Theodor W. Adorno Siegfried Kracauer Correspondence 1923-1966
Theodor Adorno and Siegfried Krakauer had much in common. They were intellectuals and refugees from Hitler’s Europe who spent fruitful years in the U.S. (Adorno returned to Germany after the war). Both were Jewish. They were also unconventional Marxists, heretical from the Bolshevik standpoint, trying to make sense of social and cultural phenomena through Marxist dialectics. Little wonder they were friends.
They comment on each other’ writings in the letters collected here, a massive archive providing much material for intellectual historians. Kracauer is important as a pioneering film historian who showed how social attitudes are inadvertently mirrored in the movies. Adorno was concerned by the shallow artificiality of manufactured pop culture. Unfortunately, as one of their exchanges shows, they both agreed that jazz was mass-produced pop music without authentic cultural roots.
