The New Criterion

Siegfried Kracauer
The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays.
Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Thomas Y. Levin.
Harvard University Press, 403 pages, $49.95; $24.95 paper

A generation or so ago, Siegfried Kracauer’s 1947 opus, From Caligari to Hitler, a sociological survey of Weimar cinema, used to be, along with Eisenstein on montage, the only film book one could count on finding on literate shelves. No one much read them, but there they were—dense, abstract, analytic, European, and reassuringly left guides to the Seventh Art.

The hectoring, old-fashioned Marxism of the Kracauer book went out of style, and in time there arose on its ruins Cultural Studies. Well, now it turns out that Kracauer was a pioneer of Cultural Studies avant la lettre. From 1921 to 1933, he was a regular essayist for the Frankfurter Zeitung; in 1963, Kracauer himself collected some of these writings under the title Das Ornament der Masse. This volume—or, more precisely, its fuller second edition (Frankfurt, 1977)~dash\has now been translated by Thomas Y. Levin, an assistant professor of German at Princeton. (Kracauer fled to France in 1933 and, eight tortuous years later, wound up in New York; he died there in 1966, in his middle seventies.)

Mr. Levin regards these essays as founding documents in Cultural Theory, and treats Kracauer as the peer of his Frankfurt friends Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno and as the precursor of Roland Barthes. Kracauer’s subjects—city maps, travel and dance, photography (that mas- ter subject for Cultural Theory), popular biography, hotel lobbies, shopgirls’ taste in movies, and the arcades of Berlin—seem to promise something like those plum puddings of Benjamin and Barthes, heavy with the sugar of theory but spiced with observed specificities. But, alas, Cultural Theory in Kracauer is all recipe and no cake; it was in him barely emerging from the cocoon of Idealist Philosophy. Thus the greater part of each essay is taken up by a philosophizing demonstration of the proposition that such and such an epiphenomenon of popular life is worthy of attention. Again and again Kracauer decants his private blend of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. The world, you see, is moving away from Mythology and toward the reign of Reason (Vernunft), but capitalism has thrown up a false rationality (Ratio), which looks like Reason but ain’t. As he puts it, “the Ratio of the capitalist economic system is not reason itself but a murky reason… . It does not encompass man. The operation of the production is not regulated according to man’s needs, and man does not serve as the foundation for the structure of the socioeconomic organization.” Popular culture can, all unwittingly, reveal the real structure of this Ratio and thus hasten the dawn of Vernunft.

Rhythmic gymnastics? “Just one example among many other equally hopeless attempts to reach a higher life from out of mass existence.” Popular dance crazes? They manifest the false relationships inherent in capitalist modes of production. Picture palaces and detective novels show “the desolation of Ratio”; the hotel lobby is seen, in a labored and unproductive conceit, as “the inverted image of the house of God … a negative church.” Kracauer likes to pose as the (theoretical) champion of the tastes of shopgirls, whose enthrallment to kitsch is seen as somehow more honest and more socially revelatory than the obfuscatingly arty penchants of their bourgeois masters. This notion is embryonic in Kracauer, but those of us who have lived to see the lingerie of Madonna a more prestigious object of academic study than, say, the novels of Nabokov or the ballets of Balanchine have every reason to regret it was not strangled at birth.

There is, finally, the question of the positive values propounded by Kracauer. Writing about such best sellers of the time as Emil Ludwig’s admiring biographies of Goethe, Bismarck, and Napoleon, Kracauer declares that “if there is a confirmation of the end of individualism, it can be glimpsed in the museum of great individuals that today’s literature puts on a pedestal.” He finds, however, that there is one “biographical work”—an autobiography, actually— which portrays a new type of individual “different from the one aimed at in bourgeois literature” because it “does not claim to have a reality of its own but becomes real only through its transparency with regard to reality.” And who is this autobiographer whose very autobiography enacts the end of the individual, the death of the author? Trotsky. Poor Kracauer could imagine no better incarnation of his utopian Vernunft than the author of the Red Terror. Publisher’s note: Back issues of The New Criterion are for sale at $6 each.