Kracauer, Siegfried

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KRACAUER, SIEGFRIED

KRACAUER, SIEGFRIED (1889–1966), sociologist, philosopher, film critic, and novelist. Born in Frankfurt, the sole son in a Jewish family, he studied architecture (1911–14) and in 1921 became an editor of Germany's leading liberal newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung. As head of the Berlin feuilleton section (1930–33), he tried to raise public awareness of the encroaching Third Reich by observing and describing cultural and social symptoms of change. In March 1933 he emigrated to France, settled in Paris and had henceforth to make his living as a freelance journalist and author. Encouraged by the success of his novel Ginster (1928) and his sociological study Die Angestellten (1930), he wrote another novel, Georg (1934, unpublished until 1973), and portrayed French society of the mid-19^th century in Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time (1937). After being temporarily interned, he managed in spring 1941 to flee from Marseille via Lisbon to New York. He started to work on the impact of mass media propaganda and drafted a study on "Propaganda and the Nazi War Film" (1942), on behalf of the Film Library at the Museum of Modern Art. Further essays, such as "National Types as Hollywood Presents Them" (Public Opinion Quarterly, 1949) and "The Challenge of Qualitative Content Analysis" (Public Opinion Quarterly, 1952–53), followed. Support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation enabled him to complete his renowned book, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, published in 1947. After 20 years of writing and rewriting, he managed in 1959 to finish his second film book, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (published in 1960). In the early 1950s Kracauer began to win international recognition: he became research director at Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research and an adviser to the Bollington Foundation. He edited a compilation of his articles written for the Frankfurter Zeitung and republished them as Das Ornament der Masse (1963) and Strassen in Berlin und anderswo (1964). Kracauer died before completing his work on History: The Last Things before the Last. The book was published in 1969, edited by the historian Paul Oskar Kristeller in cooperation with Kracauer's widow, Lili.

bibliography:

Stalder, Siegfried Kracauer: Das journalistische Werk in der 'Frankfurter Zeitung' 1921–1933 (2003); H. Bratu, "Introduction," in: Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film, Princeton 1997, vii–xlv; Koch, Kracauer zur Einführung (1996); Barnouw, Critical Realism: History, Photography and the World of Siegfried Kracauer (1994); Anderson (ed.), Special Issue on Siegfried Kracauer, of the NewGerman Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies, 54 (1991); Levin, Siegfried Kracauer: Eine Bibliographie seiner Schriften, (1989); Belke and Renz, Siegfried Kracauer 1889–1966 (1988); Frisby, Fragments of Modernity (1985); I. Muelder, Siegfried Kracauer –Grenzgänger zwischen Theorie und Literatur: seine fruehen Schriften 1913–1933 (1985).