The Curious Humanist ─ Siegfried Kracauer in America

Siegfried Kracauer is today considered one of the key thinkers of the 20th century. During the Weimar Republic, he established himself as a trenchant theorist of film, culture and modernity, now often ranked alongside his friends Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. When he arrived in Manhattan aboard a crowded refugee ship in 1941, however, he was virtually unknown in the U.S. and had yet to write his best-known books,From Caligari to Hitler and Theory of Film. In this study, Johannes von Moltke details the intricate ways in which the American intellectual and political context shaped Kracauer’s seminal contributions to film studies, and how Kracauer’s American writings helped shape the emergent discipline in turn. Through archival sources and detailed readings of Kracauer’s work, von Moltke reconstructs what it means to consider Siegfried Kracauer as the New York Intellectual he became when he settled in Manhattan for the last quarter century of his life. Here, he found an institutional home at the MoMA film library, contributed to communications and propaganda research under the aegis of the Rockefeller Foundation, and published in the influential “little magazines” of the New York Intellectuals. Adopting a trans-Atlantic perspective on Kracauer’s work, von Moltke demonstrates how he pursued questions that animated contemporary critics from Adorno to Hannah Arendt, from Clement Greenberg to Robert Warshow: questions about the origins of totalitarianism and the authoritarian personality, about high and low culture, about liberalism, democracy, and what it means to be human. From these wide-flung conversations and debates, Kracauer’s own voice emerges as that of an incisive cultural critic invested in a humanist understanding of the cinema.

Johannes von Moltke is Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures and Professor and Chair of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan; he is the author of No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema and the editor of two volumes of writings by and about Siegfried Kracauer.