Siegfried Kracauer has been misunderstood as a naive realist,
appreciated as an astute critic of early German film, and noticed
as the interesting exile who exchanged letters with Erwin Panofsky.
But he is most widely thought of as the odd uncle of famed
Frankfurt School critical theorists Jurgen Habermas, Theodor
Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Max Horkheimer. Recently, however,
scholars have rediscovered in Kracauer's writings a philosopher,
sociologist, and film theorist important beyond his
associations--and perhaps one of the most significant cultural
critics of the twentieth century. Gertrud Koch advances this
Kracauer renaissance with the first-ever critical assessment of his
entire body of work.
Koch's analysis, which is concise without sacrificing
thoroughness or sophistication, covers both Kracauer's best-known
publications (e.g., From Caligari to Hitler, in which he gleans the
roots of National Socialism in the films of the Weimar Republic)
and previously underexamined texts, including two newly discovered
autobiographical novels. Because Kracauer's wide-ranging works
emerge from no rigidly unified approach, instead always remaining
open to unusual and highly individual perspectives, Koch resists
the temptation to force generalization. She does, however, identify
recurring tropes in Kracauer's lifetime effort to perceive the
basic posture and composition of particular cultures through their
visual surfaces. Koch also finds in Kracauer a surprisingly
contemporary cultural commentator, whose ideas speak directly to
current discussions on film, urban modernity, feminism, cultural
representation, violence, and other themes.
This book was long-awaited in Germany, as well as widely and
well reviewed. Now translated into English for the first time, it
will fuel already growing interest in the United States, where
Kracauer lived and wrote from 1941 until his death in 1966. It will
attract the attention of students and scholars working in Film
Studies, German Studies, Comparative Literature, Critical Theory,
Cultural Studies, Philosophy, and History."
General
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