my back”.2 Some weeks before, on December 4th, he had told Engels about the effects caused by his daily consumption of port and stout. His situation provided, in his opinion, “a good subject” for a short story (Novelle): In the front, a man who indulges his inner man 3 with port, burgundy, stout and the heartiest meat cuts. In the front, the gourmet. But in the back, on the back, the outer man, the damn carbuncle. If the devil made a pact with you to always keep it, under these circumstances, at a good table, may the devil take the devil away. […] Little Tussy [= Eleanor] said, referring to the outer man: “But it’s your own flesh!”4

Would it be too hazardous to relate both narrations to the thought of the thinker? Well considered, these two sketches of Kunstmärchen deal with alienation phenomena: Röckle’s curious goods that, by virtue of the narrative magic, go back to their possessor’s hands and the second self— a sort of Frankenstein’s monster or Mr. Hyde—constitute the sickly and dark side of a façade of splendour. And regarding the story of the outer man, a recurrent element in Marx’s writings is the presentation of the bourgeois era as an inseparable conjunction of splendour and misery, of a dazzling façade and a background of barbarism: this view of capitalism as an essentially two-fold, contradictory structure is a central element of his dialectical thought. On some occasions, we can find references to the universe of the (Kunst)märchen. For example, at the very beginning of the Manifesto, where contemporary readers are invited to say farewell to Communism as a ghost —that is to say, to say farewell to the conspiratorial socialist tradition—and communists are incited to “openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale [Märchen] of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself”.5 In the context of the critique of political economy, the references to fairy tales are more insidious. As an example

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of this, it is worth mentioning the beginning of the paragraph about the fetishism of commodities and their mystery, where it is said that a table as the product of human industry “continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”6 The passage practices a variation on themes present in the Kunstmärchen of Hoffmann, a writer that revered the author of Capital. Unfortunately, there is no specific reflection on the fairy tale in Marx; something that we do find, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in György Lukács’ early work. The interest of the Hungarian philosopher in the genre coincides with the crisis of the tragic Weltanschauung that defines the early period of his philosophy, a period in which he produces some of his fundamental contributions to a theory of tragedy, such as those in History of the Development of Modern Drama (1907– 1909, published in 1911) or in the essay “The Metaphysics of Tragedy” (1911), included in Soul and Forms. Under the influence of the writer Anna Lesznai, Lukács sees in the fairy tale the expression of an effort to overtake individualism through the configuration of a utopian community founded upon genuine and concrete human relationships. Far from the disenchanted and individualistic world of capitalism, fairy tales mean to Lukács, as Lee Congdon noted, “a redeemed world, one in which ultimate reality was magical rather than empirical or metaphysical”. At the same time, they taught men that their reality, whether empirical or metaphysical, was but one of many imaginable realities. Recognizing this, they needed no longer to regard their reality as an inescapable prison; they could understand that it was the result of their own choices. All great literature, Lukács now believed, treated a given reality as result of man’s free choice, not as something forced upon him by some transcendent necessity.7

This approach to the fairy tale is linked, at the same time, to another major landmark in young Lukács’s philosophical path: his encounter with Jewish mysticism. In this had a major role the discovery of the Hassidic tradition, which for a time mesmerized him. By the middle of 1911, Lukács finishes reading the two famous compilations by Martin Buber,

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The Tales of Rabbi Nachmann (1906) and The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1908) and was impressed by them, to the point of urging Buber (to whom he had met at Simmel’s seminary in Berlin) to publish a more extensive edition of the mystical texts.8 The tales collected by Buber offer a utopian anticipation of an organic community as the one identified by Anna Lesznai in the great tradition of the fairy tale. The effects that these reflections had on Lukács’ theory of drama can be seen in his considerations about non-tragic drama (untragisches Drama) or romance (Romance): a genre that, around 1911, occupies the place that had previously corresponded, for young Lukács, to the tragedy. Contrary to the enigmatic aristocratism and estrangement from life tragedy implies, romance is a more democratic form: unlike tragedy, it does not establish casts among men; its purest solution should be, at the same time, a configuration which in the common essence of men – without heroes and even without wise men – should find the path towards the plenitude of life, towards the perfect form.9

When characterizing this non-tragic variety of drama, exemplarily cultivated by Calderón, by Beaumont-Fletcher or by Shakespeare in The Tempest, Lukács draws a series of parallels with the fairy tale, which shares with romance this link with a non-problematic concept of communitarian life: The fairy tale offers a metaphysics of the Golden Age turned into an ornamental element: it has descended from the most sacred, from a sphere much above art and the possibility of artistic expression; it has become profane, mundane, with the purpose of reaching beauty; it has brought to the surface the deepest vital (supra-artistic) configuration and has become – precisely because its sources are the deepest – pure surface. The fairy tale, as a perfect form, is par excellence anti-metaphysical, superficial, purely ornamental.10

It is significant—especially in relation to Kracauer’s ideas which we will comment on later—that some of these ideas about the fairy tale (and about non-tragic drama) also reappear in Lukács’ early reflections on cinema. Thus, in the article “Thoughts towards an Aesthetic of the Cinema” (1911; republished in 1913), the following is stated:

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Thus a new, homogeneous and harmonious, unified and diverse world emerges in the “cinema”, that, in the worlds of literature and life, finds its correspondence in the fairy tale and dream: maximum vivacity (Lebendigkeit ) without an interior third dimension; suggestive linkage through mere sequence; strictly nature-bound reality and extreme fantasy; the becoming decorative of the non-pathetic ordinary life. In the ‘cinema’ everything that the romanticism of the theatre had sought – in vain – to achieve can now be attained: extreme uninhibited mobility of figures, the complete becoming- alive of the background, of nature and interiors, of plants and animals; but a liveliness that is not bound to the content and limitations of ordinary life.11

We might think that this approach to the fairy tale perhaps left few traces in the philosopher’s ulterior life and work. That would be, however, a wrong observation, as evidenced by the fact that, during his intervention as Commissar of Culture in the Republic of Councils in Hungary, Lukács insisted on implementing the curious project of spreading the reading of fairy tales in schools, parks and theatres. For Lukács, as for his friend and collaborator Béla Balázs, Grimm’s or Andersen’s fairy tales do not reproduce the bourgeois ideology in children but represent, instead, a world in which the possibilities of human fulfilment overtake the horizons of class society. According to Balázs: “The communist Weltanschauung of fairy tales is far more profound, even in its most naive forms, than that of consciously socialist poetry”.12

2 The Cunning of the Oppressed: Ernst Bloch and the Theory of the Fairy Tale More exhaustive and persistent in time than those of Lukács, and at the same time more akin to those of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, are the reflections on the fairy tale that run through the work of Ernst Bloch, and that also insist on the emancipatory effects of the genre. Bloch asserts that in the core of the fairy tale there are “tendencies towards freedom, towards overcoming natural limits”.13 In this sense, the fairy tale (Märchen), above all the temporal fairy tale, is opposed, as a revolutionary force, to the myth, which keeps men confined within narrow limits. The fairy tale represents the positive, active element against the passivity of mutually related forms such as the myth (Mythos ) and the saga (Sage). In fairy tale the revolt is embodied: the revolt of the weak

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and dispossessed man or woman, and for that reason it is Enlightenment avant la lettre; an Enlightenment that is not based on abstract formulae, but on the cunning of the oppressed: The fairy tale is the [...] first Enlightenment, while, in its proximity to men and happiness, it is the model of the Enlightenment; is always a children’s war story of cunning and light against mythical powers, and it ends as a fairy tale of human happiness, as existence reflected as happiness.14

According to Bloch, the fairy tale has its roots in the people and, because of this, embodies the rebellious spirit of those who dream of transforming, through their own praxis, the current order. To that extent it is distinguished from the tale and its heir, the saga (Sage), which is reactionary for Bloch: its purpose is to maintain and legitimize the power of the lords, hence it seeks to revalidate the efficacy of a fate that dominates men and women as an ineluctable power. In the sagas, “human beings are in mythical terms the same thing that they were in political terms in the age of the Brothers Grimm, in the age of reaction: namely objects to whom nothing is permitted”.15 The hero of the Märchen is the weak, anonymous, plebeian, though cunning and rebellious person; not in vain states Bloch, in Atheism in Christianity (1968), that “most fairy tales have something Chaplinesque about them; they are not ‘minimyths’ as the reactionary interpretation would have it”,16 but an attempt to save the mythical element from the feudal despotism of the saga. During Bloch’s exile in United States, and even after his return to Germany, the interest in examine the difference between myths and sagas is replaced by the interest in rescuing popular literary genres from any attempt to reducing them to the status of mere elusive reveries. Thus, according to The Principle of Hope,17 the genuine fairy tale offers less an escape than a prompt to action: the fairy tale does not pretend to be a substitute for action. But rather the clever Augustus of the fairy tale practises the art of not letting himself be impressed. The power of the giants is painted as one with a hole in it, through which the weak man can see his way to victory.18

To better specify this possibility of the Märchen, Bloch proposes to distinguish the technical fairy tale (technisches Märchen)—in which the hero

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suddenly encounters a happiness that is not the result of his own effort, and which he accesses through magic wands or marvellous lamps—, from the literary fairy tale or marvellous legend (Kunstmärchen, märchenhafte Legende), whose protagonists first conceive in the interior of their soul the image of a happiness that they will then strive to achieve. This last version of the Märchen implies the decision to forsaking everyday life to seek fulfilment through an adventure to be faced with the courage typical of the cunning character (Mut des Klugen): Not all are content just to wait for this goodness. They go out in search of their happiness, clever versus rough. Courage and cunning are their shield, their spear is reason. Since courage alone little helps the weak against the fat lords, it does not cast their towers to the ground. Cunning of reason is the human part of the weak. Fantastic though the fairy tale is, it is still always clever at overcoming difficulties.19

Utopian form, the fairy tale seeks, then, to configure a world in which men can realize their highest possibilities, atrophied in the real world. It is linked to the development of anticipatory consciousness, since it contributes to sketching the features of the dreamed utopia and suggests the way to make it real, eliminating all relationships in which the human being is a degraded, servile, abandoned, despicable being (Marx).

3

Siegfried Kracauer: The Fairy Tale as a Demystifying Form

Siegfried Kracauer’s ideas on the fairy tale are unfold along a similar line, even though in them the struggle between this genre and myth is linked to a radical defence of the Enlightenment, understood as a process of historical combat against mythical powers. Olivier Agard stressed to what extent this confidence in the liberating effect of the Enlightenment had to be weakened by the rise of fascism.20 In any case, in the context of the second half of the 1920s, and even in the early 1930s, belief in the emancipatory efficacy of reason represents the foundation of Kracauer’s reflection on the fairy tale. A description of this genre akin to Bloch’s and—even more—Benjamin’s can be found in one of his most influential essays of the period: “The Mass Ornament” (1927). The process of history is exposed in this essay in terms of a struggle between reason and those forces of nature that rule over heaven and earth at the beginning of

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human civilization. After their twilight, the gods did not abdicate: “the old nature within and outside man continues to assert itself. It […] serves as a ground for the superstructures of mythological thinking which affirms nature in its omnipotence”.21 The liberation from the despotism of myth will not be possible through the unrestrained exploitation of nature— which would only mean that a natural force subjugates the other—, but, instead, through the constitution of space for the autonomous development of reason. Opposite to this demythologization process evolves organicist doctrines, which, by setting the body as a model of social structure, harbours no other purpose than to keep human society confined within the limits of natural life. But does not move within the circle of this life the reason (Vernunft ), for which, on the other hand, it is a question of implanting the truth in the world. The realm of the rational has been dreamed of in advance (vorgeträumt ) in fairy tales, “which are not stories about miracles but rather announcements of the miraculous advent of justice”.22 In early historical stages, fairy tales have shown that mere nature is suspended so that truth can prevail; and it is telling that the genre occupies a dominant position at the beginning of Modernity, when the rising bourgeoisie was preparing to defeat the natural powers of the Church, of the monarchy and of the feudal system. It is not, for Kracauer, a mere coincidence that “the Thousand and One Nights turned up precisely in the France of the Enlightenment and that eighteenthcentury reason recognized the reason of the fairy tales as its equal”.23 It is characteristic that this essay should state that to the rationality (Rationalität ) of an emancipatory thinking “which emanates to some extent from the reason of fairy tales”,24 is correct to attribute the unleashing of the bourgeois revolutions. Kracauer’s association between the cunning with which the fairy-tale hero defeats mythical powers and the function of the modern intellectual is as important as those considerations.25 In the “Minimalforderung an die Intellektuellen” (Minimal Demand upon Intellectuals”), published in 1931, intellectuals are asked to use all their weapons to dismantle the mythological, to which fossilized concepts and opinions belong. The intellect is defined as a weapon to destroy every mythological element in men and their surroundings: “Its dominance, which has been undermined in fairy tales, has been challenged once and again by those great representatives of Enlightenment along history”; and every revolution is, first of all, a revolution of the intellect “which will attack and ridicule the powers that veil the human image, until men finally

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find themselves”.26 The mission of the intellectuals is, then, the dismantling of natural powers; hence, the essay states that those thinkers and artists who do not undertake the substantial task of unmasking ideologies and putting all received knowledge to the test are trapped in a natural irrationality. We cannot review, within the limits of this article, the many contexts in which, throughout Kracauer’s writings, observations on the fairy tale appear. We would like to highlight here only one instance in which some representative features of his particular approach to the genre are revealed in the context of a reflection on cinema. We are making reference to the “Marseille Notebooks” to a Theory of Film on which Kracauer worked during his residence in that port city between June 1940 and February 1941, under very dramatic personal conditions, and which consists above all of a series of notes that he continued during the days of his stay in Lisbon, during the ship journey to North America and even immediately after arrival in the United States. In the “Marseille Notebooks”, which in several respects reveal a broad criterion that contrasts with the relative dogmatism of the later Theory of Film, it is emphasized that the mission of cinematographic art is to capture the totality of the material world as the object of filmic representation. This material world integrates not only the sphere of feelings (the “internal nature”), but also the universe of imagination. The fundamental features of the film—that which in the “Notebooks” is designated as its “fundamental layer” (Grundschicht )— were established in the early years of cinema, and above all in the genres of the documentary and the slapstick. Those features substantially differentiate film from theatre, whose model is the closed and coherent action, in which the end grants a conclusive closure to the entire dramatic development. That is why the subgenre that best represents the essence of theatre is tragedy and, even more, the fate drama, where the supremacy of Fatum tends to cancel out any intervention of chance and where the action closes with the death of the hero. Cinema moves away from this self-sufficient world: “In contrast with the theatre – or expanding this – […] it introduces the whole world into the representation, be it real or imagined”27 ; that is why it achieves its goals all the better the further it moves away from all theatricality. Against theatrical immobility, the cinema is dynamic; in front of the closed action (the Geschloßenheit ) of the drama, it tends to the endlessness (Endlosigkeit ); against the tragic glorification of death, it makes the last-minute salvation its Leitmotiv.

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Precisely, it is the motif of the salvation (Rettung ), with theological echoes, that connects cinema with the universe of fairy tales. In terms of the “Marseille Notebooks”, “salvation is thus a marvellous motif in films, since it evidently dismisses the (tragic) ending”.28 This is central in the slapstick, which is the reason why it is legitimate to understand Chaplin’s films as a constant combat in which small David, like the prince in fairy tales, defeats colossal Goliath. This takes us to the sociological and political dimension of the “Marseille Notebooks”, which reveal some similarities with Bloch’s theory of the Märchen: if the film is not directed “upwards” (the intentional) but “downwards” (the material substratum), this is so because its social bases are not rooted in the enlightened bourgeoisie, but in the popular classes. The educated strata reject cinema because they instinctively feel “that cinema’s turn to the material could shake their existence”29 ; the rich “live in the long shot; the poor are forced to transcend the long shot”.30 These restrictions are especially visible in the early days of cinema, when it was attached to the social milieux from where it came and the “upper world” has not yet appropriated it. But if “the privileged despise cinema”,31 they do above all so when it is faithful to its own principles. The reaction was the creation of the film d’art , whose intention is to win the bourgeois audience’s favour and which, instead of turning cinema into art, betrays cinema by making it surrender to theatre. It is similar to the “proletariat renegade, who, as soon as he enters the upper class, he assumes its beliefs”.32 Given that in the film d’art the impression of the material world is blocked, in it the bourgeois circles can assert themselves. But its action, as well as these circles, is a retrograde one: it relies on the desire to retreat to the past in order to escape progress. The closed action is closed precisely in the face of the openness of Modernity—an openness caused by the access of the masses to the historical scene. Here lies the historical conditioning for the role of chance in the cinema: “The fact that the motif of chance, and not fate, is current today is related to the entrance of the masses into history. There is no chance where there are only a few; in the age of the masses, chance must rule”.33 This hunger for an openness is valid for the settings as well; as in Benjamin, the (bourgeois) intérieur is the place of the dead34 and of the tragic fatum. This is the reason why cinema, from its early days, conquers the streets and the public spaces—shops, train stations, airports, hotel lobbies—as the places of the provisional and the hazardous. By privileging the contingent, the film places itself next to the science and the technique of a secularized and materialist period; and

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Kracauer suggests an elective affinity between cinema and materialism: thus, if materialist thought seeks to trace the dominant intentions to social relations of a material nature, thus also the images of the material in the cinema aim at questioning the intentional constructions produced by long shots. That is the reason why “both cinema and materialist thinking shake the immanence of the conscience of the men of the LONG SHOT ; both underestimate the intentional unity”.35 They are both expressions of one and the same stage of the process of demythologization: the irruption of the material is a revolutionary fact. However, there exists a central difference: if philosophical materialism—thinks curiously enough Kracauer—is anthropocentric, the camera is oriented towards the extra-human, towards nature. Besides, if materialism aims at introducing specific social changes, cinema could not be reduced to objectives of this nature: it is a prodigious instrument of propaganda, but can be used for the most diverse purposes. Cinema is fed by the material and the “low”. Kracauer compares it to the giant Antaeus, who can increase his energy through the contact with his mother, the Earth; o to Sancho Panza, who exposes the “Donquichotteries” of empty ideologies and intentional constructions. This unveiling does not rest on a mechanical, ingenuous realism; as Hansen highlights, “the politicophilosophical significance of photography does not rest with the ability to reflect its object as real but rather with the ability to render it strange”.36 The point is to act against conventional perception and thought: the film observes under the table, what is not allowed in good society; it confronts intention with being and often exposes it. For this reason, because it makes the intimate and familiar strange, it manages to expand our knowledge of the material world and de-automatize perception. Faithful to his vitalism, Kracauer emphasizes that cinema must counteract the petrification of its figures: “It must advance from one discovery to another in the material dimension; otherwise, it loses its function”.37 It is telling that here, as well as in the essays collected in Streets in Berlin and Elsewhere (1964), the struggle against convention is related to poverty and the proletarian milieux, which offer more material to the camera than opulent settings, “in which there is not much to discover. The rich live in the long shot more than the poor”.38 It can be seen, in this way, that what is postulated here is an affinity between the fundamental stratum of the cinematographic medium, revolutionary thought and praxis, the unmasking of ideologies, the historical role of the

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popular masses and, with the latter, the illuminating effect of that “chaplinesque” dimension of the film that has its predecessor in the fairy tale and that found an outstanding expression in the slapstick.

4

Siegfried Kracauer’s Late Reflections and the Devaluation of Fantasy

Kracauer’s ulterior contributions to cinematographic theory and criticism move away, to a great extent, from this deep and thoughtprovoking reflection on the correspondences between the fairy tale and the slapstick, between the happy ending of the tales and cinematographic Rettung, between the essential popularity of the Märchen and cinema in its fundamental stratum. In From Caligari to Hitler (1947), there are only a few unspecific allusions to the fairy tale. In the second chapter, where some considerations about the beginnings of German cinema appear, the brief initial associations between the basic attributes of the cinema and the popular literary genre take place from references to some comments by Hermann Häfker and the young Lukács that are exposed in an ostensibly ironic context. The subsequent analysis of Paul Wegener’s The Student of Prague (1913) underlines the affinities between this film and the Kunstmärchen—Hoffmann, especially—and highlights the closeness between Wegener’s and Georges Méliès’s projects. The comparison places the French director in a positive and advantageous position in relation to the German regisseur: Wegener was animated by the same cinematic passion which had inspired Georges Méliès to make such films as A Trip to the Moon and The Merry Frolics of Satan. But while the amiable French artist enchanted all childlike souls with his bright conjuring tricks, the German actor proved a sinister magician calling up the demoniac forces of human nature.39

The other references to the narrative genre are even vaguer. Thus, concerning Sumurun (1920), it claims that the film by Ernst Lubitsch, who is not presented in favourable terms, “withdrew from the realms of history into Oriental fairy-tale surroundings, making an old sheik in search of sex adventures the comical counterpart of Amenes and Henry VIII”.40 About Murnau’s Nosferatu, it is said that he is, like Attila, “a ‘scourge of God,’ and only as such identifiable with the pestilence. He is a blood-thirsty, blood-sucking tyrant figure looming in those regions

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where myths and fairy tales meet. It is highly significant that during this period German imagination, regardless of its starting-point, always gravitated towards such figures as if under the compulsion of hate-love”.41 A similar association with tyranny reappears in the comment on Destiny (1921), by Fritz Lang, a film defined as “Part legend, part fairy tale”, and which Kracauer proposes to understand as a kind of inversion of a well-known marvellous tale: There is an old fairy tale about a traveler startled by the misdeeds of his companion; this enigmatic fellow sets an inhabited house afire, obstructs justice and persistently returns evil for good. At the end he reveals himself as an angel and initiates the traveler into the true meaning of those apparent misdeeds; they were measures of Providence to protect the very people they wronged from future catastrophes.42

None of this can be seen in Lang’s film, which concludes, in a striking analogy with Nosferatu, ratifying the ineluctable pre-eminence of Fatum over all the attempts at salvation carried out by the protagonists. More emphatic is the condemnation of the minor works of cinema immediately prior to Hitler’s rise, whose optimistic banalities, like Hollywood melodramas, aim to promote conformism with the current world. Productions such as The Man Without a Name and Countess of Monte Christo (both from 1932) are but “screen opiates” created “to demonstrate: that everyday life itself is a fairy tale”.43 The change of attitude in the 1947 book as regards a genre so closely linked to childhood may be due to political reasons: one of the central hypotheses in From Caligari to Hitler is that the Germans—and especially its middle classes—are governed by a political immaturity that accounts for its regressive drives towards intimacy under the shelter of power and fatalist submission to tyrants. It is characteristic that Kracauer regrets the absence, in German literature, of great realists such as Balzac or Dickens, and that he explains this absence in this way: No social whole existed in Germany. The middle-class strata were in a state of political immaturity against which they dreaded to struggle lest they further endanger their already insecure social condition. This retrogressive conduct provoked a psychological stagnation. Their habit of nurturing the intimately associated sensations of inferiority and isolation was as juvenile as their inclination to revel in dreams of the future.44

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The gesture, recurrent in German cinema prior to Hitler, of resting the head in the womb of a woman characterized by maternal features embodies the regressive desire to return to prenatal or infantile security. This attitude. betrays his [i.e.: the character’s] intense desire to return to the maternal womb. He has never attained maturity. It is noteworthy that, far from being repudiated, his singular gesture of capitulation reappeared, almost unchanged, in various German films, indicating that his instinctive reluctance to attempt emancipation might be considered a typical German attitude. It is an attitude which results from the prolonged dependence of the Germans upon a feudal or half-feudal military regime not to mention the current social and economic motives enforcing the perpetuation of this attitude within the middle class.45

When films with children as protagonists are positively evaluated in From Caligari to Hitler, as in Gerhart Lamprecht’s Emil und die Detektive (1931), this is justified by the fact that, in them, children act with maturity that is often lacking in adults, assuming responsibilities, appealing to intelligence and a democratic organization that suggests the existence of faint enlightened impulses that National Socialism would be in charge of crushing. If, in From Caligari to Hitler, the interest in the Märchen has a limited function, in Theory of Film it is practically extinguished. It is, in many moments, a heavy and dogmatic piece of work, also marked by a striking political apathy: compared to the articles and reviews of the 1920s and 1930s, in which films and cinematographic language were addressed not only from an aesthetic perspective, but also from a sociological and political one, the 1960 treatise reveals an astonishing desire for neutrality. In this sense, Hansen deplores that the radical critic of the Weimar era has been transformed into a Cold-War liberal humanist.46 Together with this political castration, there is an effort to abandon the essay style of his early writings to adopt another form in keeping with the practices of the academic discourse. The product of these changes is a work with plenty of keen observations and fruitful hypotheses, though far from the living relationship with reality the journalist of Frankfurter Zeitung used to have.47 Theory of Film is the work of an author who no longer goes to the movies; as Olivier Agard states, in New York, Kracauer “did not frequent the dark rooms as often or as systematically as when in Paris: most of the reviews of

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analysis of films in his archive belong to his French years”.48 The paralysis in his cinematographic experience adds to the paralysis of his own writing: the author who, in his journalistic years, wrote several articles a week (between 1921 and 1933 he published about 1800 contributions in newspapers), in the 1950s often takes several months to complete a chapter, and what he produced lacked, regrettably, the satirical sharpness that had characterized his early writing.49 Something seems to have stuck in a thinker with a passion for dynamism. The relative paralysis of the analytical imagination coincides with the relegation of the imaginative. In particular, the opposition suggested at the beginning of the book between a “realistic” and a “formative” tradition, and the justification of the first at the expense of the second, gives the study a sectarian and normative character that contradicts the general character of Kracauer’s thought. The three references to fairy tales that appear in the book are merely superficial and do not contribute with anything new or substantial. In any case, the first one serves to indicate, in Méliès’s production, the place and moment of birth of the questioned formative tradition, as opposed to the profitable realistic line initiated by the Lumière brothers. Despite acknowledging the French director’s merits, Kracauer insists that Méliès is what he has always been: a theatre director who uses photography “in a pre-photographic spirit – for the reproduction of a papier-mâché universe inspired by stage traditions”.50 This would explain the French director’s final drifts: There seems to be some truth in the observation that, as people grow older, they instinctively withdraw to the positions from which they set out to struggle and conquer. In his later years Méliès more and more turned from theatrical film to filmed theatre, producing féeries which recalled the Paris Châtelet pageants.51

Theory of Film is a study in which many of the impulses announced as latencies in “Marseille Notebooks” are extinguished. The certainty, common to both works, that the essential features of cinematographic language are expressed the moment such language is in its childhood—in statu nascendi—is combined, in the 1960 treaty, with a severe, reprimanding adult outlook on children’s experience and imagination. And it is precisely on these that Walter Benjamin’s theory will found its arguments.

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5

Walter Benjamin: The Fairy Tale and the Deliverance from Myth

Benjamin’s occupation with the fairy tale is related, in the first instance, to an attention to the children’s world that arises at the time of his break with Gustav Wyneken and the youth movement; as Giulio Schiavoni points out, the philosopher’s interest moves from “youth to childhood; better yet: from the potentiality of youth to the potentiality of childhood. From around 1924, he deals with the world of childhood and children literature in new ways”.52 The series of articles on pedagogy and on children’s literature and theatre produced between 1924 and 1932 already offers eloquent testimony of this interest, but it is perhaps even more provided by works written during the rise of Nazism, among which we could mention above all “Berlin Chronicle”,53 Berlin Childhood around 1900, and even the project on the Paris Arcades (1927–1940), especially if we consider that Benjamin identifies both the turn-of-the-century Berlin and the Paris of the Second Empire as primary—“child-like”— forms of his own present, marked by the expansion of Fascism. It is said, in the context of The Arcades Project, that the childhood experience of a generation has much in common with the dream experience: “Its historical configuration is a dream configuration. Every epoch has such a side turned towards dreams, the child’s side. For the previous century, this appears very dearly in the arcades”.54 Michelet’s quote that appears as the second epigraph of “Paris, the Capital of the nineteenth century” (1935)—“Each epoch dreams the one to follow”—is an incitement to interpret the nineteenth century as a child’s dream awaiting interpretation by the “adult” twentieth century, who would have had the mission to redeem, by interpreting them, the dreams of the preceding era: The dream waits secretly for the awakening; the sleeper surrenders himself to death only provisionally, waits for the second when he will cunningly wrest himself from its clutches. So, too, the dreaming collective, whose children provide the happy occasion for its own awakening.55

It is worth highlighting the importance of the term cunning; in the section “Exhibitions, Advertising, Grandville”, it is stated: The genuine liberation from an epoch, that is, has the structure of awakening in this respect as well: it is entirely led by cunning. Only with

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cunning, not without it, can we work free of the realm of dream. But there is also a false liberation; its sign is violence.56

This cunning is related to the Hegelian cunning of reason (List der Vernunft ). But even more it is linked to a reflection on the myth that found an early expression in the essay on Hölderlin, and that continued to develop, with significant variations, over the years. Gershom Scholem comments, in connection with a series of conversations held with Benjamin between June 16th and 18th 1916, that his friend’s decided to turn to a philosophical penetration of myth, which occupies him for the rest of his life, was manifested here for the first time and left its mark on many of our conversations. In this connection, at this early date Benjamin spoke of the difference between law and justice, calling law an order that could be established only in the world of myth.57

These ideas, as is well known, were developed in “Critique of Violence” (1920–1921). A new turn in the occupation with the myth takes place— as Günter Hartung has indicated—from 1924, under the tutelary shadow of Asja Lacis, who helped to channel the materialist tendencies already present in Benjamin in the direction of Marxism. In the light of these changes of direction must be understood the statement in the essay on Karl Kraus, according to which “the developing man actually takes form not within the natural sphere but in the sphere of mankind, in the struggle for liberation, […] there is no idealistic but only a materialistic deliverance from myth”58 ; also the thesis, formulated in The Arcades Project, which asserts that “As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth”.59 But beyond these alterations, there is an unwavering interest in the mythical age that was fuelled by the reading of Johann Jakob Bachofen and Wilhelm Wundt. Benjamin’s purpose is to oppose mythical violence—which founds law—to a future justice linked to the world of truth, which will take place in the field of politics, of the profane. The early essay “Fate and Character” (1919) highlights the role played by ancient tragedy as an expression of a reluctance in the face of the previously unquestionable power of mythical destiny: it is not through law, but through tragedy that the head of Genius rose for the first time from the fog of guilt, since in tragedy the demonic fate is broken: “in tragedy

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pagan man becomes aware that he is better than his god, but the realization robs him of speech, remains unspoken”.60 It cannot be said that the ethical world order has been restored with it, but “the moral hero, still dumb, not yet of age – as such he is called a hero – wishes to raise himself by shaking that tormented world”.61

6 Theory of the Epic Genres. The Fairy Tale as Promesse de Bonheur Benjamin’s reflections upon fairy tales take place in the context of his increasing involvement with epic genres, in contrast with the greater early dedication to dramatic forms. To analyse such reflections, it is convenient, in the first place, to show the links that bind the two thematic complexes previously considered: childhood and myth. A nexus between the two is established, as we have advanced, by cunning, whose affinity with the fairy tale we could see when examining the ideas of Bloch and Kracauer. In Benjamin’s late thought, determined to subject the collective consciousness to an analysis comparable to that applied by Freud to the individual one, childhood has an invaluable role, since it embodies the desire to conjure up the degradation of things to mere commodities that capitalism has consumed. In each age, children comply with the function of introducing new inventions in a symbolic space, thus granting them a utopian potential: “For us, locomotives already have symbolic character because we met with them in childhood. Our children, however, will find this in automobiles, of which we ourselves see only the new, elegant, modern, cheeky side”.62 If new images correspond to each new technical manifestation, each generation of children has to discover them so as to incorporate them into the treasures of images of humanity. As is stated in the section devoted to epistemology and the theory of progress in The Arcades Project: By the interest it takes in technological phenomena, by the curiosity it displays before any sort of invention or machinery, every childhood binds the accomplishments of technology to the old worlds of symbol. There is nothing in the realm of nature that from the outset would be exempt from such a bond.63

These infantile representations have a genuine utopian content that awaits their redeeming decipherment; in other words, they are dream images

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waiting for the wakening. The mission of dialectic thinking is to interpret those childish dreams by freeing them from the chains imposed by capitalism and its mythical idea of progress. It is telling that, like the proverbial device of the cunning Odysseus, “[t]he imminent awakening is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in the Troy of dreams”.64 This kind of social psychoanalysis of the Paris of the Second Empire included, in the first conception of the Arcades Project, explicit references to fairy tale that were later minimized or were latently incorporated into Benjamin’s research. Let’s recall that, as Susan Buck-Morss emphasizes, “Benjamin’s original conception, a politicized version of Sleeping Beauty as a fairy tale of ‘awakening’, retold along Marxist lines, was intended to ‘set free the huge powers of history that are asleep within the once upon a time of classical historical narration’”.65 In this early stage of the project, which runs roughly between mid-1927 and autumn 1929, Benjamin planned to write an essay with the title “Pariser Passagen. Eine dialektische Féerie” (Paris Arcades. A Dialectical Fairy Scene).66 According to Benjamin, cunningly, the materialist historian looks back to the technical inventions of the past with the intention of freeing the oneiric fantasies imprisoned within them. By doing so, he breaks the chains of the new myths that rule the industrial society, in the way of the epic hero who tries to undermine the power of mythical nature. There is a point here where the strategies of dialectical materialism reveal similarities to the cunning of the heroes of the epic poetry and the fairy tale. In order to show those similarities we will move from the aforementioned considerations about The Arcades Project to some aspects of Benjamin’s narrative theory and, particularly, of his reflection on the fairy tale. According to Scholem, Benjamin’s interest in children’s tales is kindled by the birth of his son Stefan; however, as Jean-Michel Palmier points out, his letters from youth already bear witness to an early interest in the genre. After his study about the Trauerspiel , Benjamin intended to write a book about fairy tales and another about sagas, in connexion with a study on Goethe’s “The New Melusine”.67 In his review “Old Forgotten Children’s Books” (1924), Benjamin highlights the attraction that children feel for waste products, and points out that in these materials they recognize the face that the world of things returns to them, and only to them: “In using these things, they do not so much imitate the works of adults as bring together, in the artefact produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship. Children thus produce their own small world of things within the greater one”.68 The

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fairy tale is such a waste product—perhaps the most powerful to be found in the spiritual life of humanity. Children are able to manipulate the stuff of fairy tales with the same ease and lack of inhibition that they display in playing with pieces of cloth and building blocks. “They build their world out of motifs from the fairy tale, combining its various elements”.69 The child’s labour with the stuff of the tale, as with his toys in general, represents then a promesse de bonheur: the anticipation of a future in which things will be free of exchange-value; not in vain it is praised Fourier, in The Arcades Project, for having turned the game into “the canon of a labour no longer rooted in exploitation […]. Such work inspirited by play aims not at the propagation of values but at the amelioration of nature. For it, too, the utopia of Fourier furnishes a model, of a sort to be found realized in the games of children”.70 This model of alliance with nature, linked to ideas developed in One-Way Street (1928), is also related to the utopia, outlined in “On the Concept of History” (1940), of “a kind of labour which, far from exploiting nature, would help her give birth to the creations that now lie dormant in her womb”.71 An image of the utopian appeasement of man and nature, and of the silencing of the mythical fate, is pre-figured, according to “The Storyteller”, in the fairy tale: in the figure of the animals that come to help the child, it shows that nature is subject to myth, but would prefer to associate with man.72 For Benjamin, the fairy tale is an attempt to be set free from myth; in the essay on Robert Walser (1929), it is stated that the characters in this popular form “emerge from the night and from madness – namely, from the madness of myth”.73 Through the Märchen, humanity wages its struggle, in the realm of the profane, to awaken from the mythical world; the characters of this genre are still struggling to free themselves from their torment. From them differ Walser’s, whose works “begi[n] where the fairy tales stop. ‘And if they have not died, they live there still.’ Walser shows how they live”.74 The matter with which Walser works is no longer the popular form of fairy tales, but the “literary” genres: “stories, essays, poetic works, short prose pieces, and the like”.75 These considerations are recovered and further explored in “Franz Kafka. On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” (1934). The analysis of “The Silence of the Sirens” offers the occasion to make the link between Kafka and Ulysses explicit; the epic hero stands, according to Benjamin, at the dividing line between myth and fairy tale: “Reason and cunning have inserted tricks into myths; their forces cease to be invincible. Fairy tales are the traditional stories about victory over these forces”.76 In Benjamin’s analysis,

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the fairy tale would thus represent a higher degree of development than the epic poetry within the process of the poetic and, at the same time, human overcoming of the despotic nature chained by myth: through its cunning, the hero mocks and turns his back to the powers of a universe ruled by guilt and punishment. In “The Storyteller”, the thoughts exposed in previous essays reach a point of condensation. Above all, it shows the intersections of childhood and myth, dream and cunning that propose Benjamin’s reflections on the fairy tale. By establishing a parallel between the history of individual and that of the species—between ontogenesis and phylogenesis—, it is argued here that the Märchen can be today counsellor of the children because it was once of humanity. The genre bears witness to the first strategies which found humankind to shake off the nightmare imposed by myth. In the figure of the cunning (der Kluge) it shows, for instance, that it is possible to give in a simple way an answer to the questions posed by the myth, just as Oedipus was able to quickly find a solution to the riddle of the Sphinx. In the same way as the fairy tale, in times of yore, aided men, so does the fairy tale today: it “teaches children to this day […] to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits”.77 The liberating spell that the fairy tale has at its disposal “does not bring nature into play in a mythical way”,78 but it reveals its complicity with the liberated man. This complicity, which the adult experiences in happiness, was first presented to the child in the fairy tale. The art form of the short story (Erzählung ) undertakes the task of treasuring and recreating this capacity to conjure up the mythical. The death of the traditional narration does not have to mean the death of that liberating potential of Märchen: not only because children and adults keep on profitably reading fairy tales and stories, but also because late capitalism has developed its own didactic forms, which renew the effects of traditional stories under the dizzying conditions of Modernity. A good illustration of this can be found in Brecht: his dramatic and narrative works and his “plump thought” (plumpes Denken) itself show, for Benjamin, a profitable pedagogical orientation that recovers the heritage of old narratives. An eminent example of this is offered by the narratives of Mr Keuner, which we could define as fairy tales for dialecticians. It is telling that Benjamin—who actually wondered whether there is a genuine revolutionary literature without a didactic character—79 has sought Brecht’s epic model for inspiration when thinking of the possibility of taking advantage of the radio to deploy a revolutionary pedagogy.

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In fact, there exists a close link between Benjamin’s radiobroadcasts and the essays he dedicated to Brecht’s theatre; as Palmier points out, in connection with these radio broadcasts. Benjamin’s essay about Brecht’s theatre makes the intentions of those radiobroadcasts clear – his efforts to make historical processes appear behind the images and anecdotes. From the illustrated books he brings out the pariah and dispossessed. At the same time, he seems to experience, through them, a new possible form of narration. Benjamin was not content with “initiating” children into literary works, with making them discover “unusual aspects” of the world around them. He has created something new for them: a form of story based on the tone of confidence, of irony, where each word, chosen with the greatest care, undoubtedly involved important work on the voice tone, its inflection.80

In his article “Dostoevsky’s The Idiot ” (1917; published in 1921), Benjamin makes reference to “the unlimited healing powers of childlike simplicity”.81 To him wanted he to appeal in his radiobroadcasts, but also in his essays and autobiographical writings, which also recover the heritage of the fairy tale. In Berlin Childhood around 1900, we can see, for example, an adult determined, not only to rehabilitate, but perhaps even more to redeem the utopian yearning locked in childhood and associated to the promises of happiness in fairy tales. A letter from Benjamin to Carla Seligson on July 8, 1913 already alluded to the need to embark upon this undertaking, many years before the German essayist carried it out, under the threats of fascist barbarism: “I really believe that we put down roots for the second time in our childhood, that they want to teach us to forget in these days”.82

Notes 1. Marx-Aveling, Eleanor, “Karl Marx. Lose Blätter”. Liebknecht, Wilhelm et al., Mohr und General. Erinnerungen an Marx und Engels. Berlin: Dietz, 1964, pp. 269–279; 273 cited here. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of foreign-language quotations are the author’s. 2. Marx, Karl / Engels, Friedrich, Werke. Ed. by the Institut für MarxismusLeninismus. 43 vols. Berlín: Dietz-Verlag, 1956 and ff, vol. 30 (Letters, January 1860–September 1864), p. 382. 3. Terms in Italics appear in English in the original. 4. Marx, Karl / Engels, Friedrich, Werke, vol. 30, p. 378.

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5. Marx, Karl / Engels, Friedrich, Manifesto of the Communist Party. Transl. by Samuel Moore with an Introd. and notes by Gareth Stedman Jones. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002, pp. 218. 6. Marx, Karl, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Middlesex, etc.: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1982, vol. I, pp. 163–164. 7. Congdon, Lee, The Young Lukács. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983, p. 79. 8. Cf. Lukács’ letter to Martin Buber, November 1911. 9. Lukács, György, “Das Problem des untragischen Dramas”. Benseler, Frank / Jung, Werner (eds.), Lukács 1997. Jahrbuch der Internationalen GeorgLukács-Gesellschaft. Bern: Peter Lang, 1997, pp. 13–16, 16; p. 16 cited here. 10. Ibid., p. 14. 11. Lukács, György, “Thoughts Towards an Aesthetic of the Cinema”. Transl. by Jürgen Reichert. Aitken, Ian, Lukácsian Film Theory and Cinema. A Study of Lukács’ Writings on Film, 1913–71. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012, pp. 181–186; p. 183 cited here. On pp. 3– 34, Aitken develops a detailed interpretation of this essay by the young Lukács. 12. Qtd. in Congdon, Lee, The Young Lukács, p. 159. A different analysis of the presence of these topics in Young Lukács can be read in Gángó, Gábor, “O conto de fadas como esclarecimento, cultura e violência”. Machado, Carlos Eduardo J. / Machado, Rubens / Vedda, Miguel (eds.), Walter Benjamin. Experiência histórica e imagens dialéticas. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2015, pp. 173–182. 13. Bloch, Ernst, “Exkurs: Über Zeittechnik (1928)”. Philosophische Aufsätze zur objektiven Phantasie. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1985, pp. 567–572; p. 568 cited here. 14. Bloch, Ernst, Heritage of Our Times. Transl. by Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991, p. 166. 15. Ibid. 16. Bloch, Ernst, Atheism in Christianity. The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. Transl. by J. T. Swann. London and New York: Verso, 2009, p. 25. 17. Written in US between 1938 and 1947; revised between 1953 and 1959. 18. Bloch, Ernst, The Principle of Hope. 3 vols. Transl. by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993, vol. I, p. 355. 19. Ibid., p. 354. 20. Agard, Olivier, Kracauer. Le chiffonnier mélancolique. Paris: CNRS, 2010, p. 121.

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21. Kracauer, Siegfried, “The Mass Ornament”. The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays. Ed. and Transl. by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 75–86, p. 79 cited here. 22. Ibid, p. 80. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Kracauer also insists, by the way, on the Chaplinesque character avant la lettre of the hero of the fairy tale, who observes (and fights) the materially existing powers “from below”. Francisco García Chicote has underlined the preeminence assumed in Kracauer by two constitutive features of the genre: “the weak hero and the wonder. The wonder is related, on the one hand, like the trick-kitsch, with the objective structure of the world of capitalism. Just as industrial society does and undoes, in a summary way, natural units, so wonder usually belongs ‘naturally’ to the order of Märchen” (El sujeto de la emancipación. Personalidad y capitalismo en György Lukács y Siegfried Kracauer. Los Polvorines: Ediciones UNGS, 2015, p. 151). 26. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Minimalforderung an die Intellektuellen”. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Minimalforderung an die Intellektuellen”. Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. 9 vols. Vol. 5.3: Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen (1928–1931). Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach with the collaboration of Sabine Biebl et al. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2011, pp. 601–606; p. 603 cited here. 27. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Marseiller Entwurf” zu einer Theorie des Films. Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. 9 vols. Vol. 3: Theorie des Films. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2005, pp. 521–779; p. 559 cited here. 28. Ibid., p. 526. 29. Ibid., p. 528. 30. Ibid., p. 530. 31. Ibid., p. 545. 32. Ibid., p. 555. 33. Ibid., p. 694. 34. Cf. “The bourgeois interior of the 1860s to the 1890’s—with its gigantic sideboards distended with carvings, the sunless corners where potted palms sit, the balcony embattled behind its balustrade, and the long corridors with their singing gas flames—fittingly houses only the corpse” (Benjamin, Walter, One-Way Street. Transl. by Edmund Jephcott. Ed. and with an Introd. by Michael W. Jennings. Pref. by Greil Marcus. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016, p. 26). 35. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Marseiller Entwurf” zu einer Theorie des Films, p. 589.

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36. Hansen, Miriam, “‘With Skin and Hair’: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940”. Critical Inquiry 19/3 (Spring 1993), pp. 437–469; p. 453 cited here. 37. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Marseiller Entwurf” zu einer Theorie des Films, p. 753. 38. Ibid., p. 735. 39. Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler. A psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947, p. 28. 40. Ibid., p. 50. 41. Ibid., p. 79. 42. Ibid., p. 90. 43. Ibid., p. 214. 44. Ibid., p. 33. 45. Ibid., p. 99. 46. Hansen, Miriam, “‘With Skin and Hair’: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940”, p. 445. 47. The anachronism of the author’s aesthetic positions and that of the corpus privileged by him are closely related to these shortcomings of the book; as Jörg Später points out, it was increasingly seen that “the way in which Kracauer understood the film came from another era. At least, he was often stuck in the ‘Flaherty drawer’ of ‘non-fantasy realism’ or ‘naive nineteenth-century realism’. An avant-garde film club announced, almost maliciously, an event saying that the filmmaker was ‘the most talented and exciting of non-Kracauerian directors’” (Später, Jörg, Siegfried Kracauer. Eine Biographie. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2016, p. 540). 48. Agard, Olivier, Kracauer. Le chiffonnier mélancolique, p. 287. 49. As Jörg Später rightly comments on the late Kracauer: “While he, as editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, would have gotten almost an article a day out of his sleeve […] as a ‘freelancer’ without writing work, between 1946 and 1951 produced about thirty articles, that is, about five per year. And these were not up to par with the Weimarian texts when it came to acuity. This, on the one hand, surely had to do with the new language; but on the other, the terrible years as a fugitive had evidently left deep marks; among others, that the mockingbird of the olden days, like Ariel falling from the sky, had lost its scathing humor. Reality had instructed him in humility; the sharp pen had been blunt” (Später, Jörg, Siegfried Kracauer. Eine biographie, p. 466). 50. Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality. Introd. by Miriam Bratu Hansen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 33. 51. Ibid. 52. Schiavoni, Giulio, “Zum Kinde”. Lindner, Burkhardt (ed.), Benjamin Handbuch. Leben—Werk—Wirkung. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2006, pp. 373–385; p. 373 cited here.

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53. Most of the manuscript is written between April and July 1932 in Ibiza. Gershom Scholem published it for the first time in 1970. 54. Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project. Transl. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 388. 55. Ibid., p. 390. 56. Ibid., p. 173. 57. Scholem, Gershom, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Transl. by Harry Zohn. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2001, p. 40. 58. Benjamin, Walter, “Karl Kraus”. Transl. by Edmund Jephcott. Selected Writings. Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934. Ed. by Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 433–458; p. 455 cited here. 59. Cf. Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, p. 400. 60. Benjamin, Walter, “Fate and Character”. Transl. by Edmund Jephcott. Selected Writings. Volume 1 (1913–1926). Ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 201–206; p. 203 cited here. 61. Ibid. 62. Cf. Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, p. 390. 63. Ibid., p. 461. 64. Ibid., p. 392. 65. Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Projects. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989, p. 67. 66. Cf. Tiedemann, Rolf, “Einleitung des Herausgebers”. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. V: Das Passagen-Werk. Ed. by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1991, pp. 14–40; pp. 14 et sq. cited here. In a letter to Adorno of May 31, 1935, Benjamin comments, in a way of criticism of his initial attempts at the Arcades Project, that the subtitle “Eine dialektische Féerie” reveals “the rhapsodic character of the representation that I had in mind then and whose vestiges – as I recognize today – did not contain any sufficient formal and linguistic guarantee”; that epoch was that of “a carelessly archaic, natural philosophizing” (Benjamin, Walter, Briefe I . Ed. with notes by Theodor W. Adorno. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1978, p. 663). 67. Palmier, Jean-Michel, Le chiffonnier, l’Ange et le Petit Bossu. Esthétique et politique chez Walter Benjamin. Ed. and annotated by Florent Perrier. Preface by Marc Jimenez. Paris: Klincksieck, 2006, p. 140, n. 126. 68. Benjamin, Walter, “Old Forgotten Children’s Books”. Transl. by Rodney Livingstone. Selected Writings. Vol. 1. (1913–1926), pp. 406–413; p. 408 cited here. 69. Ibid. 70. Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, p. 361.

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71. Benjamin, Walter, “On the Concept of History”. Transl. by Harry Zohn. Selected Writings. Volume 4 (1938–1940). Ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 389–400; p. 394 cited here. 72. Benjamin, Walter, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”. Transl. by Harry Zohn. Selected Writings. Volume 3 (1935– 1938). Ed. by Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 143–167; p. 157 cited here. 73. Benjamin, Walter, “Robert Walser”. Transl. by Rodney Livingstone. Selected Writings. Volume 2, Part 1 (1927 –1930). Ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 257–261; pp. 259 et sq. cited here. 74. Ibid., p. 260. 75. Ibid. 76. Benjamin, Walter, “Franz Kafka. On the Tenth An niversary of His Death”. Selected Writings. Volume 2, pp. 794–818; p. 799 cited here. 77. Benjamin, Walter, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”, p. 157. 78. Ibid. 79. Benjamin, Walter, “The Present Social Situation of the French Writer”. Transl. by Rodney Livingstone. Selected Writings. Volume 2, pp. 744–767; p. 762 cited here. 80. Palmier, Jean-Michel, Le chiffonnier mélancolique, p. 688. 81. Benjamin, Walter, “Dostoevsky’s The Idiot ”. Selected Writings. Volume 1 (1913–1926), pp. 74–81; p. 81 cited here. 82. Benjamin, Walter, Briefe I , p. 73.

Anatomies of Melancholy: Acedia and Alienation in Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer

1 The Duplicity of Kronos and the Ambivalences of Melancholy in Benjamin In Saturn and Melancholy, E. Lasa. Klibansky, Panofski and Saxl highlight a fundamental duplicity in Kronos: its essence is dualist in regard to both its external effects and its own destiny; so: “This dualism is so sharply marked that Kronos might fairly be described as god of opposites”.1 Such a definition suggests per se an association with Walter Benjamin, a thinker marked by the conjunctions of opposites: in the image of two-faced Janus—present in his Trauerspiel study2 —we could see an allegory of his entire life and work. The antithetical or, better yet, the constant movement between extremes has been referred to as a hallmark of Benjaminian thought, a thought that oscillates between the porosity of Naples and the non-historicity of Paris or Berlin; between the lamentation over the loss of the aura and the celebration of the new forms of technical reproduction, linked to dispersion; between the longing for the faded experience, and its transmission by great storytellers, and the expectations raised by forms of representations specifically modern and associated to shock, such

Translation from the Spanish by Cecilia E. Lasa. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67965-1_9

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as the radio or cinema. As Michael Löwy comments, he “liked to compare himself to a Janus figure, one of whose faces was turned towards Moscow and the other towards Jerusalem”.3 Fritz Raddatz, who says, about the German essayist: “[t] he pleasure is the contradiction, his contradiction is the pleasure”,4 has left an image in which the coincidentia oppositorum stands out as a defining Benjaminian feature: he demanded from the writer a tendency, position and useful instruction, and celebrated the flâneur, the opium-eater, the dreamer, the inebriated as an “illuminated”; he wanted to determine “the place of the intellectual in the class struggle” and envied Saint-Pol-Roux’s witticism to hang on her bedroom door a sign with the inscription “Le poète travaille”; he hated the noise and the rush though he wrote what might be his most important book – Origin of the German Trauerspiel – in the “Prinzess Café” in Berlin, near a jazz band; he wrote the most lucid studies about Kafka, Baudelaire, Proust, and produced hundreds of irrelevant pieces of criticism, made to order.5

These contradictions, which, from mythical Kronos to Kracauer and Benjamin, are constitutive of the taciturn character, have a substantial bearing on our topic: the ambivalence that marks Benjamin’s approach to melancholy, since, together with the theoretical elaboration and personal identification with the atra bilis, we find periodic and exhaustive criticisms directed at acedia, especially in the face of historical and political circumstances and the possibilities of a revolutionary change. A characteristic example of such a criticism is the article “Left-Wing Melancholy” (1931), in which Benjamin categorically condemns Erich Kästner and, in general, the whole movement of New Objectivity, in which he observes a petty-bourgeois hatred towards the petty bourgeoisie. Provided with few bonds with the working class, this left-wing intelligentsia has the function of “give rise, politically speaking, not to parties but to cliques; literarily speaking, not to schools but to fashions; economically speaking not to producers but to agents”.6 Expressions of an intelligentsia reluctant to join the revolutionary movement and to forsake its petty-bourgeois myopia, the works of New Objectivity give voice to a melancholy that Benjamin presents in grotesque terms. Thus, the beat of Kästner’s poems “very precisely follows the notes according to which poor rich folk play the blues; they correspond to the mournfulness of the satiated man who can no longer devote all his money to his stomach. Tortured stupidity: this is the latest of two millennia of metamorphoses of melancholy”.7

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With an irony akin to Brecht—whose poetry is positively mentioned in the review—, Benjamin alludes to the fatalism of Kästner’s poems through a scatological simile: This is the fatalism of those who are most remote from the process of production and whose obscure courting of the state of the market is comparable to the attitude of a man who yields himself up entirely to the inscrutable accidents of his digestion. The rumbling in these lines certainly has more to do with flatulence than with subversion. Constipation and melancholy have always gone together. But since the juices began to dry up in the body social, stuffiness meets us at every turn. Kästner’s poems do not improve the atmosphere.8

The criticism against melancholy as an expression of political fatalism and hopelessness reappears in “On the Concept of History” (1940), where is questioned that historical empathy (Einfühlung ) whose origin is “indolence of the heart, that acedia which despairs of appropriating the genuine historical image as it briefly flashes up. Among medieval theologians, acedia was regarded as the root cause of sadness”.9 Benjamin associates this absolute historical despair with the historicist historian’s empathy with the winners. The futile pessimism of historicism—similar, in this regard, to the “left-wing melancholy” of New Objectivity—is the opposite pole, but ultimately complementary, of the positivist and anti-dialectic optimism of social democracy. This form of consideration coexists in Benjamin with another one, which shows a different perspective on melancholy. We may as well recall, as Max Pensky does, the fragment Agesilaus Santander, composed on August 12th–13th 1933,10 in Ibiza, in precarious and sad vital conditions, and in which Benjamin highlights the saturnine and even satanic nature of his character and destiny. The meaning of the title of the fragment is understood as soon as an anagram of “The Angel Satan” (der Angelus Satanas ) is discovered in it. Benjamin rests on a long-established tradition that deems Lucifer the paradigmatic exponent of the melancholic character, and also relates his own destiny to a misfortune that has marked him since the childhood. Along these lines it corresponds to interpret various fragments of Berlin Childhood around 1900; Jean-Michel Palmier has shown how, in a section like “Imperial Panorama”, the images that parade before the child’s eyes, stamped by a “melancholic atmosphere of goodbye”, have for him something of a “déjà vu”. What the narrator, in Proust, endeavours to decipher through the hue of the stone, the line of a

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roof, is a promise of happiness. Benjamin, on the other hand, finds there only the premonition of future sadness. The Little Hunchback manages to ruin his most beautiful instants, by letting him guess their negative side.11

The oscillations in the approach to melancholy can be already observed in Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study. This is actually valid with regard to the very same concept of melancholy as it is developed in the book: living embodiment of the split between physis and meaning, melancholy has, as Menke underlines, an essential ambiguity: on the one hand, “it stubbornly keeps the rift open; on the other hand, by insisting on what is missing, it invokes the totality”.12 Daniel Weidner has linked the essential ambivalence of the concept of creature in Benjamin in the context of the discussion on the theory of melancholy: For this transcends the interpretation of anthropological knowledge from the perspective of the Geistesgeschichte in two aspects: on the one hand, he underlines the physiological constitution of melancholy, its basis in the doctrine of humors; on the other, its theological dimension is no less important: Benjamin begins the treatment of melancholy by referring to the Lutheran tradition and underlines its tendency to empty the world, in which Klaus Garber has not without reason seen a reference to Max Weber.13

Even more important are the political correlates of baroque melancholy; Susan Buck-Morss has shown that Benjamin’s study, for all its determination to vindicate the importance of the Trauerspiel and, in general, of the Baroque allegories, encloses a critical attitude towards them: “there are unmistakable clues as to Benjamin’s own position, which must be read not as an affirmation, but as a fundamental critique, one which had political as well as philosophical implications”.14 Decisive target of criticism is the lack of commitment of the Baroque poets: they only conceive of political action as a space for intrigue and, on these grounds, they seek, as the ulterior idealist philosophy, “refuge in the spirit […]. In order to remain true to God, the German allegoricists abandon both nature and politics […]. In short, Benjamin criticises Baroque allegory for its idealism”.15 In the essays on Baudelaire and the writings related to The Arcades Project, Benjamin suggests an analysis of melancholy that is not identified, neither with the Baroque allegorists’ complete refraining from politics, nor with the petty-bourgeois inefficacy of New Objectivity. Benjamin

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perceives in the author of Fleurs du mal —as he does with the avantgardes, in general, and Surrealism, in particular—the predilection for the destructive, anarchic moment, as well as the inability to embark upon a constructive action. His is a demolition, a negative task, consistent with the social significance of the lumpenproletariat and the marginal types associated with it, whose expression is found, in aesthetic terms, in the bohème; in political terms, in the conspirateurs de profession. When describing the behaviour of the latter, Benjamin draws upon Marx, who had questioned the conspirateurs for curbing their perspectives to the organizations of the conspiracy and the overthrow of the existing government, disregarding any constructive attitude. On these terms, Blanqui’s insurrection is to revolutionary practice, as conceived of by Marx, what Baudelaire’s Satanism is to consequent atheism—a persistent gesture of repulsion that, as such, contributes to keeping the denied enemy alive. However, in Benjamin’s view, it is not about doing away with the forces of drunkenness (Rausch),16 germane to the bohème and coupmongering politics, but to make them productive for the revolution. Unlike petit-bourgeois opportunism typical of left-wing melancholy, the non-conformism of the bohème represents a step forward in the path to a genuine politicization of the revolutionary proletariat and intelligentsia: an advance—comparable to that made by Benjamin himself—from an anarchic and even anarchist attitude to a Marxist one.

2 A Malcontent, not a Leader: The Intellectual as Ragpicker in Kracauer With regard to the Baroque allegorists, the Trauerspiel study claims that they limited themselves to compose, with the fragments recollected by them, arbitrary configurations, given their inability to restore the original totality. Circumscribed to a world deprived of bonds with the transcendent, the allegorist is devoted to accumulating allegories, but fails to grasp a non-arbitrary meaning; in Pensky’s words, the more allegories the thinker constructs, aiming at recovering genuine meaning, “the more the network of allegorical references multiplies and intertwines, the more distant this goal becomes, the more urgently the allegorist works, and the deeper the allegorist plunges into the well of subjectivity”.17 Related to this character is the chiffonnier, whose aim is to melancholically recollect waste—fragments—, and whose figure, as can be read in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (1938), fascinated all his time. As

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other subjects close to the bohème or belonging to it, the ragpicker is seen as a marginal subject, whose discontent with the social order does not go beyond an individualist non-conformism. The allusion to the ragpicker provides the appropriate context to introduce Kracauer; let’s remember that, in his review of The Salaried Masses —tellingly entitled “An Outsider Makes His Mark” (1930)—, Benjamin compares the essayist’s basic attitude to the lonely marginality of the chiffonier: Kracauer “stands alone. A malcontent, not a leader. No pioneer, but a spoilsport”.18 If we wanted to gain a clear picture of him in the isolation of his trade, we would see a ragpicker, at daybreak, picking up rags of speech and verbal scraps with his stick and tossing them, grumbling and growling, a little drunk, into his cart, not without letting one or another of those faded cotton remnants – “humanity,” “inwardness,” or “absorption” – flutter derisively in the wind. A ragpicker, early on, at the dawn of the day of the revolution.19

This comment lays emphasis on the strokes that outline Kracauer’s melancholy. We can identify the author of The Salaried Masses as an intellectual determined to demolish the dazzling, deceptive appearances of the totality the bourgeois society puts up and also to gather the waste, deprived of exchange-value and, therefore, removed from the power of attraction of the fetish. The attitude is demystifying: Kracauer is someone who does not want to continue playing the game and “declines to don a mask for the carnival mounted by his fellow human beings […], he rudely pushes his way through the throng, so as to lift the masks of the most impudent here and there”.20 Important is here, not only the emphasis on drunkenness, but also the fact that the ragpicker with whom the author of The Salaried Masses is compared performs his tasks at the dawn of the day of the revolution. This event endows the figure of intellectual represented by Kracauer a transitional character: the journalist of the Frankfurter Zeitung is not a snob, but neither could he become a revolutionary tout court by a mere act of will, insofar as “the proletarianization of the intellectual hardly ever turns him into a proletarian”.21 Kracauer’s honest attempt to unmask the false appearance of the existent order is the only valid result a revolutionary intellectual with a bourgeois origin could achieve; what it is about, basically, is to conquer the politicization of the own class: “This indirect impact is the only one a revolutionary writer from the bourgeoisie can aim at today. A direct effect can proceed only from

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practice”.22 A book like The Salaried Masses is “a milestone on the road toward the politicization of the intelligentsia”,23 but—partially similar to what happens with the Baroque allegorists—this intellectual is turned into a malcontent (Mißvergnügter) due to the incapacity to pass from destruction to construction, from the fragment to totality, from contemplation to praxis. The political efficacy associated with the grief of malcontent opposes the futile melancholy of New Objectivity. This allows us to reveal an affinity between the essayist from Frankfurt and the essayist from Berlin. Elsewhere we have pointed out that Benjamin’s “prismatic thought” (Hans Heinz Holz) presents different facets as the physiognomic features of each of the authors with whom he has established a personal and intellectual bond are reflected, as in a magical mirror.24 We obtain diverse characterizations of Benjamin if we look at him from the mutually discordant points of view of Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem or Bertolt Brecht; accordingly, we will see a Benjamin close to Frankfurt’s Critical Theory, to Jewish mysticism or to a version of Marxism similar to that of the creator of the epic and dialectic theatre. The approach to Kracauer’s writings helps the anti-academic essayist stand out in Benjamin, a recurrent guest in magazines and cultural supplements. It also contributes to revealing the sceptical and malcontent man, who throws a demystifying look, deprived of Einfühlung, upon the course of history. This provides elements to understand why Kracauer highlights the importance of the intellectual, not as a member of an organization to which he owes blind obedience, but as destructor of the façades of legitimation of the bourgeois society.25 For the German essayist, the demystifying look is, in the case of the marginal intellectual, related to malcontent, to scepticism and, eventually, to melancholy, as opposed to the lethargic optimism of the supporters of the status quo. Kracauer’s perspective coincides with that of Freud’s, who has not in vain suggested the thesis that at the base of melancholy there is an extremely lucid grasp of reality: He also seems to us justified in certain other self-accusations; it is merely that he has a keener eye for the truth than other people who are not melancholic. When in his heightened self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weakness of his own nature, it may be, so far as we know, that he has come pretty near to understanding himself; we only wonder

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why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind.26

Kracauer has been invariably reluctant to attempt to subordinate the intellectual to the discipline of a party or any other collective organization, hence those oscillations that we can see in Benjamin are absent in him. Kracauer’s attitude is related to the absence of any condemning attitude towards melancholy: the heuristic value he identifies in it is too dear for him to offer it in exchange of a certificate of unreserved integration to the current society. Because he is a promoter of the demystifying capacity of melancholy, but above all because he finds himself under the sign of Saturn, Kracauer also finds himself passed through by antithesis; not in vain has he written, paraphrasing Heine, that “the great rift of the world also goes through me, precisely through me”.27 But only gradually did Kracauer become aware that this rift, which runs through both the modern world and the subjectivity, demands an ambivalent, dialectical stance from the intellectual. In his first writings, we can perceive a global rejection of Modernity, questioned through an arsenal of arguments typical in the Kulturkritik at the beginning of the twentieth century. Inspired, among others, by Simmel and the young Lukács, Kracauer condemns modern civilization and society, which he sees as related to an abstract, impersonal way of life and contrasts with traditional culture and community, in which the blossoming of the whole person (Gesamtperson) was still possible. Encouraged by the hopes for the restoration of a unitary social ordo, the young essayist confronts the medieval transcendent shelter (transzendente Geborgenheit ) with the transcendent homelessness (transzendentale Obdachlosigkeit ) typical of the anomic bourgeois society. Kracauer’s development towards a more complex and innovative grasp of contemporary reality is related to overcoming this unilaterally critical approach and to acknowledging positive aspects of Modernity, inextricably related to the alienating and harmful ones. In the 1919 study on Simmel28 we see a typical example of the early stage of Kracauerian thought, with its critical accents in the characterization of the figure of the Wanderer. The melancholy of a “wanderer” like Simmel has its counterpart, in the young Kracauer, in that of the urban masses, who are defined as spiritually homeless (geistig obdachlos ) and in perpetual search for distractions, with the aim of blurring the consciousness of their own condition. Elements of this critical interpretation of mass culture are still found in the article “Langeweile” (Boredom 1924),

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in which several of the early objections against urban civilization return. The article, whose accents remind of Pascal and Kierkegaard, insists on the contemporary man’s reluctance to find himself and on the eagerness to run away from boredom by means of multiple forms of distraction. Escaping from authentic leisure, which may lead to reflection, people have invented a work ethic that, at any rate, affords them a certain moral satisfaction. Once the workday is over, they banish leisure time through the cinema and the radio, by attending coffees and wandering through streets laden with advertisements that, with the circularity of mythical torments, reproduce once and again the very same messages: like Pegasus prancing on a carousel, this spirit must run in circles and may never tire of praising to high heaven the glory of a liqueur and the merits of the best five-cent cigarette. Some sort of magic spurs that spirit relentlessly amid the thousand electric bulbs, out of which it constitutes and reconstitutes itself into glittering sentences.29

As in Benjamin, also in Kracauer the quantitative, empty time of Modernity finds one of its representative expressions in the eternal return of the identical.30 In the space of the street, in contrast to an intérieur in which it would be possible to rediscover the lost subjectivity, one’s body “takes root in the asphalt, and, together with the enlightening revelations of the illuminations, one’s spirit – which is no longer one’s own – roams ceaselessly”.31 Anticipating Adorno’s ulterior reflections, the author of the essay questions urban civilization because in it all trace of private existence has vanished: faced with objective boredom— of which they are not at all conscious—, the inhabitants of large cities are deprived, by the mass media, of the right to personal boredom. In such boredom finds Kracauer the only appropriate occupation, since it offers some guarantee that the individual will have his own existence; that is to say: that he will be subject, and not object of the boredom of a world of distraction which pounces on him and subdues him. The melancholic who, enclosed within four walls, dedicates himself to boredom is qualified as authentic, “becomes content to do nothing more than be with oneself […] one harbours only an inner restlessness without a goal, a longing that is pushed aside, and a weariness with that which exists without really being”.32 This insistence on the fallacious character of urban reality is a central component in Kracauer’s early thinking, so is the insistence on the value of patience, which here—as in the

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essay “Those who Wait” (1922)—has an almost redeeming effectiveness: patience specific to legitimate boredom allows the projection, in dreams, in the musing of the melancholic, of a landscape where the features of the great passion (die große Passion)—ever longed for—are drawn. This image of passion evokes the allegory of Hope set by Benjamin at the end of the essay on Elective Affinities, by Goethe: “Were this passion – which shimmers like a comet – to descend, were it to envelop you, the others, and the world – oh, then boredom would come to an end, and everything that exists would be…”33 A utopia is hinted here that refuses to be described, and that can only be defined ex negativo: as an inversion of an empirical world emptied of meaning. It is telling that here, like in the analysis developed by Benjamin in the Trauerspiel study, secularized Modernity expresses itself, not only in the imposition of an empty temporality, but also into the reduction of men to puppets or mannequins, subjected to the power of objects that seem to have gained a life of their own. The counterpart of Benjamin’s analysis of props (Requisiten) is the animation that things reach in Kracauer’s essays and novels; and the presentation of the characters of the Trauerspiel such as figurines or corpses—objects, ultimately—coincides with the description of the modern man, in “Langeweile”, as a chained being, as a helpless little doll (ein ohnmächtiges Püppchen).

3 Crisis and Ennui in Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time In Kracauer’s later essays, this analysis with metaphysical overtones is substituted, not only by a more careful consideration of socio-historical conditions, but also by a more differentiated analysis of Modernity. Now an enemy of the “fanatics of the community” and those who foster, from a kulturkritisch point of view, the decadence thesis, Kracauer opposes the conventionalism and conservatism of the middle classes— subjugated by the ratio and the cult of distraction—to the situation of the poor devil, the suffering creature of our time, who has nothing left to lose.34 Middle classes’ self-destructive connivance with the current order is expressed in their determination to erase from their lives every trace of transience and contingency. An example of this is the white collars’ vitalism: their idolatry of sport and youth represents, as written in The Salaried Masses , an escape from death. “The dominant economic mode”, states Kracauer, “does not wish to be seen through, so sheer vitality must

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prevail”.35 Even more explicit, in terms of its social repercussions, is the thesis according to which the flight of images to which the urban masses are exposed is a flight from revolution and from death. The middle classes are incapable of conceiving the transient nature of existence as well as a utopic temporality. They are dazzled by the vertiginous tempo of the city, where time has adopted the shape of space. Influenced by the reflections of Bergson and of the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness, Kracauer’s reflection about the spatialization of time under capitalism also presents affinities with the analysis of the process of secularization in the Trauerspiel study. Let us recall that, for Benjamin, evidences of the fading of all eschatology are the preference of the baroque theatre for the construction of panoramas, the application of the medieval technique of the speculum and, in general, the design of spatializing the temporal course. Such a transformation of time into space is the counterpart, on the literary level, of Leibniz’s introduction of the infinitesimal calculus: If history is secularized in the setting, this bespeaks the same metaphysical tendency that in the exact sciences at that time led to the infinitesimal method. In both cases temporal process is caught up and analysed in a spatial image. The image of the setting – or, more precisely, the court – becomes the key to historical understanding.36

Unlike the chronological and discontinuous course of time in tragedy, the Trauerspiel unfolds choreographically in the continuum of space. At this point, we could draw several correspondences between the spatiality of baroque theatrical scenery and the one that characterizes the mass ornament examined by Kracauer. From the homogeneous and empty temporality—governed by the equalizing uniformity of the ratio—that dominates bourgeois society, only manage to escape outsiders, who, in their predilection for the unconventional and the provisional, break with the abstraction imposed by the system.37 The places that, in accordance with this, Kracauer privileges, “that is, those places ‘promised to the passage, to the provisional, to the ephemeral’, which cannot be defined as historical or relational, or in terms of identity”, are, according to Agard, “bearers of a promise”.38 These spaces open to improvisation are the settings par excellence for the marginal, whose behaviour reveals the fragility of an order that persists in presenting itself as solid and timeless. A paradigmatic example of Kracauer’s approach to cultural chiffonniers offers the Offenbach study,39 in whose chapter “Langeweile” (Boredom)

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we find reissued, with greater socio-historical concreteness, that reflection on melancholy which, in the homonymous essay of 1924, was still marked by typical topoi of the Kulturkritik. The boredom that, in the early essay, seemed to descend on the urban masses in metaphysical terms, derives here from the economic crisis of the July Monarchy, which begins to undo the illusions of splendour that previously prevented the perception of misery: The brightness, all over the social being, threatened to extinguish and things started to show in their unnamed nakedness. Without envelopes, the materialism of the dominant bourgeoisie was now shown, which, like a flock, tried to flee, dominated by panic, from a storm whose proximity it sensed, and refused to embellish its desire for profit.40

Just as, in the baroque allegories, the dissolution of the beautiful classicist appearance made the skull to emerge behind the beautiful face, so too the bourgeois society, under Louis-Phillipe, starts to experience the approach of revolution and death. In this context the ennui is enthroned: “Possessed by him as by a perverse demon, men listened how empty time, time without content, whispered; time itself, which just flows without carrying anything”.41 From this boredom—from which the bourgeoisie and the middle classes flee like from a plague—differs the melancholy of those who, like Offenbach, contemplate their times with the eyes of the exile. Filled with references to the historical circumstances under which it is written, Kracauer’s social biography links the most creative and exciting of France during July Monarchy and Second Empire with the strangers’ culture, which sprouts in the extra-territorial realm of the boulevard: It was a place removed from the reach of social reality. A neutral meeting place. An unreal land. Also contributing to its unreality was the circumstance that, with the internal emigrants who populated it – the dandies, the hedonists and, in a certain sense, the journalists – a number of genuine emigrants mixed.42

In Kracauer’s essays about nineteenth-century Paris, Offenbach’s operetta performs a role similar to Baudelaire’s poetry in Benjamin’s analyses. Like the French poet, the German musician is related to marginality; not in vain remarks Kracauer that Offenbach’s work is born in the realm of the boulevard, which is defined as a home for the homeless (Heimat der Heimatlosen):

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Offenbach and the boulevard […] matched, according to their essence. Wasn’t Offenbach an emigrant after all? Here, on the boulevard, he found his equals; he found a space in which he could maintain the state of free suspension that was suited to him. Here he felt at home, since the boulevard was not a home, in the usual sense of the word.43

It is telling that the author of Offenbach has not chosen a poet like Baudelaire as a representative figure but, instead, an operetta composer, whose satirical work—vastly popular—could unmask with great efficacy, not the drama, but the farce of Napoleon III’s tyranny. Offenbach represents, in nineteenth-century Paris, something of what Kracauer sees in Chaplin’s films, or of what he tries himself to express through the protagonist of his first novel, Ginster. Endowed with Offenbachian and Chaplinesque features, Kracauer’s character is a melancholic that, with his involuntary comicalness, manages to demolish all the façades of power. In another essay in this book we analyse in detail this novel and its protagonist,44 suffice it to say here that Ginster—one of the masterpieces of Kracauerian writing—is the epitome of that mix of humour and melancholy to which the Frankfurt essayist attributed such intensely explosive ideological power.45

4 The Melancholy of the Photographic Approach and the Redemption of Physical Reality There are, in Kracauer’s late work, several testimonies of the persistence of this affinity with the estranged and estranging gaze of the melancholic. But the clearest one appears perhaps in Theory of Film (1960), where it is stated that the peculiarity of the photographic approach—its capacity to observe reality with the stranger’s eye—is related to the melancholic mood essential to photography. Melancholy, as an internal disposition, not only seeks to make elegiac objects seem attractive but also carries an even more important implication: it favors self-estrangement, which on its part entails identification with all kinds of objects. The dejected individual is likely to lose himself in the incidental configurations of his environment, absorbing them with a disinterested intensity no longer determined by his previous preferences. His is a kind of receptivity which resembles that of Proust’s photographer cast in the role of a stranger.46

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It is telling that here Kracauer illustrates the relation between photography and acedia through a very recurrent film sequence: that of a melancholic character that wanders in the city; the places he walks through are materialized by means of numerous juxtaposed façades, neon lights and occasional by-passers. It is understandable that the spectator should attribute the apparently unmotivated emergence of these elements to the character’s loneliness and alienation. We do not need to make explicit the significance of the figure of the flâneur in Kracauer’s and Benjamin’s writings: both thinkers share the certainty that the deepest and most accurate look on the great city is the stranger’s. In “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935), Benjamin underlines that Baudelaire’s poetry is “no hymn to the homeland; rather, the gaze of the allegorist, as it falls on the city, is the gaze of the alienated man. It is the gaze of the flâneur…”.47 The second version of Exposé (1939) reads, in similar terms, that “the gaze which the allegorical genius turns on the city betrays […] a profound alienation”.48 Something analogous to this is what Kracauer sees in Offenbach, who embodies, as Agard points out, the unlucky consciousness of the exile: in Paris, as a emigrant, the German writer’s “situation of not belonging provides some guarantee of a creative objectivity, although it is also a source of suffering”.49 Fundamental, in this alienated gaze, is the absence of an instrumental purpose. We know that Benjamin’s early work is marked by a profound rejection of the subject’s attempt to manipulate the immanence of objects. In a very early essay such as “Two Poems by Friedrich Holderlin” (1914), Benjamin highlights the German’s poet skill to transcend his own subjectivity for the benefit of the whole. But the condemnation of subjectivist aggressiveness—typical of idealism and positivism—, as Beatrice Hanssen states, reaches its pinnacle in the “Vorrede” to the Trauerspiel study, where we witness to “another form of history, one no longer purely ruled by the concerns or categories of human agency”.50 At the core of this contention against the despotism of human subjectivism there is not only a philosophical confrontation with idealism, but also a condemnation to the tyranny of anthropocentric conceptions and, in broader terms, all kind of violence against nature. This eagerness is connected, in his mature work, with the certainty that redemption is connected to a determination to emancipate things from the subject’s oppression. The proposal for redemption of the physis —already present in the Trauerspiel study—has its correlates in Kracauer, who has in fact assigned as a task to the cinema to redeem the physical reality, as the subtitle of Theory of Film says. The

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reason for Benjamin’s fascination for Atget’s photographs is that they have redeemed the inorganic world by showing it ruthlessly independent from humanity: devoid of their aura, things refuse to return the look to the man beholding them.51 A similar enthusiasm nourishes Kracauer’s attention to the photographic medium: for this radical materialist, the commitment to safeguarding the autonomy of particular bodies and things against the violence of the concept—the obsession for consummating the redemption of physical reality—is connected with the firm hope that another world is possible. A faint hope, corresponding to the weak and the malcontent, the spoilsport and the melancholic. In other words: that hope that has been given to us by virtue of the hopeless.

Notes 1. Klibansky, Raymond / Panofski, Erwin / Saxl, Fritz, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Philosophy, Religion and Art. Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Krauss Reprint, 1979, p. 134. 2. In fact, Beatrice Hanssen rightly proposed to use the image of Janus’ head to account for the Benjaminian allegory. By virtue of the ambiguity of this, its various readers “have privileged either the messianic, chiliastic implications of allegory or its antimessianic, disjunctive force, depending on whether its restitutive, resurrectional moments or its materiality have been underscored. A similar equivocation, it should be added, befalls the status of the fragment or ruin, which can be read either as a subversion of the unifying grasp of systematic philosophy or a remnant waiting to be redeemed” (Hanssen, Beatrice, Walter Benjamin’s Other History. Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings and Angels. Berkeley, etc.: University of California Press, 2000, pp. 82 et sq.). 3. Löwy, Michael, Fire Alarm. Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’. Transl. by C. Turner. London, New York: Verso, 2005, p. 20. 4. Raddatz, Fritz, “Die Kräfte des Rausches für die Revolution gewinnen. Der Literaturbegriff des preußischen Snobs und jüdischen Melancholikers Walter Benjamin”. Revolte und Melancholie. Essays zur Literaturtheorie. Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus, 1979, pp. 191–220; p. 191 cited here. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of foreign-language quotations are the author’s. 5. Ibid. 6. Benjamin, Walter, “Left-Wing Melancholy”. Transl. by Bren Brewster. Selected Writings. Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934. Ed. by Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 423–426; p. 424 cited here. 7. Ibid., p. 426.

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8. Ibid. 9. Benjamin, Walter, “On the Concept of History”. Transl. by Harry Zohn. Selected Writings. Volume 4 (1938–1940). Ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 389–399; p. 391 cited here. 10. Max Pensky finds it noteworthy that the articles “Left-Wing Melancholy” and “Agesilaus Santander” are almost contemporaries (“roughly simultaneous”; cf. Pensky, Max, Melancholy Dialectics. Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning. Amherst: University of Massachussets Press, 1993, p. 6), which would prove Benjamin’s ambivalences with particular clarity. If one takes into account that there are almost two years between the two articles—the review of Kästner’s poems was written in October 1931— and, above all, two years marked by such arduous and complex political and personal circumstances, the simultaneity asserted by Pensky seems inadmissible. 11. Palmier, Jean-Michel, Le chiffonnier, l’Ange et le Petit Bossu. Esthétique et politique chez Walter Benjamin. Ed. by Florent Perrier. Preface by Marc Jimenez. Paris: Klincksieck, 2006, p. 94. 12. Menke, Bettine, “Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels ”. Lindner, Burkhardt (ed.), Benjamin Handbuch. Leben—Werk—Wirkung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2006, pp. 210–229; p. 220 cited here. In her monograph about the Trauerspiel study, Menke also makes reference to the antithetical feature of melancholy, expressed, “in the Benjaminian typology of the staff of the Trauerspiel, of the prince and the schemer, and is wedged in the dichotomy of materiality abandoned by God, and spirituality lacking, as such, of ties with the Divine with Deity” (Menke, Bettine, Das Trauerspiel -Buch. Der Souverän—das Trauerspiel —Konstellationen— Ruinen. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010, p. 124). 13. Weidner, Daniel, “Kreatürlichkeit. Benjamins Trauerspielsbuch und das Leben des Barock”. Weidner, Daniel (ed.), Profanes Leben. Walter Benjamins Dialektik der Säkularisierung. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2010¸ pp. 120–138, pp. 124 et sq. cited here. 14. Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Projects. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989, p. 174. 15. Ibid., p. 175. 16. In relation to the importance of Rausch in Benjamin, it is particularly worth recommending first the book by María E. Belforte Política de la embriaguez. Infancia, amor y muerte en el proyecto político de Walter Benjamin (Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Univ. de Buenos Aires, 2016). 17. Pensky, Max, Melancholy Dialectics, p. 127. 18. Benjamin, Walter, “An Outsider Makes His Mark”. Transl. by Rodney Livinstone. Selected Writings. Volume 2, Part 1 (1927 –1930). Ed. Michael

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

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W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 305–311; p. 310 cited here. Ibid. Ibid., p. 305. Ibid., p. 309. Ibid., p. 310. Ibid. Cf. Vedda, Miguel, La irrealidad de la desesperación. Buenos Aires: Gorla, 2011, p. 5. Cf. Köhn, Eckhardt, “Die Konkretionen des Intellekts. Zum Verhältnis von gesellschaftlicher Erfahrung und literarischer Darstellung in Kracauers Romanen”. Arnold, Heinz Ludwig (ed.), Siegfried Kracauer. Text + Kritik 68. Munich: Text + Kritik, 1981, pp. 41–58; especially p. 50. Freud, Sigmund, “Morning and Melancholia”. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Transl. and Ed. by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955, vol. XIV (1914–1916), pp. 243–258; p. 246 cited here. Adorno, Theodor W. / Kracauer, Siegfried, Briefwechsel 1923–1966. “Der Riß der Welt geht auch durch mich”. Published by the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Ed. by Wolfgang Schopf. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2008, p. 11; letter Adorno, 1923/4/5. To which another of the essays in this book is dedicated; cf. pp. 25–35. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Boredom”. The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays. Ed. and Transl. by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 331–334; p. 332 cited here. Carlos Eduardo Jordão Machado proposes a comparison between Benjamin’s reception of the theory of the eternal return formulated by Nietzsche and this aspect of Kracauer’s reading of Modernity. Cf.: “Benjamin’s criticism of the idea of the eternal return, formulated by Nietzsche apparently against the idea of a teleological progress of humanity, is clear; something in general mitigated, openly obliterated by secondary literature in relation to his work” (“Siegfried Kracauer y Walter Benjamin sobre la génesis histórica del tedio”. Ciordia, Martín José / Vedda, Miguel (eds.), Placeres de la melancolía. Reflexiones sobre literatura y tristeza. Buenos Aires: Gorla/DAAD, 2014, pp. 323; p. 322 cited here). Kracauer, Siegfried, “Boredom”, p. 332. Ibid., p. 334. Ibid., p. 334. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Reise ans Ende der Nacht ”. Werke Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. 9 vols. Vol. 5.4: Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen (1932–1965). Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach with the collaboration of Sabine Biebl et al. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2011, pp. 409–415; pp. 410 et sq. cited here.

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35. Kracauer, Siegfried, The Salaried Masses . Transl. by Quintin Hoare, introd. by Inka Mülder-Bach. London, NY: Verso, 1998, pp. 53–59, p. 59 cited here. 36. Benjamin, Walter, Origin of the German Trauerspiel . Transl. by de Howard Eiland. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2019, p. 82. 37. Lepenies has also drawn attention to the opposition of the melancholic Außenseiter to the monotony of the bourgeois world in the context of the nineteenth century. He argues that, with the dissolution of the “melancholic centers”, “melancholy passes to the one to whom it itself had to expel: the nineteenth century is the time of the great melancholic loners” (Lepenies, Wolf, Melancholie und Gesellschaft. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1972, p. 95). Figures such as the flâneur and the dandy “do not stabilise, with their eccentric attitudes, any system, but themselves: just like the flâneur protests against the process of production, the dandy protests against the everyday norm. The flâneur and the dandy create a program that does not work for the society that enjoys at a distance, but only for the one producing it; the ‘apathetic isolation of each individual into his private interests’ (Engels), typical of modern commodity production, is also evident in the flâneur” ibid., pp. 94 et sq.). 38. Agard, Olivier, “La mélancolie urbaine selon Siegfried Kracauer”. En: Füzzerréry, Stéphan / Simay, Philippe (eds.), Le choc des métropoles. Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin. París: Editions de l’éclat, 2008, pp. 149– 173; p. 168 cited here. 39. Kracauer starts to work on the composition of this book in 1934. The first German edition appears in 1937, in the publishing house Allert de Lange, Amsterdam. 40. Kracauer, Siegfried, Werke. Vol. 8: Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit. Ed. by Ingrid Belke with Mirjam Wenzel. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2005, p. 102. 41. Ibid., p. 103. 42. Ibid., p. 88. 43. Ibid., p. 89. 44. Cf. the pp. 37–63. 45. Starobinski has also highlighted the connection between the melancholic character and the predisposition for satire: “Whatever models are given to it, melancholy constitutes a sufficient pretext for the satirical voice, for indignation as well as for laughter. […] Under the cover of black humour, of which he declares himself tormented, the satirist can denounce without regard the course of the world. He will tell the most impolite truths and will excuse himself by alleging the fatality of his bodily constitution. His irreverence leaves no one safe” (Starobinski, Jean, L’encre de la mélancolie. Afterword by Fernando Vidal. París: Seuil, 2012, p. 165).

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46. Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film. The Redemption of physical Reality. Introduced by Miriam Bratu Hansen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 17. 47. Benjamin, Walter, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”. Selected Writings. Volume 3. (1935–1938). Ed. by Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 32–49; p. 39 cited here. 48. Benjamin, Walter, “Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris”. The Arcade Projects. Transl. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 21–23, p. 21. 49. Agard, Olivier, Kracauer. Le chiffonnier mélancolique. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2010, p. 323. 50. Hanssen, Beatrice, Walter Benjamin’s Other History. Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings and Angels, p. 26. 51. This blissful indifference that things maintain with respect to the human gaze differs both from the disposition of objects endowed with aura to raise their heads and look back at the one who looks at them, and from fetishized commodities, which, like prostitutes, look at clients and beckoned to them from the shop windows. Günter Butzer has examined the affinities between the programmes of the redemption of physical reality through the photographic medium promoted by Benjamin and Kracauer and the apokatastasis formulated by Origen (and, one might add, the tikun olan of Jewish mysticism): “The model […] is that of a redemption of phenomena that is constantly consummated and that has nothing in common with the traditional concept of historical progress. It is connected with that eschatological representation of a restitutio in integrum at the end of time whose importance for Benjamin’s historical conception has been highlighted in various ways. For Benjamin, as for Kracauer, what was involved was a reconciliation between nature and history that is nourished by the idea of apokatastasis , of a complete restitution of the world, in which the most recent meets the oldest: the end of time coincides with the origin of time” (“MedienRevolution. Zum utopischen Diskurs in den Medientheorien Kracauers und Benjamins”. Grunert, Frank / Kimmich, Dorothee (eds.), Denken durch die Dinge. Siegfried Kracauer im Kontext. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009, pp. 154–168; p. 164 cited here).

Decline and Fall of the Short Novel? Vicissitudes of a Genre in the Modern German Narrative

1

On the Thesis of the Demise of Traditional Narrative

During the last decades, the study “The Storyteller” (1936), by Walter Benjamin, has lost its status as an essayistic, controversial approach and, to that extent, open to discussion, to become a kind of sacred writing, whose statements are reproduced all the more so, the less their validity is investigated. This attitude of blind reverence helps to explain the unusual frequency with which, in the monographs of the literature students and in the papers of their professors, the same quotes from the Leskov essay reappear over and over again; a frequency equalled only by the repetition, ad infinitum et nauseam, of certain passages of the article on “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility” (1936) that captivate readers in a special way. In this process of trivialization could have played a role Benjamin’s own style of writing, whose conciseness encouraged the extraction and accumulation of sentences. More than forty years ago Scholem affirmed that, in Benjamin, the esoteric gesture was that of the “producer of authoritarian affirmations, and this very certainly also means of phrases destined, in advance and by their very essence, to be quoted and interpreted”. Benjamin himself has already said it, referring to Brecht: “The supreme aspiration that is attributed to writing is its citation”.1 This stylistic peculiarity plays a preponderant role in an essay © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67965-1_10

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like “The Storyteller”, which, according to Schöttker,2 is defined by “the lack of argumentative consistency. Instead of this, aphoristic formulations predominate, such as the one that refers to death as the presupposition of the narrative”. We are aware that these particularities might have led to, but never determined, a simplified reception of the essay, and that it would be unfair to reproach the author for the superficiality of some appropriations of his work. But it also seems necessary to go beyond idolatry and critically examine the theses formulated in “The Storyteller”. This involves—to use typically Benjaminian expressions and, perhaps, to make ourselves guilty of inappropriate citation—to extract the essay from the historical continuum and brush the polished surface of its exposition against the grain in order to notice some of its insufficiencies and contradictions. In the first place, it is convenient to draw attention to the provisional, tentative nature of an article that, for the author, did not offer a definitive formulation but, at most, the torso of the Theorie der epischen Formen (Theory of epic forms) that, finally, he did not get to write. Considering it as a kind of Exposé of a more ambitious work helps to account for the diversity of problems that, in the essay, receive a summary treatment, and that refer to concerns of the German thinker that are undoubtedly interrelated, but by no means identical. Thus, in the first place they can be tracked, in “The Storyteller”, traces of an attention to short narrative forms that go back to the context of the late 1920s. Secondly, elements of reflections on the crisis of the novel that have their most immediate origin in the debates generated, at the beginning of the thirties, around Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and the study by Döblin Der Bau des epischen Werks (The Construction of the epic Work, 1928). Finally, components of those considerations on the productivity of a conscious, “sentimental”— in the Schillerian sense—recovery of popular genres such as the fairy tale and the saga that appear in the 1934 essay on Kafka. It is as well important—also in the context of the reflection with Kafka’s work—the interest in the Hasidic tradition of exemplary stories, the Haggadah, as an ideal vehicle for doctrine (Hallakkah). The general thesis about the extinction of the ability to narrate as an effect of the decline of the traditional community (Gemeinschaft ) and the rise of the abstract industrial society is not an original contribution of this essay, but, in any case, an application of propositions recurrent in the German Kulturkritik of the early twentieth century. For such propositions we could find immediate antecedents in works frequented by Benjamin, such as Lukács’s Theory of the Novel

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(1914–1915, published as a book in 1920) or Kracauer’s early articles. The emphasis in “The Storyteller” stands out on the decline of experience, on the disappearance of wisdom (Weisheit ), on the expansion of periodicals and radio and, in general, on the decline of the artisanal mode of production. But these processes can at best be taken into account as preparatory instances—in a broad sense that Benjamin does not deal with justifying—of the moment indicated, at the beginning of the article, as the more or less precise death time of the art of narrating, namely: the outbreak of the First World War. Soldiers who returned after the war no longer had stories to tell: material and mechanical warfare would have silenced them. This is a cardinal element in the argumentation of “The Storyteller”: the daily capacity to tell stories is presented as the source from which all the great storytellers have drunk. The narrative is, for Benjamin, a basically oral activity, which as such would differ from the original textual nature of the novel. With this thesis is connected one of the main flaws of the essay: none of the authors mentioned as models for the art of traditional storytelling—Hebel, Gotthelf, Keller, Stevenson, Leskov—corresponds to the ideal model of oral communication advocated by Benjamin. It is curious that he does not resort to the heritage of popular narrative stricto sensu—the fairy tale, the saga or the legend, for example—and instead illusively attributes naiveté to a literature that, as it might be inferred from the named examples, presents the defining features of the “torn” Modernity. The cases of Hebel and Hauff are illustrative: in their Kunstmärchen it would only be possible to see a sentimental and ironic reading of the popular fairy tale (Volksmärchen), never the expression of a collective and anonymous desire to narrate. This striking confusion is linked to another: the essay does not make a distinction between popular forms of storytelling and the short novel (Novelle), which in essence belongs, as we will comment later, to the same individualistic universe as the novel. Benjamin’s argumentation contradicts these positions, as it is extracted, for example, from the assertion according to which the novel is distinguished “from all other forms of prose literature – the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella – is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor enters into it”.3 The “even” (ja selbst ) is, in the passage just quoted, the mark of bad consciousness: a faint hint of recognition that the Novelle is incongruous with the naiveté attributed to popular forms. The particularity of Benjamin’s approach to storytelling in general and Leskov’s work in particular becomes even more apparent when compared, as suggested by Honold4 and Schöttker,5 with

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the studies that Boris Eichenbaum dedicated to the work of the Russian narrator, in which it is shown to what extent what we find in Leskov is not a direct derivation of popular tradition, but a arduous and conscious effort to produce the illusion of oral narration; a procedure designated by the Russian formalists with the category of skaz.

2 Crisis and Transformations of the Novel and the Short Novel in Adorno and Kracauer It is suggestive that, in returning to the discussion about the crisis of narrative forms, intellectuals close to Benjamin have avoided the strategy of identifying the nineteenth-century short narrative with the traditional oral narrative. In his famous article “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel” (1954), Adorno circumscribes himself to the novelistic genre, which he conceives, following the footsteps of Hegel and Lukács, as a specific form of the bourgeois era. Born, with Don Quixote, from the early experiences with a disenchanted world, the modern novel would have been, during its period of consolidation, a genre to which realism was immanent, so that even the fantastic novel was forced to produce the suggestion of the real. Exposed to the crisis that, since the end of the nineteenth century, affected all aesthetic expressions, the novel, according to Adorno, departed from early objectivism to seek, through subjective means, an approach to the essence of reality, beyond the fetishized appearances: “If the novel wants to remain true to its realistic heritage and tell how things really are, it must abandon a realism that only aids the façade in its work of camouflage by reproducing it ”.6 Aimed at enhancing the validity of the novel, Adorno avoids references to other narrative forms, but some reticent allusions to his friend’s essay show a certain reluctance in the face of the siren’s song of the traditional narrative; the disenchanted world requires, to a greater and greater extent, a reader who is aware and sceptical of any ideal of naive and spontaneous storytelling that harks back to an age before the administrated society. An implicit criticism of Benjamin encloses the statement that “[n]otions like ‘sitting down with a good book’ are archaic. The reason for this lies not merely in the reader’s loss of concentration but also in the content and its form”.7 Adorno, who avoids any show of reverence for the beauty of a genre that is heading towards its decline, expressly highlights the merits

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of the specifically modern variants of the narrative. His essay leaves unanswered the question for the significance and validity of the short narrative, which falls outside his horizon of analysis. Kracauer had already dealt with this problem in a little-known article, published in 1930 under the title “Erschütterungen der literarischen Formen. Moderne Novellen” (“Disruptions of the literary Forms. Modern short novels”) and whose most immediate motivation is given by the appearance of a volume of narratives by Leo Perutz. Kracauer’s first purpose is to underline the inadequacy between the closed form of the Novelle and the contents chosen by the Prague writer, which do not easily conform to a scheme that would require concentration and coherence: “The short novel is a narration of events and, by the way, a narration that has been set to lead to a surprising climax. As a closed composition, the short novel has as its condition a closed society; it needs the horizon of firm concepts, types and actions”.8 The critic takes up here the thesis of the young Lukács (also recovered by Benjamin and Adorno) about the interrelation between the novel and bourgeois society and extends it to the short novel. At the base of the article, as in that of Kracauer’s other early aesthetic writings—for example, the “philosophical treatise” on the detective Novel (1925)—is the thesis on the process of secularization as one that stripped individuals of all absolute certainties on the material and ideological planes. The transcendental homelessness, mentioned by the young Lukács as a fundamental experience of modern man, is one of the leitmotifs that, like a red thread, run through Kracauer’s early work, and that reappear in the article we are commenting on. For example, when it is said that short novels like Perutz’s “could not be brittle if the bourgeoisie, from which they come, still had a weather resistant roof over their heads. The impossibility of complying with the formal law of the short novel is a clear sign of the disruption of the contemporary order”.9 Kracauer understands that it is not a lack of talent or artistic honesty that prevented the Austrian author from writing authentic Novellen, it is contemporary order or, better still, disorder that has ruined his attempts. The structural failure of Perutz’s short novels could be found in the drift of narrative action towards a psychological dimension that is alien, according to Kracauer, to the objectivism of the short novel: Although Perutz undoubtedly always complies with the form of the short novel by composing a connection of external events, he does not remain faithful to the required exteriority until the end. Instead, at the decisive

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moment, turns away from it and falls again in psychology, in the interiority. But precisely this cannot be a closure as required by the short novel.10

The problem that arises here is the question about the positive instances for the short story paradigm postulated by Kracauer. If in “The Storyteller” we found it objectionable that the examples mentioned did not conform to the model of oral narration proposed as paradigmatic, in “Moderne Novellen” we find it problematic that particular examples of “successful” short novels are not mentioned. Kracauer does not postulate a naive narrator, but instead appeals to the debatable strategy of questioning Perutz’s works in the name of a platonic, speculative model. Only that this model has the difficulty of being historically non-existent. Contrary to Kracauer’s, but also, fundamentally, to Benjamin’s proposals, we affirm that the short story and the novel share the circumstance of being genres that from their birth hour present the traits identified as typical of their time of decadence. And this is especially true for the German short novel. Since its genesis, it has dealt with thematization of the transcendental homelessness of modern man, with all its consequences: the state of general anomy, the depersonalization and anonymity, the inert submission under a social functioning independent of the will and action of individuals.

3

The Origins of the German Short Novel and the “transcendental Homelessness” of Modernity

The German short novel is a typically bourgeois genre; no matter how much the scholars want to look for antecedents in Albrecht von Eybs (1420–1475) or in Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1607–1658), its starting point is in German Classicism; above all, in Goethe’s Conversations of German Refugees (1795). Suggestively, it is a work aimed at characterizing the era inaugurated by the French Revolution as a time marked by the destruction of all traditional certainties and by the dissolution of community ties. Goethe harbours the conviction—expressed in multiple contexts—that the present age is no longer that of harmonious personalities, but that of collectives, but he also warns that the irresistibly expansionist tendency of Modernity and the propagation of the individualistic spirit incapacitate men to coordinate with the perspective of a common action. Known is the diagnosis stated in The Natural Daughter

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(1799–1803), according to which “The elements once fused in mighty life / No longer will reciprocally join / With force of love in unity renew’d / Continually. Scattering, forth they fly, / And each returns unto itself in coldness”.11 The narrative framework of the Conversations shows—on a reduced scale—such a state of anarchy, and as an antidote to it, a model of urban education (gesellige Bildung ) is proposed. The maxim stated by the old man in the “Fairy Tale” with which the Conversations are closed could be used as a synthesis of the Goethean proposal: “One alone can do but little, but he can avail who in the proper hour unites his strength with others”.12 From the fact that this statement appears in an artistic fairy tale (Kunstmärchen) it is inferred to what extent it refers to a utopian situation opposed to the real one. Something similar can be said of the harmonious, conciliatory but also chimerical ending of the late “Novelle” (1827). In Goethe’s description of his own time, stand out above all else images that refer to disintegration; Borchmeyer rightly pointed out that “the destroyed unity, the torn human solidarity has been for Goethe a fundamental painful experience of the French Revolution”.13 It is also capital in the writer the perception of the modern world as a process whose dynamics has become autonomous from the will of men, who appear relegated to the condition of spectators. The confession of the sorcerer’s apprentice at the end of the well-known ballad: “The spirits I summoned – / I can’t get rid of them”,14 fits in very well with the comment that Mephistopheles directs to the audience immediately before the start of the “Classic Walpurgis Night”: “The fact is, we remain dependent on / The creatures we ourselves have made”.15 We will return to this at the end. Goethe’s short narrative is traversed by these dilemmas. But this could be extended to the nineteenth-century German short novel in general. It is not a peculiarity of the classical and romantic periods, but rather a feature that can be seen also in the most representative works of the genre during the Restoration era (1815–1848) and the time of the founding of the Empire (1848–1890). Recurrent is the contrast between the present of the narrative—understood as a time of decadence—and an idealized time prior to the tearing. This description often leads to a questioning of the survival of the art of storytelling in a context marked by the disappearance of traditional culture. An extreme example of this is found in one of the most famous short novels in German literature: “The Story of the Brave Kasperl and the Beautiful Annerl” (1817), by Clemens Brentano, whose narrator questions not merely his own ability as writer,

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but the right to the existence of a cultured and professionalized literature. Ashamed of his own condition as a professional poet (Dichter von Profession) and critical of the French model of the homme de lettres, the narrator appeals to an organic simile to question all literature that has become an end in itself as a symptom of decadence: It is very easy to say to him: Lord, every man has in his body – in addition to the brain, heart, stomach, spleen and liver, etc. – a poetry. But whoever overfeeds and fattens one of those organs, and then develops it to outperform the others and even makes it his source of income, this guy has to be ashamed in front of the rest of his body. Those who make a living from poetry have lost their balance, and a goose liver that is too large, no matter how good its flavour, always makes one presume the existence of a sick goose.16

From the sentimental scepticism of a narrator who only manages to present himself as a scribe (Schreiber) differs the character of the old woman, who does not know the art of writing and reading, but in return possesses a narrative talent that is spontaneous and free from doubts. Wolfgang Frühwald pointed out that the character of the old woman functions as an embodiment of the Volkspoesie: “In the representations of the ancestral peasant all the vital fields are still integrated; poetry does not appear artistically problematized either, but rather it is one of those fundamental faculties of human existence that determine life”17 ; and Gerhard Kluge proposed simply to compare the relationship between the old woman and the first-person narrator with that drawn by Schiller between naive and sentimental poetry.18 In other words: in the face of the unshakable security that the old woman possesses on the aesthetic and the moral levels, the “professional poet” belongs to the era of transcendental homelessness, to the world abandoned by the hand of God—to use again the expression formulated by Lukács in his Theory of the Novel. The inclusion of elements from the fairy tale in the short novel tends to have an elegiac or utopian character: it opposes the present “evil” with a lost or desired naiveté. First of all because the hero of the fairy tale lacks the insecurity typical of a world in course of secularization, in which the short novel takes place. Constitutive of the latter is the absence of the community and the active hero, two capital components of the popular fairy tale (Volksmärchen). Max Lüthi wrote that the hero of this latter genre “travels and performs; he is not immobile given over to surprise,

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contemplation or brooding”.19 His lack of psychology is linked to this unproblematic character: the popular fairy tale does not describe “feelings and states of mind, internal conflicts and thought processes, but rather strives to translate everything into action”.20 If the hero of this genre goes out to travel the wide world with the security of arriving at the desired goal, the protagonists of the short novel are beings who seek (Suchende, according to Lukács’ expression). As in the novel, the contingent reality and the problematic hero are also defining elements of the short novel. A confirmation of these theses could be found in another of the canonical short novels of German literature, the Kunstmärchen “The Blond Eckbert” (1797). It will be remembered that the narrative framework of this narrative presents prosaic characters, whose way of life is marked by a typically (petty-)bourgeois individualism, alien to any ideal of community. At the beginning of the narration it is said that Eckbert lived locked up in his small castle and out of all contact with his neighbours, and that “[h]is wife loved quiet as much as he”.21 There was in Eckbert a longing for friendship; hence, when “he was alone, was observed to be reserved and melancholy.”22 Anticipating the Kafkaesque characters, Eckbert experiences both a desire for solitude and a longing for a happy social life. Hence the ambivalence between the effort to protect their secrets and the impulse to find a friend to communicate them to: There are hours in every man’s life in which, if he has a secret from his friend, he becomes suddenly in labour with it, and what before he may have taken the greatest pains to conceal, he now feels an irresistible impulse to throw out of himself – to lay bare the whole burden of his heart, that it may form a new link to bind his friend to him. Friendship ebbs and flows, and is subject to singular influences. There are moments of violent repulsion; there are others when every barrier is dissolved, and spirits flow together and mingle into one.23

Readers of this short novel know how frustrated the protagonists’ desire to establish effective human contact is. In any case, the narrative offers a counterpoint to this prosaic setting through the narrative of Bertha, the protagonist’s wife, whose story—precisely the secret that Eckbert feared to share—comprises diverse motifs from the fairy tale. It might be thought that through this the disenchanted present receives a positive compensation; however, it is striking how this short novel, situated at the beginning of the German evolution of the genre (this Novelle was written

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only two years after the Conversations by Goethe), constructs a marvellous setting devoid of any comforting naiveté. Brittnacher appropriately described the true investment of the Volksmärchen that Bertha’s story has: To the hero of the fairy tale, his destiny leads him directly to his goal, going through all kinds of confusion and risks: he does not know the terrors of disorientation, since the entire world of the fairy tale has been cut to suit him. Through Bertha’s world, however, there is no leading path, not even out of that world. Unlike a naive, non-psychological character in the fairy tale, who does not feel her isolation as such, Bertha experiences social deprivation as an existential failure.24

Something similar can be said of Eckbert, who, in his mediocrity, “is rather the representative of the new age. Scepticism and doubt displaced confidence in the strength and blessing of the archaic”.25 On the other hand, “the lonely Eckbert of Modernity lacks the community of the archaic hero”26 of the saga, and isolation and passivity make him the quintessential incarnation of the problematic hero: a model usually associated with the novel form.

4 Indifferentiation Crisis and Absence of a Binding Ethos: The Short Novel of the Restoration The exclamation of the character at the end of “The Blond Eckbert”, “to what dreadful loneliness have I then led my life”,27 is valid as a synthesis of the general condition of the characters of the German short novel since its beginnings: it is the vital crisis experienced by the characters of Kleist and Schiller, of Hoffmann and Arnim, of Keller and Fontane, of Storm and Raabe. It is, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the typical experience of Tonio Kröger and Gustav Aschenbach. The centrality of this atmosphere of universal relativism is such that it dominates even in those central works of the genre in which scepticism is mitigated by a utopian hope induced by the appearance of motifs typical of the fairy tale, the legend or the romance. This can be clearly seen in some canonical short novels of the Restoration Era. An outstanding example could be “The Black Spider” (1842), by Gotthelf, whose optimistic ending does not hide the threat of an evil that has been confined, but not eliminated; an evil

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that precisely consists in the propagation of the individualistic spirit, which undermines community principles. It is striking that the situation created by the proliferation of spiders and the death of the priest—representative and guarantor of the patriarchal ordo—in the second story is a state of general confusion, identifiable with the mimetic crisis analysed by René Girard: in the community in which the narrative takes place, everyone mistrusts everyone. Correlatively, the spider is everywhere and nowhere, and apparently dispenses with social distinctions: “It spared neither the infant in the cradle nor the old man in his deathbed; it was a plague more deadly than any that had been known before, and it was a form of death more terrible than any that has been previously experienced”,28 and what was still “more terrible than the dead-agony was the nameless fear of the spider which was everywhere and nowhere and which would suddenly be fixing its death-dealing stare on someone when he fancied that he was more secure”.29 We cannot explain here to what extent the fear of mimetic crisis as an undifferentiation crisis is one of the recurring topics of the German Novelle. It is enough to refer, as a parallel case, to “The Jew’s Beech” (1842), by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. In this Novelle, the old community of B. is characterized as a town in which commerce and industry had not yet developed, where everyone knew each other and in which the little world was so closed in itself that any individual who moved away a few miles would run the risk of becoming a new Ulysses. The appearance of a gang of criminals, the Blue-Smocks (Blaukittel ), introduces in the town a state of undifferentiation comparable to that which, in Gotthelf’s work, spiders generated: In direct contrast to the usual state of affairs, when the leaders of the flock can be pointed out, it had not been possible on this occasion, in spite of every vigilance, to name even a single individual. They received their name from the identically uniform dress, by which they made it difficult for them to be recognised if a forester should see a few isolated stragglers disappearing into a thicket.30

There are several significant details in this passage. The first is the indifferentiating factor imposed by the use of the uniform; the second, the state of universal mistrust imposed by the modus operandi of the band; the third, the fact that this inability to distinguish an individual within the herd (and the metaphor is itself suggestive) is contrasted with the usual state of affairs. It is important that these problems appear configured in

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a work in which it is difficult to identify positive figures, whose narrator is extremely reticent and in which there is no authentic dialogue between the characters—as has been pointed out, a good part of the conversations consists of ostensible or covert interrogations.31 We could easily multiply the examples; the important thing is to reaffirm what many examples can confirm: the German short novel is the expression of confusion in the face of a Modernity devoid of a binding ethos and in perpetual instability. We cannot subscribe to Winfried Freund’s thesis according to which the short novel has a greater contemporaneity than the novel, insofar as it is his task to elaborate failure in the face of what happens in a constant and an uncontrollable way. But credit should be given to his claim that the short novel is a mirror of the modern consciousness of being subjected to overwhelming, largely uncontrollable processes and of being exposed to them. The Novelle moves the man from the role of agent to that of victim; it does not show an action directed towards the outside or towards the inner self of the decentered man, but the human passio and the annihilating pressure of processes experienced anonymously. In times of increasing anomia, of man’s displacement from the centre of action, of the dominance of products, and in historical phases of threatening catastrophes, the short novel has its place as a literary fiction about a potential or an actual failure.32

If we subtract the apocalyptic despair tone from this passage, we can see in it a more accurate perspective than we find in such outstanding critics as Benjamin or Kracauer. The identification of the Novelle with an oral narrator—traditional, naïve—, or with a generic Idealtypus characterized by the construction of an objective and closed action does not allow to account for the specificity of the most important works of the genre, nor of its permanence in time. On the other hand, the neoclassical representation (curiously supported by Kracauer) of the closed form has the difficulty, often attributed to the classifications by Todorov, of not being appropriate for more than a very small number of works and, on the other hand, of not conforming to fundamental works of the genre. Theodor Storm may have called the Novelle the sister of drama and the most rigorous form of literary prose, but this definition has no greater general validity for the early narratives of Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre and Cervantes than for those of the German-language literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Storm himself. The thesis on

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the death of the short novel, on the other hand, is difficult to admit in a corner of the world such as Latin America, where, during the twentieth century, such storytellers as Borges and Bioy Casares, Cortázar and Felisberto Hernández, composed works closer to the “classical” form of the Novelle than to presumably more current models, such as the Kurzgeschichte. I am afraid that this is another argument to sustain the validity of the genre.

Notes 1. Scholem, Gershom, Walter Benjamin und sein Engel. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1983, p. 35. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of foreign-language quotations are the author’s. 2. Schöttker, Detlev, “Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows ”. Lindner, Burkhardt (ed.), Benjamin Handbuch. Leben—Werk— Wirkung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2006, pp. 557–566; p. 561 cit. here. 3. Benjamin, Walter, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”. Transl. by Harry Zohn. Selected Writings. Volume 3. (1935– 1938). Ed. by Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 143–166; p. 146 cited here. The italics are ours. 4. Honold, Alexander, “Erzählen”. Opitz, Michael / Wizisla, Erdmut (eds.), Benjamins Begriffe. 2 vols. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2000, vol. I, pp. 363–398; p. 391 cited here. 5. Schöttker, Detlev, “Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows ”, p. 559. 6. Adorno, Theodor W., “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel”. Notes to Literature. Transl. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, vol. 1, pp. 30–36; p. 32 cited here. 7. Ibid., p. 31. 8. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Erschütterungen der literarischen Formen. Moderne Novellen”. Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. 9 vols. Vol. 5.3: Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen (1928–1931). Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach with the collaboration of Sabine Biebl et al. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2011, pp. 301–305; p. 301 cit. here. 9. Ibid., p. 304. 10. Ibid., pp. 301 et sq. 11. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, The Natural Daughter. Collected Works. 5 vols. Philadelphia: G. Barrie, 1885, vol. 2. p. 287 (Act V, scene 8). 12. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, The Recreation of the German Emigrants. Collected Works, vol, 5, p. 61.

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13. Borchmeyer, Dieter, “Weimarer Klassik und Französische Revolution. Goethes und Schillers Freundschaft. Dichtung, Ästhetik, Kulturtheorie”. Žmegaˇc, Viktor (ed.), Geschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Vol. I/2. Königstein: Athenäum, 1979, pp. 1–56; p. 5 cited here. 14. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, The Book of Lieder. Chosen, Transl. and introd. by Richard Stokes. Foreword by Ian Bostridge. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. 15. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust I & II. Ed. and Transl. by Stuart Atkins. With a new Foreword by David E. Wellbery. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 179 (Faust II , Act II, vv. 7003f.). 16. Brentano, Clemens, “Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl”. Werke. Ed. by Friedhelm Kemp. 4 vols. Munich: Hanser, 1968, vol. 2, pp. 774–806; p. 782 cit. here. 17. Frühwald, Wolfgang, “Die Ehre der Geringen. Ein Versuch zur Sozialgeschichte literarischer Texte im 19.Jahrhundert”. Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissenschaft 8/1 (1983), pp. 69–86; p. 76 cited here. 18. Kluge, Gerhard, “Brentano: Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und von schönen Annerl ”. Münz, Walter et al., Erzählungen und Novellen des 19.Jahrhunderts. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1988, pp. 309–337; vol I, p. 327 cited here. 19. Lüthi, Max, Es war einmal. Vom Wesen des Volkmärchens. 4th revised ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973, p. 34. 20. Ibid., p. 93. 21. Tieck, Ludwig, Select Works. Tales from the “Phantasus”, etc. London: Robson, Levey, and Franklin, 1845, p. 1. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., p. 2. 24. Brittnacher, Hans Richard, Ästhetik des Horrors. Gespenster, Vampire, Monster, Teufel und künstliche Menschen in der phantastischen Literatur. Frankfurt /M: Suhrkamp, 1994, p. 31. 25. Ibid., p. 39. 26. Ibid. 27. Due to the difficulties of the English version, we have had to offer our own translation here. 28. Gotthelf, Jeremias, “The Black Spider”. Transl. by H. M. Waidson. Sammons, Jeffrey L. (ed.), German Novellas of Realism. New York: Continuum, 1989, pp. 133–213; p. 188 cited here. 29. Ibid. 30. Droste-Hülshoff, Annette Freiin von, “The Jew’s Beeck”. Transl. by Lionel and Doris Thomas. Sammons, Jeffrey L. (ed.), German Novellas of Realism, pp. 88–132; pp. 103 et sq. cited here.

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31. Benno von Wiese says about the conversation between Friedrich and the forester: “Here, too, the situation in the dialogue becomes dramatic, here again a hidden, deliberately insincere dialogue, a question and answer game that has an interrogation-like character and the climax of which is a lie threatening the life of the forester. With Droste, conversations are not bridges from person to person, but almost always - at least in ‘The Jew’s Beech’ - immersed in an atmosphere of disaster” (Wiese, Benno von, “Annette von Droste-Hülshoff: Die Judenbuche”. Die deutsche Novellevon Goethe bis Kafka. Interpretationen. 2 vols. Düsseldorf: August Bagel, 1956, vol. 1, pp. 154–175; p. 166 cit. here). 32. Freund, Winfried, Novelle. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1988, p. 62.

The Historian in the Anteroom: Configurations of the Intellectual in the Late Discussions Between Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor W. Adorno

1

Adorno’s Role as a Cultural Mediator

In a letter to Adorno dated April 1, in which he comments to his youth friend about the recent appearance of an article by Joachim Günther on the compilation of essays The Mass Ornament (1964), Kracauer observes: “It is interesting that young critics recall, once and again, the affinity among you, Benjamin, Bloch and me. For them, we make up a group that outstands against the background of our times”.1 Uneasy with the way Günther presents his essays from the 1920s and 1930s to the German reading public, Kracauer comments: “I find it interesting and weird to notice the aspect we –who know each other from within – show outwards”.2 In the eyes of an author concerned, beyond his proverbial withdrawal, in tracing the way in which his own image as an intellectual was being interpreted and spread in post-Second-World-War Germany, the strategy discovered in Günther and also in some younger critics who could not see first-hand the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic and the early years of Nazism must have contained both a benefit and a risk. On the one hand, the approach to the aforementioned thinkers

Translation from the Spanish by Cecilia E. Lasa. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67965-1_11

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could not help but represent a convenient letter of introduction for a writer who, in Germany, had fallen into relative oblivion during the years of exile; on the other, the congregation of the different authors in only one group had to instil, in an individualist as radical as Kracauer, the fear of a pernicious homologation of the different perspectives. It is, on this ground, explicable that he frequently attempts, in his late writings, to define his own stances by setting the limits that separate them from Adorno’s, Benjamin’s or Bloch’s. The fact that, above all, Kracauer was interested in clarifying his agreements and disagreements with Adorno is in itself explainable: in part, because there existed between them a more prolonged and intense personal relationship than the one the author of The Salaried Masses had kept up with the other two thinkers. But above all because of the position that Adorno had been occupying, in German public opinion, since the early 1960s. The intense academic activity, the publication of his books in large print runs, the frequent interventions in the press and on the radio, had earned the Frankfurt philosopher a success comparable, at some point, with that achieved by Kracauer in his times as a writer and editor of the Feuilleton of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Favoured, for the first time, by such a position of authority, Adorno takes up, during the last decade of his life, the role of the mediator between German readers and the works of authors close to him in biographical and intellectual terms. The lectures, essays and radio talks in which Adorno devoted himself to the task of drawing silhouettes of the thinkers indicated in the abovementioned letter from Kracauer provide testimony to this. We could mention as examples, in the case of Bloch, the articles “Ernst Bloch’s Spuren” (1960) “The Handle, the Pot and Early Experience” (1965); in Benjamin’s, “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin” (1950), “Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften” (1955) or “Benjamin the Letter Writer” (1966). In all these cases, Adorno performs the valuable function of awakening or reviving the interest for these thinkers, but he also contributes to consolidating—in the case of Benjamin, above all—a strongly biased image: those features in keeping with the philosophical and political points of view of the Institute for Social Research outdo divergent aspects, which are relegated or harshly criticized. The articles by Helmut Heißenbüttel and Werner Kraft as well as—to a higher degree—the controversy in Alternative about Adorno’s (disputed) appropriation of Benjamin’s legacy reveal the extent to which Adorno’s sharp cut could be experienced as an act of violence.

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In the case of Kracauer, Adorno’s double-faced strategy is particularly clear. It is undeniable that he has fulfilled a major function for the German edition (or reedition) of Kracauer’s works—beginning with the now classic compilation of essays The Mass Ornament (1964)—, and that with his lecture “The curious realist. On Siegfried Kracauer” (1964) helped to reinstall the figure of the German essayist. But this had to see, in the silhouette traced by his old friend, an image in which only with difficulty and reluctance he could recognize himself. In fact, in “The Curious Realist” Adorno highlights some of the most idiosyncratic features of Kracauer as a writer. His healthy scepticism towards totalizing systems and, in general, the idealistic philosophical tradition is praised, and his main achievements—the novel Ginster, the study on The Salaried Masses —are positively weighed. But this eulogy has as its counterpart a criticism that hints at much more than it explicitly states, but which is essentially defined by its causticity and harshness and even, at times, by its intransigence in the face of a diverse style of life and thought. According to Adorno, the central motif in Kracauer’s work is the incommensurability (Inkommensurabilität ) between idea and existence, linked to the certainty that the last should be kept free of all subjection at the hands of the former. In this radical materialist, the commitment to safeguarding the autonomy of particular bodies and objects from the violence of the concept—in other words: the obsession with consummating the redemption of the physical reality—may have meant a movement towards a contemplative position, totally unfavourable to dialectic thinking. Kracauer “hardly felt a need for strict mediation within the thing itself, the need to demonstrate the essential within the innermost core of particularity”.3 Incapable of breaking with the phenomena, he 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 unalterable”.4 Convinced of the vileness of human society, Kracauer’s conscience would have given itself over to the veneration of things. The state of happy childlike innocence “would be the condition of needy objects, shabby, despised objects alienated from their purposes. For Kracauer they alone embody something that would be other than the universal functional complex”.5 This fascination for things, and above all for the most neglected and abandoned ones, would be at the base of that devotion to low culture that the author of Theory of Film shares with Bloch, and that for Adorno contains the danger of capitulation to the siren’s song of the culture industry.

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New Feuerbach, Kracauer thus appears, in Adorno’s view, as someone who, faced with the dilemma of experience or theory, chooses to make a definitive decision in favour of the first, thus renouncing the dialectical movement and confining himself to the position of the observer fascinated by the object. Insidiously, Kracauer’s passivity—his alleged inability to transcend the inaccessible immanence of things—appears linked, in Adorno, with a slowness and a neatness that would induce Kracauer to place, with painstaking care, one link after another, even in those cases where the movement of thought can dispense with these intermediate links.

2 Dialectics or Ontology? the Discussion at the Sonnenheim Hotel The background of these observations is a vital divergence that runs through the letters between the two thinkers, and by virtue of which Adorno’s impetuous speed of thought and writing contrasts with the slow pace of work of Kracauer, who sees himself, comparatively, as someone who only manages to advance at a snail’s pace. This criticism was expressed more abruptly than in the third volume of the Notes to Literature in the original version of the lecture, published in the Neue Deutsche Hefte, where, appealing to a neologism, the author of The Salaried Masses was attributed an exorable reflection (erbittliches Nachdenken), contrasted with the inexorability (Unerbittlichkeit ) of the emphatic theory (emphatische Theorie) put forward by Adorno. Such criticism may trigger diverse considerations and reactions. In any case, any connoisseur of Kracauer’s writings may object that the critique of immobility is inadequate when directed at a thinker whose work possesses, as one of its central motives, a radical aversion to everything that is immobile and stationary. Kracauer devotes his restless attention, fundamentally, to a reality in movement: hence his sceptical attitude towards any kind of dogma. In this regard, he had to be bothered by a characterization that, like Adorno’s, made an effort to imprison him within the straitjacket of a predetermined scheme. It comes as no surprise that he should identify, in “The Curious Realist”, a combination of a direct knowledge, based on their old friendship, and a distanced interpretation, instigated by the “inexorable” thought frenzy of the emphatic theorist. Adorno’s reflections on Kracauer’s late positions and works emerge as “a construction that, in fact, appears from a certain distance

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and derives from your own premises of thought, instead of doing justice to the given matter”.6 The reluctance to ponder the individual qualities of the sketched person oppose late Kracauer’s interest to fostering tact as a way of extreme consideration towards the particularities of the others; in Barnouw’s words, tact for Kracauer means putting oneself in the place of the other and anticipating what might hurt – that is, diminish the other’s presence – or what might please – that is, enhance it. Tact means not presuming the other’s innermost truth and thereby defining, fixating her by letting her be present in relation to others.7

Adorno’s “lack of tact” betrays less the portrayed subject’s physiognomy than his own. Kracauer makes reference to it when he tells his friend: “from your construction of my figure […] yours became clearer to me; your vision of me allows me to see you more clearly”.8 In that very same letter Kracauer asks himself whether he should draw, as an answer, Adorno’s sketch. To the extent that the project did not materialize, it would be appropriate to ask what image had drawn Kracauer of the personal and intellectual idiosyncrasy of Adorno. The strongest bases to recover this image are in some notes where Kracauer summarizes a discussion held with Adorno on August 12th, 1960 in the Sonnenheim Hotel. Substantial in them is not only the characterization of the author of Minima Moralia, but also the way in which his friend delimits, based on such characterization, his own positions. In a synthetic (and, certainly, simplified) way, the discussion is exposed as an opposition between dialectic and ontology. Anticipating his article that will appear four years later, Adorno emerges here challenging Kracauer’s “naive materialism”, supposedly based on obsolete, ontological habits of thought. He puts forward an infinite dialectics, that penetrates all the concrete objects and entities and, while going through them, undertakes a process that does not have a goal exterior to its own movement, not direction different from the one immanent to itself. The feeling of vertigo that the Adornian dialectics—immaterial, infinite—provokes in Kracauer, is due to the fact that he would not have perceived the general vision that “is accessible only to those who have absorbed his production in its entirety”.9 On the contrary, Kracauer thinks that, “considering that such dialectics is an infinite sequence of concrete moments, one may guess that each moment must be interpreted in depth, the total sum of those moments

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is unattainable”.10 It is telling, in view of the idiosyncrasy of the author of Theory of Film, that this should compare the infinite dialectics of his “rival” with a film made up exclusively of close-ups: such a piece of work would be absolutely confusing for the spectators unless these close-ups alternated occasionally with long shots related with our everyday life and that, in this way, define their respective positions. Those situation shots result from ontological postulates that allow us to place and materially anchor the dialectic movement. It is in this regard that Kracauer’s positions are similar to Benjamin’s: the way in which the latter founded his analyses of concrete entities on messianic visions saturated with utopian content is akin to Kracauer’s determination to found his historical reflection on an ontological basis: neither of them accepts Adorno’s immanent dialectics. Adorno, moreover, insists on reducing the ideological dimension to the sociological one, for which he sees in ideologies only their character of false consciousness, and is, on the other hand, reluctant to recognize their positive aspect, linked to material practices and, above all, to the utopian perspectives of societies. Adorno is capable of taking back the aesthetic or conceptual characteristics of an entity to the social situation from which this entity arises, but “he does it in such a way that he unequivocally reveals his utter disinterest in the material nature of society – past and present – and in the means of improving our social condition”.11 Hence, the concept of utopia appears in Adorno only as a limit concept that, in the end, is introduced as a deus ex machina, whereas, for Kracauer, utopian thinking only makes sense if it takes the form of a vision or intuition with a defined content. In terms akin to Marx’s criticism to the Neo-Hegelians of the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Kracauer sees in Adorno a late exponent of such speculative philosophy that aims to transform the world from the idea, isolating itself from human material praxis and from the beliefs and perspectives of the masses. In this sense—and although such an idea does not occur to Kracauer—the author of Negative Dialectics could deserve an accusation of anachronism consistent with the one he directed against his friend. The distance from the Lebenswelt allows one to identify its mutilation, but not the ways of subverting it; in Kracauer’s view, Adorno emerges as the spirit of Eternal Negation, and it is suggestive that he paraphrases the verses of Faust immediately after the one we have just quoted to say that, from the Adornian perspective, as from the Mephistophelic,

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all that gains existence is only fit to be devoured in the dialectical process that Teddie keeps in constant motion because of his lack of substance, of vision. For him, dialectics is a tool to preserve his superiority over all imaginable opinions, points of view, tendencies and events by means of dissolving, condemning, or rescuing them as he pleases. Thus, he positions himself as the lord and controller of a world that he never absorbed. For if he had absorbed at least fragments of it, his dialectic would stop at some point. The way the things are, this dialectics reflects, from a sociological perspective, a world emptied of beliefs and attachments.12

In keeping with this protocol, the correspondence reveals that Kracauer’s disagreements with the concept of cultural industry created by Adorno have not so much to do with the positions of principle on which such a concept is based, as with the poverty of content.13

3

Sancho’s Perspective: The Historian and the Philosopher in History. The Last Things Before the Last

The relevance that all this discussion had for Kracauer can be appreciated in his posthumous work on historiography, about whose composition, curiously, only superficial mentions are found in the correspondence. Among the diverse objectives pursued by the author of the work, there is that of delimiting his own—imprecise—space for reflection from the “emphatic philosopher’s”: it is already so due to the fact that the book is not only in charge of specifying the specific domain of history compared to the neighbouring ones that occupy the abstract sciences, art and literature or mere opinion, but also—and above all—to the field of philosophical speculation. The subtitle of the book—The Last Things before the Last—precisely highlights that the historian devotes his attention, not to the last things that concern philosophy, but to the penultimate ones, which are in a sort of anteroom: “as viewed from the lofty regions of philosophy, the historian devotes himself to the last things before the last, settling in an area which has the character of an anteroom (Yet it is this “anteroom” in which we breathe, move, and live.)”.14 If it is true that, as Barnouw claims, Kracauer is in the habit of putting between parentheses issues that were to him of the greatest importance,15 we should devote special attention to the end of the aforementioned passage: it states that the atmosphere in which the historian moves and works is the

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Lebenswelt —“life in its fullness, life as we commonly experience it”.16 As such, it differs from the impalpable nature ascribed to objects of philosophical consideration. As the camera-reality, the historical reality is partly modelled, partly amorphous and consequently shows the half-cooked state of our everyday world. Ethereally elevated above this, philosophy faces dilemmas everytime it elaborates historical matter from above; particularly, the dilemma involved in trying to reconcile the relativity of our historical knowledge—a consequence of the historicity of the human condition—with the search for primordial truths, of universal validity. The two solutions, which represent a false alternative for Kracauer, are, on the one hand, transcendentalism, which, adhering to secularized theological concepts and remnants of the metaphysics of the past, supports the possibility of timeless truths and sustains a realm of values and absolute norms; on the other, immanentism, which, from a relativistic perspective, rejects all ontological postulates, outright denies the existence of timeless truths and, placing itself in the immanence of the historical process, leads historicity to its ultimate logical consequences. Both trends have traditions of important thinkers, but Kracauer focuses his attention on the two exponents closest in time: Karl Löwith and Adorno. Löwith’s philosophy of history represents an escape into ontological trascendentalism. As far as Adorno’s immanentism is concerned, History. The Last Things before the Last reproduces to a great extent—verbatim sometimes—the criticism as has been framed in the protocol of discussion in Sonnenheim Hotel: the objections to the evanescence of the concept of utopia, the postulation of an infinite dialectics deprived of ontological substance, the lack of attention to the “mere” empirical world and the contingencies of history. Against the violent intervention on materials that Adornian philosophy implies, Kracauer insists on the virtues of a participant observation: a method that he had already applied in an exemplary way in The Salaried Masses , and that we can condense in a statement made in an article from 1930: “the empirical facts demand to be interpreted from within and not to be deduced from above. They only speak to the one who really face them”.17 Such an attitude, which still persists in History, requires from the historian a parsimony such as that which Adorno deplores in Kracauer; the latter, moreover, felt as attracted to slowness as to detours and digressions, in which he saw expressed the only genuine form of respect for the discontinuous nature of the historical and material universe. In a letter

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to Robert Merton, in which he highlights the parallelism between his perspectives and the American sociologist’s, he compliments him for his. insistent love of digression, the feeling you give one that the whole matter is inhexhaustible […] your concern with discontinuities and possibilities which never came true – all of this couldn not do more justice to the stuff of which history is woven.18

It is characteristic that, in History, the path of the historian is compared with that of the digressive narrator of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: just as Tristram does not manage to carry his story beyond his childhood, since “there is so much to tell, so much to look into […] it is impossible for any historian following him ever to reach Loretto”.19 The structure of History keeps a bit of this sinuous, slow, nonlinear advance: if, as Agard says, Kracauer’s ideal is that of a journey that doesn’t get anywhere; if the itinerary of this nomadic intellectual is, like Burckhardt’s, that of “an indolent pilgrim who […] never penetrated […] into the very temple of thought but all his life was content to entertain himself in the courts and halls of the Peribolos, being content to think in images”,20 are then understandable both the determination to prioritize the path over the goal and to remain in the anteroom of the ultimate truths. Adorno writes that Kracauer has always stubbornly taken Sancho’s side. Our last quotation derives from the last section in History, tellingly entitled “Sancho Panza”: based on Kafka’s variation on Cervantes’ (anti)hero, Kracauer puts forward his own utopia, that of an in-between, a terra incognita placed in the hollows between the lands we know. The German thinker’s focus is on everything that is “‘genuine’, hidden in the interstices between dogmatized beliefs of the world, thus establishing tradition of the lost causes, giving names to the hitherto unnamed”.21 So curious is Kracauer’s realism.

Notes 1. Adorno, Theodor W. / Kracauer, Siegfried, Briefwechsel 1923–1966. “Der Riß der Welt geht auch durch mich”. Published by the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, ed. by Wolfgang Schopf. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2008, pp. 658 et sq. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of foreign-language quotations are the author’s. 2. Ibid., p. 659.

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3. Adorno, Theodor W., “The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer”. Notes to Literature. Transl. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, vol. 2, pp. 58–75; p. 63 cited here. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., p. 75. 6. Adorno, Theodor W. / Kracauer, Siegfried, Briefwechsel 1923–1966, p. 671 (letter from October 15th 1964). 7. Barnouw, Dagmar, Critical Realism. History, Photography and the Work of Siegfried Kracauer. Baltimore, etc.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, p. 160. 8. Adorno, Theodor W. / Kracauer, Siegfried, Briefwechsel 1923–1966, p. 670. 9. Ibid., p. 514. 10. Ibid., p. 515. 11. Ibid., p. 517. 12. Ibid. 13. Cf. the letter dating from January 16th 1964, in which Kracauer states that his disagreements with Adorno’s ideas are not based on his position, which seems to him “totally legitimate”, but on its contents: “It would be great for you to research again and exhaustibly construct one of the new developments of the cultural industry –for example, the travel racket. The unavoidable increase in the quantity of the cultural industry also leads to, possibly, the adoptions of new qualities. I have myself made some observations about it, given my ‘curious realism’” (ibid., p. 640). 14. Kracauer, Siegfried, History. The Last Things Before the Last. Completed after the author’s death by Paul Oskar Kristeller. Princeton, NJ: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 1994, p. 195. 15. Barnouw, Dagmar, Critical Realism, p. 164. 16. Kracauer, Siegfried, History. The Last Things Before the Last, p. 58. 17. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Presse und öffentliche Meinung”. Werke. Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke. 9 vols. Vol. 5.3: Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen (1928–1931). Ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach with the collaboration of Sabine Biebl et al. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2011, pp. 340–344; p. 341 cited here. 18. Letter dating from March 16th 1966; qtd. in Barnouw, Dagmar, Critical Realism, p. 154. 19. Kracauer, Siegfried. Kracauer, Siegfried, History. The Last Things Before the Last, p. 190. 20. Ibid., p. 217. 21. Ibid., p. 219.

Bibliography

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Index

A academization, 6 Adorno, Theodor W., 2, 4, 11, 13, 19, 21, 43, 56, 59, 62, 63, 65, 66, 72, 79, 80, 85, 101, 102, 105, 108, 120–122, 124, 130, 143, 144, 172, 181, 183, 191, 198, 199, 207, 211–220 aestheticization, 93, 110 Agamben, Giorgio, 6 Agard, Olivier, 26, 34, 35, 40, 52, 59, 61, 67, 79, 85, 93, 97–99, 103, 107, 111, 121, 122, 142, 153, 160, 169, 171, 185, 188, 192, 193, 219 allegory, 47–49, 57, 71, 73, 104, 175, 178, 179, 184, 186, 189 analogy, 28, 31, 51, 103, 104, 117, 159 Andersen, Hans Christian, 151 Andersson, Dag T., 140, 145 anomy, 200 apokatastasis , 193

Arcades, 4, 77, 162, 165 Arendt, Hannah, 20 Arnim, Achim von, 204 aura, 78, 175, 189, 193 avant-garde, 171, 179 awakening, 11, 12, 104, 162, 165, 212

B Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 163 Balázs, Béla, 151 Balzac, Honoré de, 159 Barnouw, Dagmar, 102, 118, 121, 124, 132, 143, 215, 217, 220 Baroque, 47–49, 56, 57, 61, 71, 73, 178, 179, 181, 185, 186 Barthes, Roland, 6, 21 Baudelaire, Charles, 77, 84, 89, 98, 127, 176, 178, 179, 186–188, 193 Beaumont, Francis, 150 Beauvoir, Simone de, 20

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67965-1

231

232

INDEX

Belforte, María E., 190 Benjamin, Stefan, 165 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 19–21, 34, 38, 58, 61, 66, 80, 84, 97, 98, 111, 123, 127, 142, 144, 145, 151, 161, 170, 172, 173, 175, 189, 190, 192, 193, 195, 207, 212 Bergson, Henri, 185 Berlin, 6, 29, 30, 66–70, 73, 78, 122, 150, 162, 168, 175, 176, 181 big city, 3, 30, 68, 102, 104 Bildungsroman, 42, 51, 201 Blanqui, Auguste, 179 Bloch, Ernst, 2, 4, 6, 8, 11, 43, 44, 59, 66, 87, 102, 108, 109, 122, 136, 138, 140, 151–153, 156, 164, 169, 211–213 Bohème, 89, 90, 179, 180 Bolsonaro, Jair, 97 bonapartism, 84 Borchmeyer, Dieter, 201, 208 boredom, 182–186, 191 Borges, Jorge Luis, 77, 78, 81, 207 Börne, Ludwig, 128, 129, 139 bourgeoisie, 40, 42, 60, 72, 73, 89, 95, 97, 137, 154, 156, 176, 180, 186, 199 Brecht, Bertolt, 8, 17, 56, 86, 98, 114, 133, 134, 138, 140, 141, 144, 167, 168, 177, 181, 195 Brentano, Clemens, 201, 208 Brittnacher, Richard, 204, 208 Brueghel, Pieter, 57 Buber, Martin, 149, 150, 169 Buck-Morss, Susan, 16, 165, 172, 178, 190 Burckhardt, Jacob, 107, 108, 219 Butler, Judith, 6 Butzer, Günter, 193 C Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 150

camera-reality, 218 Céline, Louis Ferdinand, 25, 44 Cervantes, Miguel de, 15, 206, 219 Chamisso, Adalbert von, 147 Chaplin, Charles, 18, 26, 45, 60, 73, 74, 115, 141, 156, 187 childhood, 74, 107, 159, 161, 162, 164, 167, 168, 177, 219 Chomsky, Noam, 6 civilization, 30, 66, 68, 182, 183 collectivism, 42, 54, 55, 108, 120, 137 commitment, 8, 10, 118, 128, 129, 138, 178, 189, 213 communism, 89, 91, 134, 138, 148 community, 8, 12, 26–28, 30, 31, 40–42, 54, 55, 67, 70, 103, 115, 116, 131, 134, 149, 150, 182, 184, 196, 200, 202–205 Congdon, Lee, 149, 169 consciousness, 4, 7, 9, 11, 17, 104, 112–114, 117, 129, 139, 141, 153, 164, 182, 206 conspirateurs de profession, 90, 179 Coutinho, Carlos Nelson, 16 Craver, Harry T., 105, 122 critic-intellectual, 5, 6, 19, 128, 129 criticism, 2, 3, 6–10, 12, 16, 18, 31–33, 37, 43, 67, 73, 107, 108, 116, 129, 133, 135, 140, 143, 158, 172, 176–178, 191, 198, 213, 214, 216, 218 culture, 3, 6, 17, 26, 30, 40–42, 57, 70, 79, 87, 88, 96, 106, 115, 120, 132, 139, 151, 182, 186, 201, 213 cunning, 60, 152–154, 162, 163, 165–167 D danse macabre, 58, 95 Debord, Guy, 96

INDEX

de-familiarization, 11, 104 degenerate art, 94 Deleuze, Gilles, 6 democracy, 38 Derrida, Jacques, 6 Despoix, Philippe, 34, 35, 108, 121–123, 142 detective fiction, 102 dialectics, 13, 14, 17, 91, 114, 117, 120, 165, 177, 181, 213, 215–218 Dickens, Charles, 159 Diderot, Denis, 139, 140, 145 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 118 Döblin, Alfred, 132, 135, 137, 196 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 40, 42, 168, 173 dream, 67, 75, 109, 112, 151, 152, 159, 162–165, 167, 184 Droste-Hülshoff, Annette Freiin von, 205, 208, 209 drunkenness, 75, 92, 130, 179 Dürer, Albrecht, 77 E Eagleton, Terry, 6, 20 Eisenstein, Sergei, 95 elective affinity, 19, 71, 157 empathy, 87, 111, 129, 177 Engels, Friedrich, 19, 148, 168, 169, 192 Enlightenment, 14, 90, 152–154 ennui, 77, 186 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 128, 142 epoch, 95, 162, 172 Erasmus, Desiderius, 26, 56, 108, 109, 130, 131 Erdle, Birgit, 61, 62 eternal return, 183, 191 ethos, 40, 41, 206 extra-territoriality, 10, 17, 26, 31, 68, 115, 131

233

F fairy tale, 16, 60, 74, 75, 147–156, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164–168, 170, 196, 197, 201–204 fake news, 92, 97 false consciousness, 2, 87, 91, 131, 136, 216 farce, 84, 187 fascism, 85–97, 153, 162 fate, 91, 152, 163, 166, 172 fetishism, 2, 53, 96, 149 Feuilleton, 11, 15, 16, 21, 34, 59, 102, 105, 143, 144, 170, 191, 207, 212, 220 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 12, 16 film, 2, 4, 18, 19, 60, 76, 112–114, 119, 155–161, 171, 187, 188, 216 film d’art , 156 flâneur, 32, 33, 51, 58, 75–78, 176, 188, 192 Flaubert, Gustave, 114 Fletcher, John, 150 floating intelligentsia, 9 Flores, Wilson José, 97 Fontane, Theodor, 204 Foucault, Michel, 6 Fourier, Charles, 166 Frankfurt School, 63, 131 Freud, Sigmund, 38, 43, 164, 181, 191 Friedrich, Hugo, 32, 35 Frisby, David, 99 Frühwald, Wolfgang, 202, 208

G García Chicote, Francisco, 60, 62, 170 Gide, André, 134, 138 Gilloch, Graeme, 79 Girard, René, 205 Goebbels, Joseph, 93

234

INDEX

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7, 12, 13, 29, 37, 38, 41, 58, 76, 165, 184, 200, 201, 204, 207, 208 Gotthelf, Jeremias, 197, 204, 205, 208 Gramsci, Antonio, 131 Grandville, Jean Ginace Isidore Gérard, 162 Grimm, Jakob, 151 Grimm, Wilhelm, 152 Grosz, George, 57 Günther, Joachim, 211

H Habermas, Jürgen, 6 Häfker, Hermann, 158 Hansen, Miriam, 2, 19, 123, 157, 160, 171, 193 Hanssen, Beatrice, 188, 189, 193 Hartung, Günter, 163 Harvey, David, 5, 16, 96 Hašek, Jaroslav, 26, 45, 59 Hebel, Friedrich, 197 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 43, 139, 145, 198 Heine, Heinrich, 7, 8, 15, 17, 19–21, 37, 127–131, 133, 136, 139, 141–143, 182 Heinrich, Michael, 16 hieroglyphic, 73, 104 Historical Novel, 4, 5, 20 historicism, 111, 112, 177 history, 4–6, 10, 13–16, 18, 26, 28, 33, 37–40, 51, 52, 55, 62, 63, 67, 68, 71, 76, 77, 79, 96, 101, 102, 106, 107, 109–111, 114, 117, 119–121, 128, 130, 133, 153, 154, 158, 165–167, 173, 177, 181, 185, 188, 190, 193, 217–219

Hitler, Adolf, 72, 84, 89, 90, 92, 93, 96, 159, 160 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, 147–149, 158, 204 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 43, 50 Höhn, Gerhard, 8, 20, 128, 129, 142 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 163 Holz, Hans Heinz, 181 Homer, 7 Honold, Alexander, 197, 207 Horkheimer, Max, 79, 102 humour, 17, 18, 74, 86, 148, 187, 192 Hyppolite, Jean, 139, 145 I Ibsen, Henrik, 31 idealism, 43, 53, 135, 178, 188 ideology, 26, 41, 56, 88, 105, 108, 131, 136, 137, 151, 155, 157, 216 immanentism, 120, 218 individualism, 27, 31, 39, 41, 42, 55, 68, 91, 120, 134, 137, 149, 203 Institute for Social Investigation, 101 intellectual, 1–11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 25, 27, 29–31, 34, 38, 41, 45, 53–55, 65, 66, 77, 83, 84, 90, 93, 101, 102, 106, 108, 115, 118, 127–129, 131–138, 141– 143, 154, 155, 176, 180–182, 198, 211, 212, 215, 219 intelligentsia, 4, 6–8, 10, 84, 118, 132–134, 136–138, 141, 176, 179, 181 irrationalism, 16, 92 J Jameson, Fredric, 3, 5, 14, 16, 21, 96, 99 Jaspers, Karl, 54

INDEX

journalism, 6, 10, 11, 83, 104 July Monarchy, 127, 186 Jünger, Ernst, 39, 58, 63 K Kafka, Franz, 26, 73, 112, 115, 166, 173, 176, 196, 219 Kant, Immanuel, 29 Kästner, Erich, 176, 177, 190 Keaton, Buster, 18, 26 Keller, Gottfried, 197, 204 Kierkegaard, Sören, 26, 43, 183 Kleist, Heinrich von, 204 Klibansky, Raymond, 77, 175, 189 Kluge, Gerhard, 202, 208 Koch, Gertrud, 63, 102 Köhn, Eckhardt, 45, 60, 191 Kraus, Karl, 141, 163, 172 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 34, 62, 102, 121, 143 Kulturkritik, 14, 27, 30, 40, 182, 186, 196 Kunstmärchen, 147–149, 153, 158, 197, 201, 203 L Lacis, Asja, 144, 163 Lamprecht, Gerhart, 160 Lang, Fritz, 159 language, 1, 8, 20, 34, 50, 51, 58, 73, 79, 97, 102, 103, 105, 106, 110, 121, 139, 141, 142, 160, 161, 168, 171, 189, 206, 207, 219 Laube, Heinrich, 7, 20, 143 law of levels, 119 law of perspective, 119 legend, 26, 142, 153, 159, 197, 204 Lenin, V.I., 168 Lepenies, Wolfgang, 192 Leskov, Nikolai, 20, 123, 173, 195, 197, 198, 207

235

Lesznai, Anna, 149, 150 Louis-Philippe, king of France, 186 Löwenthal, Leo, 2, 131 Löwith, Karl, 120, 218 Löwy, Michael, 16, 19, 176, 189 Lubitsch, Ernst, 158 Lukács, György, 2, 4, 5, 12, 20, 21, 29, 33, 35, 38, 43, 58–60, 85, 94, 106, 115, 149–151, 158, 169, 182, 185, 196, 198, 199, 202, 203 lumpenproletariat, 89, 90, 179 Luther, Martin, 108 Lüthi, Max, 202, 208

M Machado, Carlos Eduardo Jordão, 97, 122–124, 142, 191 Macri, Mauricio, 97 malcontent, 26, 58, 180, 181, 189 Mannheim, Karl, 9 Mann, Thomas, 18, 43, 63 Marx-Aveling, Eleanor, 168 Marxism, 2, 3, 18, 19, 39, 131, 163, 181 Marx, Karl, 2, 3, 5–7, 14, 16, 17, 19, 43, 69, 72, 73, 84, 89, 90, 98, 147–149, 153, 168, 169, 179, 216 mask, masquerade, 57, 86, 96, 180 masses, 3, 9, 11, 14, 38, 46, 49, 55, 68, 70, 79, 83, 86–89, 91–94, 97, 102, 104, 108, 120, 156, 158, 172, 182, 183, 185, 186, 190, 216 materialism, 3, 63, 133, 138, 157, 165, 186, 215 melancholy, 17, 58, 74, 77, 78, 176–178, 180–182, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 203 Méliès, Georges, 158, 161

236

INDEX

memory, 39, 62, 67, 68, 75, 78, 104, 112–114 Menke, Bettine, 178, 190 Merton, Robert, 219 messianism, 189, 216 Michelet, Jules, 162 middle classes, 3, 26, 30, 42, 55, 57, 87, 91, 160, 184–186 militarism, 50 mimetic crisis, 205 mode, 14, 26, 30, 62, 88, 106, 139, 184, 197 Modernity, 2, 4, 6, 7, 12–14, 17, 37, 40, 42, 46, 62, 66, 67, 75, 77, 79, 103, 104, 113, 115, 127, 128, 132, 139, 154, 156, 167, 182–184, 191, 197, 200, 204, 206 Molière, 4 Montaigne, Michel de, 32, 33, 35, 103, 107, 122, 130, 143 mosaic, 47, 53, 57, 61, 70, 71, 73 Moscow, 98, 176 Mülder-Bach, Inka, 18, 21, 34, 35, 43, 44, 46, 59, 60, 62, 80, 98, 99, 102, 121, 123, 124, 143–145, 170, 191, 192, 207, 220 Müller, Hans Michael, 90 Münzer, Thomas, 108 Murnau, Friedrich, 158 Mussolini, Benito, 89, 90, 96 Musto, Marcello, 19 mystification, 2, 17, 72, 96 myth, 79, 92, 103, 114, 151–154, 159, 163–167

N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 6 Naples, 66, 137, 175 Napoleon I, 118, 143

Napoleon III, 84, 86, 89, 90, 93, 95, 187 natural history, 71, 110 Nazism, 11, 102, 127, 131, 133, 162, 211 neoliberalism, 5, 10 Neue Sachlichkeit , 11 new radical Rights, 3, 96 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 29, 40–42, 59, 191 noble consciousness, 139 non-tragic drama, 150, 204 Novalis, 107, 122 novel, 15, 17, 25, 27, 31, 40, 42–57, 59, 61–63, 65, 74, 75, 83, 85, 102, 105, 109, 115, 120, 137, 139–142, 184, 187, 196–204, 206, 207, 213 Novelle, 148, 197, 199, 203, 205–207, 209

O Offenbach, Jacques, 26, 74, 84, 95, 97, 98, 115, 142, 186–188 ontology, 215 operative writer, 135 ordo, 12, 30, 42, 54, 182, 205 Origen, 193 ornament, 14, 15, 67, 68, 136, 153, 170 Oschmann, Dirk, 141, 145

P Palmier, Jean-Michelle, 133, 138, 143, 144, 165, 168, 172, 173, 177, 190 Panofsky, Erwin, 77 Paris, 15, 20, 26, 34, 59, 66–73, 75–79, 84, 89, 97, 98, 121, 123, 127, 129, 142, 143, 160–162,

INDEX

165, 169, 172, 175, 179, 186–188, 190, 193 Pascal, Blaise, 183 Pensky, Max, 177, 179, 190 Perivolaropoulou, Nia, 108, 114, 121, 123, 142 personality, 2, 13, 29–31, 40–42, 46, 66, 92, 119, 200, 131, 137, 139, 140 petty-bourgeois, 31, 60, 92, 176, 178 phantasmagoria, 26, 84, 87, 97 photography, 11, 104, 110–114, 123, 157, 161, 187, 188 Poe, Edgar Allan, 58, 75, 103, 104 postmodernism, 63, 96 progress, 9, 13, 14, 38, 42, 79, 98, 110, 115, 156, 164, 165, 191, 193 proletarianization, 91, 180 proletariat, 89, 134, 138, 156, 179 propaganda, 3, 11, 18, 86–88, 90, 92–94, 96, 97, 138, 157 prostitute, 46, 57, 60, 76, 77, 193 Proust, Marcel, 67, 104, 114, 117, 176, 177, 187 pseudo-reality, 86–88, 92, 94–97 public opinion, 83, 93, 95, 212 R Raabe, Wilhelm, 204 Raddatz, Fritz, 176, 189 radiobroadcasts, 168 ragpicker (chiffonier), 89, 180 Ranke, Leopold, 4, 53, 118 ratio, 68, 70, 73–75, 184 realism, 147, 157, 171, 198, 219, 220 reason (Vernunft ), 68, 154, 163 redemption, 188, 193 Reformation, 108 reification, 12, 13, 46, 79 Restoration, 5–7, 15, 127, 129, 130, 182, 201, 204

237

revolution, 4, 5, 15, 37, 57, 70, 84, 87, 90, 96, 109, 113, 138, 154, 179, 180, 185, 186, 189, 193, 200, 201, 208 Rohner, Ludwig, 103, 122 romanticism, 16, 151 Rosenberg, Arthur, 88 Roth, Joseph, 43, 45, 59 ruins, 56, 71 S saga, 151, 152, 165, 196, 197, 204 Said, Edward, 10, 16, 20 Salaried Masses , 9, 26, 40, 42–44, 52, 57, 62, 70, 80, 85, 87, 92, 98, 102, 103, 106, 113, 114, 121, 123, 127, 137, 138, 180, 181, 184, 192, 212–214, 218 salvation, 18, 78, 155, 156, 159 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 6, 9, 20, 63, 77, 128, 129 satire, 53, 95, 129, 141, 192 Saxl, Fritz, 77, 175, 189 scepticism, 7, 17, 50, 129, 131, 136, 140, 142, 181, 202, 204, 213 Schein, 94 Schiavoni, Giulio, 162, 171 Schiller, Friedrich, 202, 204, 208 Schnitzler, Arthur, 43 Scholem, Gershom, 163, 165, 172, 181, 195, 207 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 28, 117 Schöttker, Detlef, 196, 197, 207 Schwarz, Roberto, 16 Scott, Walter, 5 Second Empire, 3, 26, 77, 84, 85, 89, 93, 95, 97, 98, 127, 162, 165, 179, 186 Second Republic, 127 secularization, 55, 199, 202 Seligson, Carla, 168 Shakespeare, William, 150

238

INDEX

Silone, Ignazio, 86 Simmel, Georg, 19, 27–34, 66, 102, 104, 131, 150, 182 Social democracy, 177 society, 8–10, 18, 38–40, 42, 45, 47, 49, 50, 55, 56, 70, 72, 84, 92, 96, 102, 113, 115, 120, 131, 133, 136, 138–143, 151, 154, 157, 165, 170, 180–182, 185, 186, 192, 196, 198, 199, 213, 216 Soviet Union, 3, 144 Später, Jörg, 34, 35, 171 spatialization, 185 stalinism, 17 Storm, Theodor, 204, 206 stranger, 26, 32, 42, 186–188 Strindberg, August, 31 Surrealism, 134, 179 symbol, 46, 67, 164 T Tanner, Jakob, 121 tearing, 8, 56, 112, 128, 129, 139, 201 theatre, 76, 86, 87, 93, 134, 151, 155, 156, 161, 162, 168, 181, 185 theology, 120, 156, 178, 218 Tieck, Ludwig, 208 Tiedemann, Rolf, 80, 172 Tolstoy, Leon, 118 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 40 Torn consciousness, 132, 139 Toynbee, Arnold J., 118, 119 tradition, 4, 5, 7, 8, 16, 17, 19, 31, 33, 41, 67, 77, 91, 102, 111, 120, 121, 141, 148–150, 161, 177, 178, 196–198, 213, 218, 219 tragedy, 18, 149, 150, 155, 163, 185 transcendentalism, 120, 218

transience, 57, 70, 71, 184, 130, 132 Trauerspiel , 47, 61, 71, 76, 77, 80, 112, 116, 165, 175, 176, 178, 179, 184, 185, 188, 190, 192 Traverso, Enzo, 3, 16, 26, 34, 59, 114, 115, 121, 123, 124, 143 Tretyakov, Sergei, 135, 138 Trotsky, Leo, 84 Trump, Donald, 97 Tze, Lao, 45

U unconscious, 11, 104, 117 unknown territory, 3, 51, 103, 106, 115, 123 utopia, 12–14, 33, 62, 70, 106, 109, 120, 136, 153, 166, 184, 216, 218, 219

V Valéry, Paul, 134 vile consciousness, 7 Viñas, David, 16 violence, 13, 16, 38, 60, 68, 113, 116, 117, 163, 188, 189, 212, 213 vitalism, 157, 184

W Walser, Robert, 166, 173 wanderer, 32, 119, 182 Warburg, Aby, 77, 118 Weber, Alfred, 20 Weber, Max, 19, 178 Wegener, Paul, 158 Weimar Republic, 3, 15, 83, 91, 101, 133, 138, 141, 211 Wernert, Erich, 94 Wiese, Benno von, 209 Winkler, Michael, 63

INDEX

Wizisla, Erdmut, 138, 144, 145, 207 Wundt, Wilhelm, 163 Wyneken, Gustav, 162 Y Young Germany, 41, 139

239

Z Žižek, Slavoj, 3 Zohlen, Gerwin, 66, 79, 104, 122