Kracauer

Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) was a German sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist.

Siegfied Kracauer was born and raised in Frankfurt am Main, he was the son of a Jewish travelling salesman. From 1907-1914 he trained as an architect.

He published two semi-autobiographical novels, Ginster (1928) about a young man who evades conscription during World War One, and Georg (1934), about a tutor, Georg, who falls in love and has a quasi-sexual romance with his much younger pupil Fred (based on Theodor Adorno),

Arguably, Siegfried Kracauer’s masterpiece is his historical study Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit (Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time) about the composer Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880). The book delivers a brilliant social history of Paris in the 1850s and the 1860s. It gives us a good idea of what Walter Benjamin might have achieved, if he had lived long enough to complete his Arcades Project. Kracauer’s Offenbach book was published in Amsterdam in 1937 while Kracauer was in Paris, living in exile from Nazi Germany. Although the book centres on Offenbach, it is also a study of the French Second Empire between 1852 and 1871, focusing on the period between the world exhibitions held in Paris in 1855 and 1867. According to Kracauer, French citizens acclaimed Napoleon III (who seized power in a coup d’état on 2 December 1852) because he catered to their delusions and fantasies. The magic name ‘Napoléon’ was a significant factor because it promised a return to French greatness. More importantly, though, the dictatorship was welcomed because it covered up the political tensions in French society. In particular, it postponed a reckoning between the bourgeoisie and the workers. Kracauer writes: ‘das Bürgertum floh vor der Auseinandersetzung mit der Wirklichkeit in die Diktatur hinein’ (p. 127; The middle classes fled into dictatorship to avoid facing up to reality). For Kracauer, the bourgeoisie was motivated by its ‘complex’ – its pathological fear of the workers – to embrace the dictatorship (pp. 125-27).

The book includes a series of memorable literary portraits, including Offenbach’s librettist and civil servant Ludovic Halévy, Offenbach’s leading lady Hortense Schneider, Dr. Louis-Désiré Véron (publisher of Le Constitutionnel), Henri de Villemessant (publisher of Le Figaro) and Charles, Duc de Morny (the illegitimate half-brother of Napoleon III, and architect of the coup which put him in power). Kracauer argues that Offenbach used his operettas as a means to satirise the regime of Napoleon III and his delusions of grandeur, yet they also contained a utopian spark, for example, La belle Hélène (The Beautiful Helen), which premiered on 17 December 1864 (with a libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy). Meilhac wrote much of the plot, to which Halévy added humorous details and comic dialogue. Three years later, Offenbach and his librettists had another hit with La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867; The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein), an anti-military satire. However, waiting in the wings was the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. On 1-2 September 1870 at the Battle of Sedan, the Prussian army defeated the French and captured Napoleon III. Days later on 4 September 1870, the French Third Republic was declared. The glory days of the operetta were over.

Kracauer’s study concludes with Offenbach’s last work, The Tales of Hoffmann (French: Les contes d'Hoffmann), an opéra fantastique based on three stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Offenbach died in October 1880, four months before the premiere on 10 February 1881. (The opera was later filmed in 1951 by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.) However, Kracauer regards the lightness of the operetta form itself as Offenbach’s greatest achievement, as embodied in the operettas of the mid-1860s, La belle Hélène (1864) and La vie parisienne (1866). Kracauer sees Offenbach as a sort of Ariel figure, as a spirit of the air (as in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest), and concludes that Offenbach was ‘a mediator between his time and paradise’ (p. 353).

Siegfried Kracauer’s books include:

Ornament der Masse (1927) (The Mass Ornament)

Ginster (1928) (Gorse)

Die Angestellten (1930) (The Salaried Masses)

Georg (1934) (George)

Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit (1937) Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time

From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947)

Der Detektiv-Roman. Ein philosophischer Traktat (completed 1925, first published 1971) The Detective Novel

Edition cited above:

Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1994)