Siegfried Kracauer was one of Berlin’s must-read film critics at a time when Berlin was Europe’s greatest center of movie production and its films were among the most creative in the world. For Kracauer, the movies themselves were often less interesting than the world they reflected and the ideas they—often inadvertently—contained. He was politically engaged, if usually skeptical of parties, and had no illusions over the future of Jews in Germany. Even before Hitler could fully consolidate power, he fled to Paris, penniless and shabby.
He would be forgotten today if not for the efforts of fellow refugees in New York who arranged his passage to the New World just as the Nazis were overrunning Europe. Safe in America, he wrote his masterpiece on German cinema, From Caligari to Hitler, which looked for signs of the coming deluge in the creatively fertile Berlin films from 1919 through 1932.
Recently translated from German to English, Kracauer: A Biography is a book students of 20th century German intellectual history will find valuable, but it won’t serve as an easy introduction to students of film. Author Jörg Später is both imaginative and cumbersome, filling out his subject’s early life through judicious use of Kracauer’s autobiographical fiction writing but bogging down under too many small details for readers primarily interested in his influence on film culture.
For readers already familiar with From Caligari to Hitler, however, Später provides the probable building blocks and traces the evolution of Kracauer’s worldview. Kracauer had definite ideas about to what movies should aspire. For him, “films were not meant to embellish life but to illuminate it. They should not pursue some idea, but rather describe real existence.” The medium should “let the mute world be present.”
Kracauer: A Biography is published by Polity Press.
