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)~dashhas 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