Translator's Note Introduction by Thomas Y. Levin Lead-In: Natural Geometry Lad and Bull Two Planes Analysis of a City Map External and Internal Objects Photography Travel and Dance The Mass Ornament On Bestsellers and Their Audience The Biography as an Art Form of the New Bourgeoisie Revolt of the Middle Classes Those Who Wait Constructions The Group as Bearer of Ideas The Hotel Lobby Perspectives The Bible in German Catholicism and Relativism The Crisis of Science Georg Simmel On the Writings of Walter Benjamin Franz Kafka The Movies Calico-World The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies Film 1928 Cult of Distraction Fadeaway: Toward the Vanishing Point Boredom Farewell to the Linden Arcade Notes Bibliographic Information Credits Index
Known to the English-language public for the books he wrote after he reached America in 1941, most famously for From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer is best understood as a charter member of that extraordinary constellation of Weimar-era intellectuals which has been dubbed retroactively (and misleadingly) the Frankfurt School. This collection of Kracauer's early essays--like his friends Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, he began as an essayist-provocateur on a wide variety of social and cultural themes--does more than explain the origins of the eminent film critic and theorist. It includes some of his most original and important writing. -- Susan Sontag The pieces collected in Siegfried Kracauer's The Mass Ornament are the musings of an inveterate flaneur, a rapt spectator, and an inexorable detective as he wanders through the streets of the Weimar Republic. In these singular commentaries, the big city of modernity appears as a vast dreamscape and a mindboggling phantasmagoria. Ever indefatigable, Kracauer explores the many different stores, hotel lobbies, dance halls, and ornate cinemas, seeking the signs of the past and presentiments of the future which lurk behind the appearances of the everyday, scrutinizing how the changing shapes of urban spaces and the mass media alter human experience. Employing an inimitable format, a blend of sociological analysis, historical-philosophical allegory, and literary miniature, Kracauer provides a veritable lexicon of German modernity and Weimar mythologies. Finally available for English-language audiences in Thomas Levin's careful and fluid translation, The Mass Ornament provides an important primer for today's Culture Studies. -- Eric Rentschler, University of California, Irvine We finally have in translation a sample of Kracauer's Weimar writings which establish him as a major cultural critic, theorist of modernity, and superb writer. In his passionate attempt to grasp the logic of historical change, he approaches both canonized texts and the phenomena of a new leisure culture with radical curiosity, keen observation, deadpan humor and surrealist sensibility. There is hardly any idea in Benjamin's and Adorno's writing on film and mass culture of the 1930s and '40s that does not already appear, in some shape or other, in Kracauer's essays of the Weimar period. -- Miriam Hansen, University of Chicago
Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) was the author of Theory of Film, From Caligari to Hitler, and many other works on historical, sociological, and cultural topics. Thomas Y. Levin is Associate Professor of German at Princeton University.
Reading his reviews for the Frankfurter Zeitung of some 70 years
ago, one would expect Siegfried Kracauer to seem more of his time
than he sometimes does. That’s the first salutary shock in The Mass
Ornament… Here’s a German Marxist writing about Franz Kafka and Max
Weber and Martin Buber hot off the press; or giving an on-set
report to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. And yet, when he writes about
the fashion for biography, or the crisis of the novel, or of
science, he seems to be elaborating arguments that mean more today
than ever before.
*New Statesman and Society*
To those familiar with Kracauer only as the analyst and theorist of
film, capable of sustained argument linking film to history, to
cultural philosophy, to myth and to popular imagination, The Mass
Ornament will come as a revelation. The feuilleton provided the
opportunity to range across a multitude of subjects from arcades to
boredom, from Max Weber to the Tiller Girls. He emerges as an
outstandingly sharp-sighted witness to the cultural diversity of
the Weimar Republic and to the loss of value that underlay what he
calls the ‘surface-level expressions’ of that culture.
*Times Higher Education Supplement*
Known to the English-language public for the books he wrote after
he reached America in 1941, most famously for From Caligari to
Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer is best understood as a charter member
of that extraordinary constellation of Weimar-era intellectuals
which has been dubbed retroactively (and misleadingly) the
Frankfurt School. This collection of Kracauer’s early essays—like
his friends Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, he began as an
essayist-provocateur on a wide variety of social and cultural
themes—does more than explain the origins of the eminent film
critic and theorist. It includes some of his most original and
important writing.
*Susan Sontag*
Practitioners of cultural studies generally, and particularly in
the field of modern architecture, are rushing, it seems, to read
The Mass Ornament… With two dozen essays and excerpts in The Mass
Ornament—admirably translated and accompanied by a substantial
introduction and forty-five pages of additional notes—Anglophone
scholars in the field of cultural studies can now explore
Kracauer’s Weimar essays for themselves.
*Assemblage*
Kracauer’s free-associational curiosity is brilliantly displayed in
the 24 essays gathered in the long overdue English translation of
The Mass Ornament. The volume’s idiosyncratic glosses on Paris
street maps and hotel lobbies, on best-sellers and popular
biographies, are supple, at times lyrical, meditations on cultural
transition, respectful of the enigmatic meanings and turbulent
emotions elicited by the mass-produced and the marginal… Like
Benjamin, Kracauer saw himself as a brainy secret agent, a cultural
provocateur: The Mass Ornament decodes the surface meanings of the
new, finding, in their hypnotic shallowness, personal and political
significance… Among the first to assess popular culture on its own
terms, with a mind open to the tumble of new ideas set rolling by
the technology and communications avalanche, Kracauer articulated
an impressionistic critique of popular culture that’s as
provocative today as it was 70 years ago… The Mass Ornament dreams
wild dreams about the ultimate meaning of the banal and the
beautiful.
*Millennium Pop*
Thanks to Thomas Levin, we have an invaluable collection of
Siegfried Kracauer’s more ‘occasional’ Weimar essays, available in
a beautiful English-language translation… Following both the
selection and the order for a collection of essays chosen by
Kracauer himself, The Mass Ornament only now begins to make the
magnitude of its effect felt. Anyone part of a film-theory class or
German cultural-history seminar in the last two years will agree
that this earlier and more biting Kracauer has become de rigueur
for any analysis of cultural products and practices, whether
located in the Weimar Republic or more generally associated with
Western capitalist culture.
*Modernism/Modernity*
Adorno’s tutor in philosophy, Walter Benjamin’s editor, friend of
Ernst Bloch and Leo Lowenthal, Siegfried Kracauer played a pivotal
role in the early development of the so-called Frankfurt School,
but his own reputation has never been securely established… The
publication of The Mass Ornament, a collection of Kracauer’s essays
from the 1920s first issued in Germany in 1963, should go some
distance towards rectifying that situation, and renewing interest
in one of the leading figures in the Weimar debates about cultural
criticism and modernity… The essays collected in The Mass Ornament
range from observations on boredom and bullfights, dance crazes and
detective novels, to reviews of sociology (‘Georg Simmel’);
theology (‘Catholicism and Relativism’); and Biblical translation
(on the Martin Buber-Franz Rosenzweig recasting of the Hebrew
text)… The Mass Ornament offers a unique opportunity to reflect
historically on the prose of cultural studies, the idiomatic
difficulties of coordinating theoretical or philosophical
propositions (‘academic discourse’) with the passing flux of
fashion and the inexorable demands of quotidian accessibility
(‘journalism’)… As a report from the past, [The Mass Ornament]
holds a distant mirror up to the dilemmas facing cultural analysis,
and invites us to renewed reflection on the relation between theory
and history, fashion and tradition… [Kracauer’s] edgy and
restlessly incisive relation to the entire range of cultural
phenomena…offers an exhilarating instance of critical intelligence
at work.
*Prose Studies*
The essays prove that Kracauer could not only write bracingly on
photography and film, but also that his erudition extended to a
great number of cultural subjects, from religion and science to
hotel lobbies, city geography, and the phenomenon of the
bestseller. In a lively and interesting introduction, Thomas Y.
Levin, the book’s translator and editor, discusses Kracauer’s life
and works, and demonstrates why more attention should be paid to
this fascinating, neglected member of the Frankfurt School.
*Virginia Quarterly Review*
Kracauer himself chose the 24 pieces collected in this volume… They
reflect a sharp analytical interest in a wide spectrum of cultural
themes and social phenomena, extending from the new entertainment
industries to more arcane subjects: Martin Buber’s Bible
translation, the philosophy of Georg Simmel, Kafka’s prose. They
all focus on the forces that propel historical change and produce a
new culture—i.e., the mass culture of a secular and fragmented
democracy. Levin’s edition is exemplary in every respect: his
translations have adapted themselves accurately and smoothly to the
varying styles of the original, his introduction is perceptive, his
notes and documentation are precise and to the point. A book most
highly recommended.
*Choice*
Kracauer, a leading cultural critic in the Germany of the turbulent
1920s and early 1930s, shows himself in these essays to be a
wide-ranging and penetrating interpreter of the everyday life of
this era. The essays expand on his insights into such themes as
modernity, isolation, and alienation, urban culture, and the
relation between the group and the individual… He explores such
topics as shopping arcades, hotel lobbies, best-selling books and
their readers, the cinema, and photography.
*Library Journal*
We finally have in translation a sample of Kracauer’s Weimar
writings which establish him as a major cultural critic, theorist
of modernity, and superb writer. In his passionate attempt to grasp
the logic of historical change, he approaches both canonized texts
and the phenomena of a new leisure culture with radical curiosity,
keen observation, deadpan humor and surrealist sensibility. There
is hardly any idea in Benjamin’s and Adorno’s writing on film and
mass culture of the 1930s and ’40s that does not already appear, in
some shape or other, in Kracauer’s essays of the Weimar period.
*Miriam Hansen, University of Chicago*
The pieces collected in Siegfried Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament are
the musings of an inveterate flaneur, a rapt spectator, and an
inexorable detective as he wanders through the streets of the
Weimar Republic. In these singular commentaries, the big city of
modernity appears as a vast dreamscape and a mind-boggling
phantasmagoria. Ever indefatigable, Kracauer explores the many
different stores, hotel lobbies, dance halls, and ornate cinemas,
seeking the signs of the past and presentiments of the future which
lurk behind the appearances of the everyday, scrutinizing how the
changing shapes of urban spaces and the mass media alter human
experience. Employing an inimitable format, a blend of sociological
analysis, historical-philosophical allegory, and literary
miniature, Kracauer provides a veritable lexicon of German
modernity and Weimar mythologies. Finally available for
English-language audiences in Thomas Levin’s careful and fluid
translation, The Mass Ornament provides an important primer for
today’s Culture Studies.
*Eric Rentschler, University of California, Irvine*
Reading his reviews for the Frankfurter Zeitung of some 70
years ago, one would expect Siegfried Kracauer to seem more of his
time than he sometimes does. That's the first salutary shock in
The Mass Ornament... Here's a German Marxist writing about
Franz Kafka and Max Weber and Martin Buber hot off the press; or
giving an on-set report to Fritz Lang's Metropolis. And yet,
when he writes about the fashion for biography, or the crisis of
the novel, or of science, he seems to be elaborating arguments that
mean more today than ever before. -- Mark Sinker * New Statesman
and Society *
To those familiar with Kracauer only as the analyst and theorist of
film, capable of sustained argument linking film to history, to
cultural philosophy, to myth and to popular imagination, The
Mass Ornament will come as a revelation. The feuilleton
provided the opportunity to range across a multitude of subjects
from arcades to boredom, from Max Weber to the Tiller Girls. He
emerges as an outstandingly sharp-sighted witness to the cultural
diversity of the Weimar Republic and to the loss of value that
underlay what he calls the 'surface-level expressions' of that
culture. -- Philip Brady * Times Higher Education Supplement *
Known to the English-language public for the books he wrote after
he reached America in 1941, most famously for From Caligari to
Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer is best understood as a charter
member of that extraordinary constellation of Weimar-era
intellectuals which has been dubbed retroactively (and
misleadingly) the Frankfurt School. This collection of Kracauer's
early essays-like his friends Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno,
he began as an essayist-provocateur on a wide variety of social and
cultural themes-does more than explain the origins of the eminent
film critic and theorist. It includes some of his most original and
important writing. -- Susan Sontag
Practitioners of cultural studies generally, and particularly in
the field of modern architecture, are rushing, it seems, to read
The Mass Ornament... With two dozen essays and excerpts in
The Mass Ornament-admirably translated and accompanied by a
substantial introduction and forty-five pages of additional
notes-Anglophone scholars in the field of cultural studies can now
explore Kracauer's Weimar essays for themselves. -- Juliet Koss *
Assemblage *
Kracauer's free-associational curiosity is brilliantly displayed in
the 24 essays gathered in the long overdue English translation of
The Mass Ornament. The volume's idiosyncratic glosses on
Paris street maps and hotel lobbies, on best-sellers and popular
biographies, are supple, at times lyrical, meditations on cultural
transition, respectful of the enigmatic meanings and turbulent
emotions elicited by the mass-produced and the marginal... Like
Benjamin, Kracauer saw himself as a brainy secret agent, a cultural
provocateur: The Mass Ornament decodes the surface meanings
of the new, finding, in their hypnotic shallowness, personal and
political significance... Among the first to assess popular culture
on its own terms, with a mind open to the tumble of new ideas set
rolling by the technology and communications avalanche, Kracauer
articulated an impressionistic critique of popular culture that's
as provocative today as it was 70 years ago... The Mass
Ornament dreams wild dreams about the ultimate meaning of the
banal and the beautiful. -- Bill Marx * Millennium Pop *
Thanks to Thomas Levin, we have an invaluable collection of
Siegfried Kracauer's more 'occasional' Weimar essays, available in
a beautiful English-language translation... Following both the
selection and the order for a collection of essays chosen by
Kracauer himself, The Mass Ornament only now begins to make
the magnitude of its effect felt. Anyone part of a film-theory
class or German cultural-history seminar in the last two years will
agree that this earlier and more biting Kracauer has become de
rigueur for any analysis of cultural products and practices,
whether located in the Weimar Republic or more generally associated
with Western capitalist culture. -- Jeffrey S. Timon *
Modernism/Modernity *
Adorno's tutor in philosophy, Walter Benjamin's editor, friend of
Ernst Bloch and Leo Lowenthal, Siegfried Kracauer played a pivotal
role in the early development of the so-called Frankfurt School,
but his own reputation has never been securely established... The
publication of The Mass Ornament, a collection of Kracauer's
essays from the 1920s first issued in Germany in 1963, should go
some distance towards rectifying that situation, and renewing
interest in one of the leading figures in the Weimar debates about
cultural criticism and modernity... The essays collected in The
Mass Ornament range from observations on boredom and
bullfights, dance crazes and detective novels, to reviews of
sociology ('Georg Simmel'); theology ('Catholicism and
Relativism'); and Biblical translation (on the Martin Buber-Franz
Rosenzweig recasting of the Hebrew text)... The Mass
Ornament offers a unique opportunity to reflect historically on
the prose of cultural studies, the idiomatic difficulties of
coordinating theoretical or philosophical propositions ('academic
discourse') with the passing flux of fashion and the inexorable
demands of quotidian accessibility ('journalism')... As a report
from the past, [The Mass Ornament] holds a distant mirror up
to the dilemmas facing cultural analysis, and invites us to renewed
reflection on the relation between theory and history, fashion and
tradition... [Kracauer's] edgy and restlessly incisive relation to
the entire range of cultural phenomena...offers an exhilarating
instance of critical intelligence at work. -- Robert Eric
Livingston * Prose Studies *
The essays prove that Kracauer could not only write bracingly on
photography and film, but also that his erudition extended to a
great number of cultural subjects, from religion and science to
hotel lobbies, city geography, and the phenomenon of the
bestseller. In a lively and interesting introduction, Thomas Y.
Levin, the book's translator and editor, discusses Kracauer's life
and works, and demonstrates why more attention should be paid to
this fascinating, neglected member of the Frankfurt School. *
Virginia Quarterly Review *
Kracauer himself chose the 24 pieces collected in this volume...
They reflect a sharp analytical interest in a wide spectrum of
cultural themes and social phenomena, extending from the new
entertainment industries to more arcane subjects: Martin Buber's
Bible translation, the philosophy of Georg Simmel, Kafka's prose.
They all focus on the forces that propel historical change and
produce a new culture-i.e., the mass culture of a secular and
fragmented democracy. Levin's edition is exemplary in every
respect: his translations have adapted themselves accurately and
smoothly to the varying styles of the original, his introduction is
perceptive, his notes and documentation are precise and to the
point. A book most highly recommended. -- M. Winkler * Choice *
Kracauer, a leading cultural critic in the Germany of the turbulent
1920s and early 1930s, shows himself in these essays to be a
wide-ranging and penetrating interpreter of the everyday life of
this era. The essays expand on his insights into such themes as
modernity, isolation, and alienation, urban culture, and the
relation between the group and the individual... He explores such
topics as shopping arcades, hotel lobbies, best-selling books and
their readers, the cinema, and photography. -- Harry Frumerman *
Library Journal *
We finally have in translation a sample of Kracauer's Weimar
writings which establish him as a major cultural critic, theorist
of modernity, and superb writer. In his passionate attempt to grasp
the logic of historical change, he approaches both canonized texts
and the phenomena of a new leisure culture with radical curiosity,
keen observation, deadpan humor and surrealist sensibility. There
is hardly any idea in Benjamin's and Adorno's writing on film and
mass culture of the 1930s and '40s that does not already appear, in
some shape or other, in Kracauer's essays of the Weimar period. --
Miriam Hansen, University of Chicago
The pieces collected in Siegfried Kracauer's The Mass
Ornament are the musings of an inveterate flaneur, a rapt
spectator, and an inexorable detective as he wanders through the
streets of the Weimar Republic. In these singular commentaries, the
big city of modernity appears as a vast dreamscape and a
mind-boggling phantasmagoria. Ever indefatigable, Kracauer explores
the many different stores, hotel lobbies, dance halls, and ornate
cinemas, seeking the signs of the past and presentiments of the
future which lurk behind the appearances of the everyday,
scrutinizing how the changing shapes of urban spaces and the mass
media alter human experience. Employing an inimitable format, a
blend of sociological analysis, historical-philosophical allegory,
and literary miniature, Kracauer provides a veritable lexicon of
German modernity and Weimar mythologies. Finally available for
English-language audiences in Thomas Levin's careful and fluid
translation, The Mass Ornament provides an important primer
for today's Culture Studies. -- Eric Rentschler, University of
California, Irvine
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