Siegfried Kracauer Book order

Set against the backdrop of World War I, the story follows a young architecture student in Munich who cleverly avoids military enlistment. Through the character of Ginster, a Chaplinesque antihero, the narrative explores themes of self-absorption and societal demands. The horrors of war remain largely offstage, with civilian life heavily influenced by military language. As Ginster grapples with his desires and the relentless pressures of the world around him, the novel reflects on the absurdity of war and its pervasive impact on everyday life, making it resonate in contemporary times.

Focusing on the unique qualities of film, this study argues that motion pictures are fundamentally different from traditional arts like theater and literature. Dr. Kracauer emphasizes film's ability to capture the everyday world, highlighting its strength in portraying fleeting moments and authentic experiences. He posits that if film is indeed an art, it distinguishes itself through its photographic nature, adept at revealing the subtleties of life, such as the ripple of leaves and the nuances of human behavior.

This book brings together a broad selection of Siegfried Kracauer's work on media and political communication, much of it previously unavailable in English. It features writings spanning more than two decades, from the 1930s to the early Cold War period.

Best remembered today for his brilliant study of early German cinema, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Study of the German Film, and for his involvement with the Frankfurt School (he mentored Theodor Adorno), Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) was the editor for cultural affairs at Germany's leading liberal newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, during the Weimar Republic until its disastrous end. His novel Georg is a panorama of those years, as seen through the eyes of a rookie reporter working for the fictional Morgenbote (Morning Herald). In a defeated nation seething with extremism right and left, young Georg is looking for something to believe in. For him, the past has become unusable; for nearly everyone he meets, paradise seems just around the corner. But which paradise? Kracauer's grimly funny novel takes on a confused and dangerous time which may remind us of our own.

Siegfried Kracauer was a leading intellectual figure of the Weimar Republic and one of the foremost representatives of critical theory. Best known for a wealth of writings on sociology and film theory, his influence is felt in the work of many of the period’s preeminent thinkers, including his friends, the critic Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, who once claimed he owed more to Kracauer than any other contemporary. The volume brings together for the first time all of Kracauer’s essays on photography that he wrote between 1927 and 1933 as a journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung , as well as an essay that appeared in the Magazine of Art after his exile in America, where he would spend the last twenty-five years of his life. The texts show Kracauer as a pioneering thinker of the photographic medium in addition to the important historian, and theorist, of film that he is acknowledged to have been. His writings here build a cohesive theory on the affinities between photography, memory and history. With a foreword by Philippe Despoix offering insights into Kracauer’s theories and the historical context, and a Curriculum vitae in pictures , photographs from the Kracauer estate annotated by Maria Zinfert.

Focusing on the interplay between past and present, Siegfried Kracauer critiques various historical theories, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. His exploration delves into the philosophical aspects of history, contrasting the concerns of philosophy with those of historical explanation. This edition includes a new introduction by Paul Oskar Kristeller, enhancing the text's academic value. The work is noted for its clarity and cogent arguments, making it a significant contribution to the understanding of historical discourse.

A biography of composer Jacques Offenbach that is also a social and cultural history of Second Empire Paris. Siegfried Kracauer's biography of the composer Jacques Offenbach is a remarkable work of social and cultural history. First published in German in 1937 and in English translation in 1938, the book uses the life and work of Offenbach as a focal point for a broad and penetrating portrayal of Second Empire Paris. Offenbach's immensely popular operettas have long been seen as part of the larger historical amnesia and escapism that pervaded Paris in the aftermath of 1848. But Kracauer insists that Offenbach's productions must be understood as more than glittering distractions. The fantasy realms of such operettas as La Belle Hélène were as one with the unreality of Napoleon III's imperial masquerade, but they also made a mockery of the pomp and pretense surrounding the apparatuses of power. At the same time, Offenbach's dreamworlds were embedded with a layer of utopian content that can be seen as an indictment of the fraudulence and corruption of the times. This edition includes Kracauer's preface to the original German edition as well as a critical foreword by Gertrud Koch.

First published in 1930, Siegfried Kracauer’s work was greeted with great acclaim and soon attained the status of a classic. The object of his inquiry was the new class of salaried employees who populated the cities of Weimar Germany.Spiritually homeless, divorced from all custom and tradition, these white-collar workers sought refuge in entertainment—or the “distraction industries,” as Kracauer put it—but, only three years later, were to flee into the arms of Adolf Hitler. Eschewing the instruments of traditional sociological scholarship, but without collapsing into mere journalistic reportage, Kracauer explores the contradictions of this caste. Drawing on conversations, newspapers, adverts and personal correspondence, he charts the bland horror of the everyday. In the process he succeeds in writing not just a prescient account of the declining days of the Weimar Republic, but also a path-breaking exercise in the sociology of culture which has sharp relevance for today.

The Mass Ornament today remains a refreshing tribute to popular culture, and its impressively interdisciplinary writings continue to shed light not only on Kracauer's later work but also on the ideas of the Frankfurt School, the genealogy of film theory and cultural studies, Weimar cultural politics, and, not least, the exigencies of intellectual exile.