Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) was a German sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist.
Siegfried Kracauer’s book about the composer Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) is 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 dictatorship between 1852 and 1871, and between the world exhibitions in Paris of 1855 and 1867. According to Kracauer, French citizens acclaimed Napoléon 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 (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. Waiting in the wings was the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who was soon
Siegfried Kracauer’s books include:
Ornament der Masse (1927) (The Mass Ornament)
Die Angestellten (1930) (The Salaried Masses)
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)