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Curious Americanism

As we saw in the preceding chapter, Kracauer’s early reflections on film and photography suggest a range of specific meanings that the term modernity might have for film theory and film history. These reflections in turn contribute to the archive of modernist aesthetics insofar as they expand the canon of aesthetic modernism to include the technological media, not just with experimental film and photography but also with the vernacular practices of commercial cinema. In this chapter, I reverse emphasis to focus on the significance Kracauer ascribed to cinema and other new entertainment forms as indices of the direction(s) of twentieth-century modernity, which he increasingly saw as defined by mass production, mass consumption, and the emerging contours of mass society.¹ In particular, I trace the ambivalences and revaluations surrounding his utopian proposition that, like their American prototypes, these entertainment forms might provide something like “a self-representation of the masses subject to the process of mechanization,” that is, the conditions of possibility for a democratic culture. ²

Kracauer’s exploration of modern mass culture was part and parcel of the discourse of Americanism that catalyzed debates on modernity and modernization in Weimar Germany and elsewhere. As has been well documented by historians of Weimar culture, the metaphor of “Amerika” encompassed a wide range of ideas, images, and clichés: Fordist-Taylorist principles of production—standardization, rationalization, calculability, efficiency, and speed, the assembly line—and attendant promises of mass consumption; mass democracy and civil society, that is, freedom from traditional authority and hierarchies, egalitarian forms of interaction, and social as well as sexual and gender mobility (the “new woman” and the alleged threat of a “new matriarchy”); and not least the cultural symbols of the new era—skyscrapers, jazz (“Negermusik”), boxing, revues, radio, cinema. Whatever its particular articulation (to say nothing of its reference to the actual United States), the discourse of Americanism crystallized positions on modernity, from cultural-conservative jeremiads through euphoric hymns to technological progress. Within pro-American discourse, the political fault lines were usually drawn between those who found in the Fordist gospel a solution to the ills of capitalism and a harmonious path to democracy (“white socialism”) and those who believed that modern technology, and technologically based modes of production and consumption, furnished the conditions, but only the conditions, for a truly proletarian revolution (“left Fordism”).³

As has often been pointed out, the discourse of Americanism should not be conflated with the actual historical process of “Americanization,” that is, the transfer of American-style business practices to Germany (and other parts of Europe).⁴ Still, with the introduction of Fordist-Taylorist principles of production in both industry and the service sector, along with the accompanying spread of cultural forms of mass consumption, the very categories developed to comprehend the logics of capitalist modernity assumed a more concrete, and more complex and contradictory, face. To be sure, Germany had seen experiments in and debates on rationalization earlier, in fact before World War I.⁵ And while there was a distinct push for Fordist-Taylorist methods of production in the mid-twenties, they were not implemented everywhere and at the same pace, and thorough rationalization remained largely an aspiration.⁶ But to the extent that it was becoming a reality, the American system of mass production and consumption signaled a paradigmatically distinct set of values, visions, sensibilities—less a dichotomously understood assault of modern civilization on traditional culture than a specific material, perceptual, and social regime of modernization that competed with European versions of modernity.

I am less interested here in situating Kracauer within canonical Weimar debates on modernity than in tracing his engagement with American-style mass and media culture as it evolved between 1924 and 1933—not only as a response to the mounting political crisis and bourgeois culture’s failure to address it but also as an elaboration of issues that point beyond both the historical moment and the national frame of reference. During the brief period between the great inflation and the end of the Weimar Republic, Kracauer turned “Amerika” from a metaphysically grounded metaphor of disenchanted modernity into a diagnostic framework for exploring the manifold and contradictory realities of modern life under the conditions of advanced capitalism. As elaborated in chapter 1, the materialist impulse to register, transcribe, and archive the surface manifestations of modernity was initially motivated—as well as licensed—by the eschatologically tinged hope that modernity could and would be overcome: “America will disappear only when it completely discovers itself.”⁷ However, the self-reflexive construction of this phrase also suggests that the object of discovery harbors its own means and media of cognition and self-understanding; by the same logic, it implies that the discovering subject cannot remain outside or above the terrain explored. Accordingly, the more Kracauer immersed himself in the project, the less sanguine he became about the possibility of transcending modernity, and the more passionately he engaged in immanent critique. Thus, in the face of rising National Socialism, he sought to describe the particular ways in which technologically mediated and market-based culture seemed at once to furnish the conditions for self-reflexivity and self-determination on a mass scale and to neutralize and undermine those very principles.

In the first years of the Weimar Republic, the connection between Americanism qua industrial rationalization and the new mass-mediated culture, in particular cinema, was by no means established—at least not until the implementation of the Dawes Plan in 1924, which ushered in at once a large-scale campaign of rationalization and the consolidation of Hollywood’s hegemony in the German market.⁸ In a report for the Frankfurter Zeitung on a conference of the Deutsche Werkbund in July 1924, Kracauer presents this gathering of designers, industrialists, educators, and politicians as a site of missed connections. The conference was devoted to two main topics, “the fact of Americanism, which seems to advance like a natural force,” and the “artistic significance of the fiction film.”⁹ Kracauer observes a major shortcoming in the speakers’ basic approach to Americanism: they went all out to explore its “total spiritual disposition,” but, true to the Werkbund’s professed status as an “apolitical organization,” they left the “economic and political conditions upon which rationalization . . . is based substantially untouched.” While both proponents and critics of rationalization seemed to articulate their positions with great conviction and ostensible clarity, the second topic of the conference, concerning the fiction film, remained shrouded in confusion. “Curiously, perhaps due to deep-seated prejudices, the problem of film was dealt with in a much more biased and impressionistic way than the fact of mechanization, even though both phenomena, Americanism and film composition, after all belong to the same sphere of surface life.”

The metaphysically grounded concern over the “disintegration” of the world had prompted Kracauer to turn his attention to that very “sphere of surface life,” to the seemingly inconspicuous phenomena of the modern urban everyday and the culturally despised practices of popular literature and entertainment. This turn entailed an epistemological valorization of the term surface, previously associated with lapsarian laments over mechanization and the hegemony of instrumental reason or rationality (Ratio), the ascendance of Gesellschaft over Gemeinschaft , the crisis of the self-determined individual, and the breakdown of traditional belief and value systems (“transcendental homelessness”). Instead, Kracauer increasingly came to view the surface or Oberfläche as a Denkfläche, or plane for thinking, an as-yet-uncharted map for the exploration of contemporary life.¹⁰

Kracauer’s empirical efforts to trace “the inconspicuous surface-level expressions” of modern life were guided, though, by the theoretical objective to determine “the position that an epoch occupies in the historical process,” that is, the direction(s) that modernity would or could take.¹¹ Key to this project was the critique of capitalism, without which the critique of modernity would have remained marooned in metaphysical pessimism. As is often noted, Kracauer’s reading of Marx and Marxist theory beginning in 1925 radicalized his earlier materialist impulses into a critical program. At the same time, actual developments in the process of modernization, in particular the implementation of Fordist-Taylorist methods of production and the increased circulation of American entertainment products from the mid-twenties on, both confirmed and challenged the Marxist analysis of capitalism in specific ways.

The effort to grasp the ongoing transformations posed heuristic and methodological problems—concerning the relationship of theory and empirical reality and that of totality and the particular—to which Kracauer found no satisfactory answers in the established academic disciplines, least of all philosophy, in particular German idealist thought in the tradition of Kant and Hegel.¹² Theoretical thinking schooled in that tradition, he felt, proved increasingly incapable of grasping a changed and changing reality, a “reality filled with corporeal things and people” (MO 140; S 5.1:169). Accordingly, his earlier despair over the direction of the historical process turned into a concern over the lack of a heuristic discourse, over the fact that “the objectively-curious [das Objektiv-Neugierige] lacks a countenance.”¹³

Neither did he find such a discourse in the discipline of sociology and social theory, which should have been the place for conceptualizing concrete changes in social organization and social behavior under the conditions of capitalist modernity.¹⁴ It was not that the critique of Western rationality, notably Max Weber’s, ignored capitalist modes of production and exchange. In Kracauer’s view, however, this critique still operated at an idealist level of abstraction because it posited the Ratio as a transhistorical, ontological category of which the current phase of capitalism was just a particular inevitable and unalterable incarnation. He extended this reproach even to Georg Lukács, whose History and Class Consciousness (1923) had persuasively fused Weber’s theory of rationalization with Marx’s theory of the commodity and was to become major impulse for Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School. Kracauer not only rejected Lukács’s notion of the proletariat as both object and subject of a Hegelian dialectics of history but also balked at the conception of reality as a totality.¹⁵ For Kracauer, the diagnosis of the historical process required the construction of categories from within the material; bringing Marx up to date, he wrote to Ernst Bloch, required “a dissociation of Marxism in the direction of the realities.”¹⁶

In this regard, Kracauer, like many of his generation, found inspiration in Georg Simmel, a thinker who moved between, across, and beyond the disciplines of philosophy and sociology and who, as early as 1903, had asserted the significance of the “seemingly insignificant traits on the surface of life.”¹⁷ Having attended Simmel’s lectures and corresponded with him, Kracauer devoted a substantial monograph to him in 1919: “Simmel was the first to open for us the gateway to the world of reality.”¹⁸ He authorized the exploration of the quotidian, ephemeral, and coincidental, the mundane reality of everyday life and leisure and attendant modes of social interaction. Unlike “thinkers rooted in transcendental idealism who try to capture the material manifold of the world by means of a few wide-meshed general concepts” and end up missing precisely the “existential plenitude of these phenomena,” Simmel, according to Kracauer, “snuggles much closer to his objects” (MO 242). He offered a theorizing mode of description grounded in “perceptual experience”—“he observes [the material] with an inner eye and describes what he sees” (MO 257)—that is, an aesthetic disposition to which Kracauer was to add the eye for spatial dynamics and precision of an architect, the kinaesthetic imagination of a moviegoer, and a literary sensibility closer to Kafka, dada, and surrealism.

However, he rejected Simmel’s vitalist penchant to show every object as interconnected with everything else, thus making individual phenomena symbolize the infinite connectedness of the manifold as a living totality. Not only had Kracauer lost the confidence in any meaningful interconnectedness; the very breakdown of totality was for him a defining feature—and opportunity—of the historical moment, marking the difference of modernity from preceding periods. Hence, he insisted vis-à-vis Simmel on treating the sundered fragments as fragments, in their own mode of being (“Eigensein”).

Kracauer’s curiosity about contemporary realities made him drift , more radically than Simmel, toward the proliferating sites, media, and practices of consumption, including their shadow counterpart, the public yet “unseen” sites of deprivation and misery. Beginning around 1925, his articles increasingly revolve around objects of daily use, metropolitan spaces and modes of circulation, and the media, rituals, and institutions of an expanding leisure culture. As remarkable as the range of topics is the change of tone and differentiation of stance in Kracauer’s writing. Although the critique of the capitalist grounding of modernization continues—and actually becomes fiercer by the end of the decade—it is no longer linked to a metaphysically based pessimistic attitude. If in his programmatic essay of 1922, “Those Who Wait,” Kracauer had already endorsed a “hesitant openness” toward modernization, by 1925 he professes an “uncertain, hesitant affirmation of the civilizing process” (MO 138, 73). Such a stance, Kracauer argues in his essay “Travel and Dance,” is “more realistic than a radical cult of progress, be it of rationalist lineage or aimed directly at the utopian. But it is also more realistic than the condemnations by those who romantically flee the situation they have been assigned.” With an openness that does not abdicate critical awareness, the observer “views the phenomena that have freed themselves from their foundation not just categorically as deformations and distorted reflections, but accords them their own, after all positive possibilities” (MO 73; S 5.1:295).

Which particular possibilities did Kracauer perceive in Weimar modernity, especially the cultural manifestations of Americanism? What in this specific regime of modernization did he see as different and potentially liberatory? While he occasionally still deplores the “machinelike” quality of modern existence, he begins to be fascinated by new entertainment forms that turn the “fusion of people and things” into a creative principle. He first observes this principle at work in the musical revues then sweeping across German vaudeville stages: “The living approximates the mechanical, and the mechanical behaves like the living.”¹⁹ With an enthusiasm that sounds untypically close to the language of “white socialism,” Kracauer reports on the Frankfurt performance of the Tiller Girls, whose tour inaugurated the “American age” in Germany.²⁰ “What they accomplish is an unprecedented labor of precision, a delightful Taylorism of the arms and legs, mechanized charm. They shake the tambourine, they drill to the rhythms of jazz, they come on as the boys in blue: all at once, pure duodeci-unity [Zwölfeinigkeit]. Technology whose grace is seductive, grace that is genderless because it rests on joy of precision. A representation of American virtues, a flirt by the stopwatch.”²¹

Kracauer’s pleasure in such precision does not rest with forms inspired by technology but with the aesthetic rendering of social and sexual configurations coarticulated with the new technological regime. It is significant that he does not conflate mechanization and rationalization with an a priori negative concept of standardization, or feel threatened by the flaunted loss of individuality. In the stylized economy of the revue, its fragmentary, serial, incessantly metamorphosing patterns, standardization translates into a sensual celebration of collectivity, a vision, perhaps a mirage, of equality, cooperation, and solidarity. It is also a vision of gender mobility and androgyny (girls dressed as sailors)—a mark of Americanism for both its proponents and enemies—though perhaps at the price of a retreat from sexuality and denial of sexual difference. Still, Kracauer’s account conveys a glimpse of a different organization of social and gender relations—different at least from the patriarchal order of the Wilhelmine family and norms of sexual behavior that clashed with both the reality of working women and Kracauer’s own sensibility.²²

The Taylorist aesthetics of the revue also suggests a different conception of the body from that subtending traditional humanist notions of a unitary, autonomous self. Writing about two “excentric dancers” (Exzentriktänzer) performing live in the Ufa Theater, Kracauer asserts that the precision and grace of their act “transform the body-machine into an atmospheric instrument.” They defy physical laws of gravity, not by assimilating technology to the phantasm of a complete, masculine body (such as the armored body of the soldier-hero), but by playing with the fragmentation and dissolution of that body: “When, for instance, they throw one leg around in a wide arc . . . it is really no longer attached to the body, but the body, light as a feather, has become an appendix to the floating leg.”²³ This image evokes similar visions in contemporary visual art and experimental film, such as of Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger’s Ballet méchanique, Hans Bellmer’s broken dolls, or Hannah Höch’s collages.²⁴ Within Kracauer’s oeuvre, the aesthetic pleasure in the suspension of the “natural” body’s boundaries may also be read as a playful variant of his masochistic imagination, which (in a number of his essays and in his novel Ginster) again and again stages the violation of physical and mental identity by extraneous objects and sensations.²⁵ As a creative critique of ideology, the jumbling of the hierarchy of center and periphery in the dancers’ bodies, their fragmentation as well as prosthetic expansion, undermines both older bourgeois notions of an “integrated personality” and ongoing attempts (in sports, in “body culture”) to reground “the spirit” in an organic, natural unity.²⁶

Not least, Kracauer’s valorization of Taylorist revue aesthetics and the “American influence” on the genre served to excoriate the retrograde style of the show’s German numbers, with their mélange of monarchism (“Queen Luise descending from a perron in historical costume”), militarism, mother love, and Viennese Gemüt. However, when he returns to these examples in an all-round polemic against the genre a few months later, the Tiller Girls likewise fall prey to sarcastic condemnation (mindless “automata” “produced by Ford”). The refrain that ironically punctuates the essay, “in the age of technology,” highlights the gap between technological modernization and a culture not up to its challenges.²⁷ The phrase also suggests a lack of consciousness in the very cultural products that flaunt their synchronicity and presentness, a point that anticipates his concern about the “muteness” of the mass ornament.

Kracauer’s fascination with—and growing ambivalence toward—aesthetic forms corresponding to the Americanist regime of rationalization was not limited to the serial displays of the revues. In fact, some of his most interesting writing concerning such aesthetics can be found in his articles on the circus.²⁸ His review of Zirkus Hagenbeck, published a year before his essay “The Mass Ornament,” reads like a sketch for the latter. Kracauer introduces the appearance of the giant menagerie in Frankfurt as an “International of animals,” describing the animals as involuntary delegates from globally extended regions, united under the spell of Americanism: “The fauna moves rhythmically and forms geometrical patterns. There is nothing left of dullness. As unorganic matter snaps into crystals, mathematics seizes the limbs of living nature and sounds control the drives. The animal world, too, has fallen for jazz. . . . Every animal participates in the creation of the empire of figures according to its talents. Brahmin zebus, Tibetan black bears, and massifs of elephants: they all arrange themselves according to thoughts they did not think themselves.”²⁹

The regime of heteronomous reason rehearsed on the backs of the animals would be merely pathetic if it weren’t for the clowns whose anarchic pranks debunk the imperialist claims of rationalization: “They too want to be elastic and linelike, but it doesn’t work; the elephants are more adroit, one has too many inner resistances, some goblin crosses out the elaborate calculation” (FT 110).³⁰ While their antics have a long tradition, the clowns assume alterity in relation to the ongoing process of modernization; they inhabit the intermediary realm of improvisation and chance that, for Kracauer, is the redeeming supplement of that process and that has come into existence only with the loss of “foundations” or a stable order.³¹

The institution in which the clowns could engage rationalization on, as it were, its own turf was of course the cinema, which assured them an audience far beyond local and live performances. In numerous reviews, Kracauer early on praised slapstick comedy (Groteske) as a cultural form in which Americanism supplied a popular and public antidote to its own system. Like no other genre, slapstick comedy seemed to subvert the economically imposed regime in well-improvised orgies of destruction, confusion, and parody. “One has to hand this to the Americans: with slapstick films they have created a form that offers a counterweight to their reality: if in that reality they subject the world to an often unbearable discipline, the film in turn dismantles this self-imposed order quite forcefully.”³²

To the extent that Kracauer’s theorizing of slapstick concerns the assimilation of human beings to the mechanical, it harks back to Bergson’s famous essay on laughter, Le rire (1900). However, Kracauer’s interest in the genre is decisively more anarchistic and iconoclastic. He extolled slapstick as a creative critique not only of the regime of the assembly line but also of a culture predicated on bourgeois individualism and anthropocentrism. Thus he emphasizes the mutual imbrication of the living and the mechanical, the “revolt of the slaves” (Simmel) that animates material objects and puts them on a par with human agents.³³ Human beings in turn assume a thinglike physiognomy (a case in point is Keaton’s deadpan face); lacking the authority and interiority of a sovereign ego, they are vulnerable to the push and pull, the malice of objects as well as people.³⁴ Reviewing Chaplin’s Gold Rush, Kracauer writes: “He [Chaplin] shrinks back from the door that leaps ajar behind his back because it too is an ego; everything that asserts itself, dead and living things alike, possesses a power over him toward whom one has to take off one’s hat, and so he keeps taking off his hat.”³⁵

Kracauer was only one among a great number of European avant-garde artists and intellectuals (such as dadaists and surrealists) who celebrated slapstick film, and their numbers grew with the particular inflection of the genre by Chaplin.³⁶ Benjamin, too, ascribed to slapstick comedy a radical social and political significance, which complemented his often dutiful and at best sporadic endorsements of Soviet film. He considered Chaplin an exemplary figure primarily because of his mimetic “innervation” of assembly-line technology, a “gestic” rendering of the experience of perceptual and bodily fragmentation. In abstracting the human body and making its alienation readable, Chaplin joins Kafka and other figures in which Benjamin discerned a return of the allegorical mode in modernity—except that Chaplin’s appeal combines melancholy with the force of involuntary collective laughter.

Where Benjamin emphasizes self-fragmentation and “self-alienation” in Chaplin, Kracauer locates the figure’s appeal in an already missing self: “The human being that Chaplin embodies or, rather, does not embody but lets go of, is a hole. . . . He has no will; in the place of the drive toward self-preservation or the hunger for power there is nothing inside him but a void that is as blank as the snow fields of Alaska” (W 6.1:270, 269). In this regard, Chaplin resembles the protagonist of Kracauer’s novel Ginster (1928), a connection first made by Joseph Roth: “Ginster in the War—that’s Chaplin in the department store!”³⁷

Whether from lack of identity or inability to distinguish between self and multiplied self-images (as Kracauer observes with reference to the hall-of-mirror scene from Circus), Chaplin instantiates a “schizophrenic” vision in which the habitual relations among people and things are shattered and different configurations appear possible (W 6.1:269); like a flash of lightning, Chaplin’s laughter “welds together madness and happiness.”³⁸ The absent center of Chaplin’s persona allows for a reconstruction of humanity under alienated conditions—“from this hole the purely human radiates discontinuously . . . the human that is otherwise stifled below the surface, that cannot shimmer through the shells of ego consciousness” (W 6.1:269–70). A key aspect of this humanity is a form of mimetic behavior that disarms the aggressor or malicious object by way of mimicry and adaptation, and that assures the temporary victory of the weak, marginalized, and disadvantaged, of David over Goliath.³⁹

For Kracauer, Chaplin is both a diasporic figure and “the pariah of the fairy tale,” a genre that makes happy endings imaginable and at the same time puts them under erasure. The vagabond again and again learns “that the fairy tale does not last, that the world is the world, and that home [die Heimat] is not home” (W 6.2:494). If Chaplin has messianic connotations for Kracauer, it is in the sense that he represents at once the appeal of a utopian humanism and its impossibility, the realization that the world “could be different and still continues to exist” (W 6.2:34).⁴⁰ Chaplin exemplifies this humanism under erasure both in his films and by his worldwide and ostensibly class-transcendent popularity. While Kracauer is skeptical as to the ideological function of reports that, for instance, the film City Lights managed to move both prisoners in a New York penitentiary to laughter and George Bernard Shaw to tears, he nonetheless tackles the question of Chaplin’s “power” to reach human beings across class, nations, and generations (W 6.2:492)⁴¹—the possibility, ultimately, of a universal language of mimetic transformation that would make mass culture an imaginative horizon for people trying to live a life in the war zones of modernization.

Compared to Benjamin’s, Kracauer’s interest in Chaplin and slapstick comedy— as in cinema in general—was less focused on the question of technology, either in the Marxist sense as a productive force or as a Heideggerian enframing or Gestell. He was primarily concerned with the ways in which Fordist-Taylorist technology gave rise to a distinct socioeconomic and cultural formation that, more systematically than any previous form of modernization, addressed itself to the masses, thus constituting a specifically modern form of subjectivity. Since I focus on this concern in the following sections, I refrain from offering any general definition of Kracauer’s concept of the mass, or masses, not least because that concept is subject to significant fluctuation and ambiguity. Suffice it to note that, explicitly and implicitly, Kracauer’s exploration of this particular aspect of “Amerika” sets itself off, on the conservative side, against the long-standing lament about mass-marketed culture as well as late-nineteenth-century elitist-pessimistic theories of the crowd (as synthesized by Gustave Le Bon) that essentialized, psychologized, pathologized, and demonized the crowd, or mass in the singular, as an atavistic force that required a leader.⁴² On the politically progressive side, as we shall see, Kracauer tries to complicate leftist conceptions of the masses predicated on the industrial working class and the idea of a revolutionary proletariat. The metaphor of “discovering America,” after all, refers not simply to an object of exploration but to a heuristic strategy for discovering whatever might be qualitatively and historically distinct, as yet unrecognized and undefined, in a subject so overdetermined by competing discourses. Accordingly, rather than engaging directly with sociological, psychological, or political debates on the nature of the modern masses, Kracauer takes the detour through the ephemeral phenomena of the burgeoning entertainment culture—as configurations that at once spawn and respond to a new type of collective.

THE MASS AS ORNAMENT AND PUBLIC

The locus classicus of Kracauer’s analysis of Fordist mass culture is his 1927 essay “The Mass Ornament.” In this essay, the Tiller Girls have evolved into a historicophilosophical allegory that, as is often noted, anticipates key arguments of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; 1947).⁴³ Once exuberantly portrayed, the dance troupe now figures as a critical emblem of displays that proliferate internationally in cabarets, stadiums, and newsreels, patterns formed by thousands of anonymous, uniform, de-eroticized bodies (“sexless bodies in bathing suits” [MO 76]). The abstraction of the individual body into elements or building blocks for the composition of larger geometrical figures corresponds, as an “aesthetic reflex,” to the Taylorist principle of breaking down human labor into calculable units and refunctioning them in the form of working masses that can be globally deployed (MO 79). As a figure of capitalist rationality, Kracauer argues, the mass ornament is as profoundly ambivalent or ambiguous (zweideutig) as the historical process that brought it forth. On the one hand, it participates in the “process of demythologization” that emancipates humanity from the forces of nature and that, in Kracauer’s words, “effects a radical demolition of the positions of the natural” (in particular the powers of the church, monarchy, and feudalism) (MO 80; S 5.2:61). On the other, this process ends up reestablishing the natural in ever-new forms. By perpetuating socioeconomic relations “that do not encompass the human being,” capitalist development reproduces these relations as natural— as given and immutable, instead of historical and political—and thus reverts to myth; rationality itself has become the dominant myth of modern society (MO 81; S 5.2:62).

Unlike other Critical Theorists, however, Kracauer does not locate the problem in the concept of Enlightenment as such (which he associates less with German idealism than with the utopian reason—justice and happiness—of fairy tales canonized in the French eighteenth century). Rather, he argues that the permeation of nature by reason has actually not advanced far enough—the problem with capitalism is not that “it rationalizes too much” but that it rationalizes “too little” (MO 81). This hyperbole implies the distinction, key to subsequent debates within the Frankfurt School, between instrumental rationality—the unleashed Ratio “that denies its origins and no longer recognizes any limits”—and reason as Vernunft , which reflects upon its own contingency, goals, and procedures.⁴⁴ The mass ornament embodies the incomplete advance of rationalization, that is, one without self-critical reason, by stopping halfway in the process of demythologization and thus remaining arrested between the abstractness endemic to capitalist rationality and the false concreteness of myth. Yet, just as he knows that the emergence of humanist reason is inseparable from the development of capitalism, Kracauer rejects any thought that this development could be reversed: “The process leads right through the center of the mass ornament, not back from it” (MO 86; S 5.2:67).

The essay on the mass ornament has been criticized for its reductionist analogy between “the legs of the Tiller Girls” and “the hands in the factory” (MO 79; S 5.2:60), an analogy that allegedly ignores the aesthetic specificity of the revues, their playful negation of the abstract regime they reflect.⁴⁵ Such criticism fails to see that the relationship Kracauer delineates is neither literal nor obvious but heuristic and symptomatic. Since he first reviewed the Tiller Girls in 1925, the connection between the new dance form and Fordist-Taylorist rationalization, between chorus line and assembly line, had more or less become a topos, notably with Fritz Giese’s illustrated paean to “girl culture” published the same year.⁴⁶ This topos, however, remained stuck in the binary discourse of Americanism, which either welcomed the revues as a “new culture of training” (Trainingskultur)—that curious americanism is, a means of social discipline—or decried them as a yet another manifestation of mechanization and standardization, the “growing drive toward uniformity” and “complete end of individuality.”⁴⁷ In contrast with either enthusiastic or lapsarian accounts, Kracauer’s essay assumes a more dialectical stance toward the phenomenon, reading it as an index of an ambivalent historical development. Above all, where the Americanist discourse extols technological rationality or, respectively, laments mechanization, Kracauer develops his argument from within a Marxist critique of capitalism.

If Kracauer at this point shares the Marxist (or more specifically Lukácsian) assumption of the totality of capitalism, this does not mean that he subscribes to a determinist model of base and superstructure. Methodologically, he rather borrows from the language of psychoanalysis, extending it into the political and social realm, in particular the ideological mechanisms of public consciousness. The simultaneous omnipresence and occlusion of capitalism takes the form of a paradox: “The production process runs its secret course in public” (MO 78; S 5.2:60). Yet it remains encrypted, unread, sub- or preconscious. In his 1929 study of employee culture, Kracauer invokes the “purloined letter” in Poe’s well-known story (later famously analyzed by Lacan) to describe a similar paradox—that of the salaried masses who increasingly dominate the appearance of Berlin’s cityscape but whose life eludes consciousness, both their own and that of the bourgeois public.⁴⁸ Like Poe’s letter, the salaried masses remain unnoticed “because [they are] out on display” (SM 29; emphasis added). The cover of unconsciousness, Kracauer ventures in the already-cited epigraph to “The Mass Ornament,” actually offers a cognitive gain. “The inconspicuous surface-level expressions” of an epoch yield more substantial insights about “the position [this] epoch occupies in the historical process” than the “epoch’s judgments about itself ” (MO 75). Like the image configurations of dreams, they require a conscious work of “deciphering.”⁴⁹ Echoing Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Kracauer links this work in other texts to the metaphor of hieroglyphics, a figure that, like the mass ornament, combines abstract, graphic lines with visual concreteness and ostensible self-evidence.⁵⁰

The mass ornament requires critical deciphering for two reasons. First, the educated bourgeois public fails to recognize the significance of these displays, which, Kracauer asserts, capture contemporary reality more aptly than older forms predicated on concepts of community such as folk and nation as well as outdated notions of individual personality. Second, the work of deciphering is needed because the mass ornament itself remains “mute,” unpermeated by reason, and therefore lacks the ability, as it were, to read itself. “The Ratio that gives rise to the ornament is strong enough to mobilize the mass and to expunge [organic] life from the figures constituting it. It is too weak to find the human beings in the mass and to render the figures transparent to cognition” (MO 84; S 5.2:65)—cognition, that is, of the social and economic conditions that they inhabit and unwittingly perpetuate. Instead, the modernizing impulse is deflected into the mere physicality of body culture (gymnastics, eurhythmics, nudism, fresh air), much as that movement may dress itself up in neospiritual ideologies (MO 85, 86).⁵¹

Against a bourgeois humanism to which the mass ornament gives the lie Kracauer seeks to delineate the contours of a modernist humanism that would combine the precarious and anonymous subjectivity of mass existence with the principles of equality, justice, and solidarity, a humanism grounded in reason aware of its contingency. It is no coincidence that he invokes the example of Chinese landscape paintings: a representational space from which “the organic center has been removed” (MO 83).⁵² This comparison, however, begs the question as to who reoccupies the empty space in front of or, in the case of the mass ornament, above the representation—specifically, which invisible hand or eye organizes its patterns, and to which purposes and effects.

Whether the mass ornament is merely an “end in itself ” (a travesty of Kantian aesthetic autonomy) or organized by the “invisible hand” of the capitalist system (which also appears as an “end in itself ”), Kracauer seems to leave the answer deliberately vague. Since his concept of the mass ornament is transnational, if not emphatically internationalist, as well as implicitly opposed to Le Bonian crowd theory, he does not at this point consider the fusion of mass ornament aesthetics with an extreme nationalist ideology focused on a fascist leader. When he resumes the term “mass ornament” in From Caligari to Hitler (1947) with reference to The Triumph of the Will (1935), he does suggest a genealogy linking the Nazi regime’s “ornamental inclinations,” as choreographed and eternalized by Leni Riefenstahl, with Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), though he does not mention his earlier analysis of American-style mass displays (nor, for that matter, the Busby Berkeley musicals which developed that style to exuberant perfection by cinematic means).⁵³

Even in the mass ornament essay, though, one can already discern the contours of Benjamin’s analysis, in the epilogue of his artwork essay, of fascism as a politics that aestheticizes the masses, thus giving them an expression, instead of giving them their right (that is, to change property relations).⁵⁴ Kracauer’s distress over the “muteness” of the mass ornament relates to a particular structure of miscognition and denial that he would soon focus on in his study on the salaried employees. Benjamin was to observe similar psychosocial mechanisms at work in the success of fascist mass politics, in particular the aesthetic pleasure in spectacles amounting to total destruction and self-destruction. A further trajectory could be drawn from Kracauer’s mass ornament to Adorno’s analysis of mass culture as hieroglyphic writing—as a modern form of pictographic script that facilitates the internalization of domination by keeping its author, namely, monopoly capitalism, invisible: “ ‘no shepherd but a herd.’ ”⁵⁵

Still, Kracauer is reluctant to name the transcendental subject of the mass ornament in an unequivocally pessimistic way. Despite his growing ambivalence, I would argue that he still wants to leave the space of the author and ideal beholder open for the empirical subjects who are present at these displays and to whom they are addressed. For the mass in the “ornament of the mass” (as the essay’s German title translates literally) refers not only to the abstract patterns of moving bodies qua spectacle but also to the spectating masses “who have an aesthetic relation to the ornament and who do not represent anyone”—that is, nobody other than themselves, a heterogeneous crowd drawn “from offices and factories” (MO 77, 79). While the mass ornament itself remains “mute,” it acquires meaning under the gaze of the masses that have adopted it “spontaneously” (MO 85). Against its detractors among the “educated” (who have themselves unwittingly become an appendix of the dominant economic system while pretending to stand above it), Kracauer maintains that the audience’s “aesthetic pleasure” in the “ornamental mass movements is legitimate” (MO 79); it is superior to an anachronistic assertion of high-cultural values because at the very least it acknowledges “the facts” of contemporary reality. And even though the spectating masses are, in tendency, just as unaware of their situation and similarly stuck in mindless physicality, there is no question for Kracauer that the subject of critical self-encounter has to be, can only be, the masses themselves.⁵⁶ Whether or not such collective self-representation will have a chance to prevail is a matter of the “go-for-broke game” of history by which the technological media could either advance or defeat the liberatory impulses of modernity (MO 61).

Already in his 1926 essay on the Berlin picture palaces, “Cult of Distraction,” Kracauer’s argument revolves around the possibility that in these metropolitan temples of distraction something like a self-articulation of the masses might be taking place—the possibility of a “self-representation of the masses subject to the process of mechanization.” Bracketing both cultural disdain and critique of ideology (though not without deadpan irony), he observes that in Berlin, as opposed to his native Frankfurt and other provincial cities, “the more people perceive themselves as a mass, the sooner the masses will also develop creative powers in the spiritual and cultural domain that are worth financing.” As a result, the so-called educated classes are losing their provincial elite status and cultural monopoly. “This gives rise to the homogeneous cosmopolitan audience in which everyone is of one mind, from the bank director to the sales clerk, from the diva to the stenographer” (MO 325; W 6.1:210). That they are “of one mind” (eines Sinnes) means no more and no less than that they have the same taste for sensual attractions, diversions, or distractions.

The concept of Zerstreuung, diversion or distraction, in the radical twist that Kracauer gives the originally cultural-conservative term, combines the mirage of social homogeneity with an aesthetics of decentering and diverse surface effects, at least as long as it prevails against industrial strategies of high-art aspirations and gentrification. In “the discontinuous sequence of splendid sense impressions” (which likely refers to an elevated version of the variety format that early cinema had adapted from live popular entertainment), the audience encounters “its own reality,” that is, a social process marked by an increased heterogeneity and instability. Here Kracauer locates the political significance of distraction as a structurally distinct mode of perception: “The fact that these shows convey precisely and openly to thousands of eyes and ears the disorder of society—this is precisely what would enable them to evoke and keep awake that tension that must precede the inevitable radical change [Umschlag]” (MO 327; S 6.1:211).

It should be noted that Kracauer does not (at least not yet) assume an analogical relation between the industrial standardization of cultural commodities and the behavior and identity of the mass audience that consumes them—an assumption derived from Lukács’s theory of reification that would become axiomatic both in Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry and, with a more positive slant, in Benjamin’s theses on art and technological reproducibility. For one thing, Kracauer does not condemn commodification, serial production, and standardization as such, as can be seen in his many positive reviews of popular fiction, especially detective and adventure novels, as well as in his repeated, if sometimes grudging, statements of admiration for Hollywood over UfA products.⁵⁷ For another, Kracauer would not have presumed that people who watched the same thing necessarily were thinking the same way; and if they did pattern their appearance and behavior on the figures and fables of the screen, the problem was primarily with the German film industry’s circulation of escapist ideology on screen and the compensatory gentrification of exhibition. Again and again, in daily reviews as well as the series reprinted under the titles “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies” and “Film 1928,” Kracauer castigated films that advanced their audience’s denial of growing economic uncertainty and social volatility.⁵⁸ In other words, his critique was directed less against the lure of cinematic identification in general, as an ideological effect of the apparatus, than against the economic and political conditions responsible for the unrealistic tendency of such identification.⁵⁹

The cinema is a signature of modernity for Kracauer not simply because it attracts and represents the masses but because it is the most advanced cultural institution in which the masses, as a relatively heterogeneous, undefined, and as yet little understood form of collectivity, constitute a new form of public (Öffentlichkeit). Lacking the coherence and familiarity of a traditional community, the metropolitan cinema audience represents a formation of primarily strangers defined by the terms of publicness. As Kracauer writes approvingly of Helmuth Plessner’s Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (Limits of Community, 1924), “The forms and relations in the realm of the public . . . are rules of the game that forgo investing the real ‘I’ and, before anything else, grant respect to all players.”⁶⁰ Strangers gather at the motion picture shows as spectators; that is, they engage in relatively anonymous yet collective acts of reception and aesthetic judgment in which they may recognize and mobilize their own experience in the mode of play. As Heide Schlüpmann has argued, Kracauer sketches a theory of a specifically modern public sphere that resists thinking of the masses and the idea of the public as an opposition (as still upheld by Jürgen Habermas in his 1962 study The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere). Kracauer “neither asserts the idea of the public against its [actual or putative] disintegration and decline, nor does he resort to a concept of an oppositional public sphere” (in the sense of Negt and Kluge).⁶¹ Rather, Kracauer sees in the cinema a blueprint for an alternative public sphere that can realize itself only through the destruction of the dominant, bourgeois public sphere that draws legitimation from institutions of high art, education, and culture no longer in touch with reality.

Alternative too, I would add, because, unlike the partial publics of the traditional labor movement, the cinema offers a public sphere of a different kind. Epitomizing the multiplication and interpenetration of spaces already advanced by other media of urban commercial culture (shop windows, billboards), the cinema systematically intersects two different types of space, the local space of the theater and the deterritorialized space of the film projected on the screen. It thus represents an instance of what Michel Foucault has dubbed “heterotopias”: places that “are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about.” Sites of transportation like trains and planes, sites of temporary relaxation like cafés, beaches, and movie theaters function, in Foucault’s words, as “something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which . . . all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”⁶² Taking our cue from Foucault, we could read Kracauer’s acknowledgment of the specifically modern type of publicness of cinema not just as sociological observation but also as a theoretical insight into the significance of the cinema’s intersection of an anonymous yet collective theater experience with a product whose simultaneous mass circulation exceeded the local, national, and temporal boundaries of live events.⁶³

As can be expected, Kracauer’s leap of faith into a commercially based collectivity has earned him the charge that he naively tries to resurrect the liberal public sphere, thus unwittingly subscribing to the ideology of the marketplace.⁶⁴ To be sure, he insists on political principles of general access, equality, and justice and—perhaps more steadfastly than some of his Marxist, specifically Leninist, contemporaries—on the right to self-determination and democratic forms of living and organization. Yet Kracauer is materialist enough to know that these principles do not miraculously emerge from the rational discourse of inner-directed subjects, let alone from efforts to restore the authority of a literary public sphere. Rather, cognition has to be grounded in the very sphere of experience in which modernization is most palpable and most destructive—in a sensory-perceptual, aesthetic discourse that allows for “a self-representation of the masses subject to the process of mechanization.”

As I suggested earlier, Kracauer’s concept of the masses developed within a force field defined by, on the on hand, elitist-pessimistic crowd theory (popularized by Le Bon and adapted by thinkers as disparate as Spengler and Freud) and, on the other, socialist and communist conceptions of the masses as traditional or revolutionary heroic working class. If Kracauer shared with crowd theory the assumption that the modern mass blurred traditional boundaries of class, he linked that assumption with the recognition of a new kind of publicness and a passionate inquiry into the conditions of possibility of mass democracy (in that sense pointing forward to Hardt and Negri’s concept of the “multitude”).⁶⁵ Where conservative crowd theory turns on the bourgeois intellectual’s fear of the mass as powerful other, Kracauer displays an amazing lack of fear—fear of touch, violence, contagion—toward a social formation that he knew himself to be part of, whose experience he shared in a number of respects. Like his protagonist Ginster, he felt drawn to transitional, heterotopic spaces—such as train stations, harbors, and movie theaters—that allowed him to disappear in the anonymous, amorphous, circulating crowd, to be “between people” rather than “with them.”⁶⁶ While going some way toward accounting for his cinephilia, Kracauer’s nonphobic relation to the modern mass also made him a kind of seismograph, attuned as much to what was new and promising in this formation as to its political volatility.

The specifically modern mass that Kracauer was to track began to enter public awareness in Germany with World War I. Industrialized warfare, mass killing and death, mass starvation and epidemics had brought into view the masses as object of violence and disease (rather than, as in crowd theory, their putative subject and source). While social privilege protected to some extent against these ravages, the sheer scale made suffering as much a statistical probability as a matter of class. Following the revolution of 1919, which mobilized the image of the masses as a powerful agent, mass existence continued to be associated with the stigma of misery, culminating in the 1923 hyperinflation, which spread the experience of destitution far beyond the industrial working class. During the short-lived phase of economic recovery, however, the masses began to appear less as a suffering and more as a consuming mass—a mass that became visible as a social formation in collective acts of consumption.⁶⁷ And since consumer goods that might have helped improve living conditions (for instance, refrigerators) were still a lot less affordable than in the United States,⁶⁸ major objects of consumption were the fantasy productions, images of consumer goods, and environments of the new leisure culture. In these phenomena Kracauer discerned the contours of an emerging mass society that, for better or for worse, was productive in its very need and acts of consumption.

MASS CULTURE, CLASS, SUBJECTIVITY

The essay on the mass ornament invokes the language of conservative crowd theory while effectively undermining it. Seemingly rehearsing the standard oppositions, Kracauer delineates the mass against the organic community of the people qua Volk; against the higher, “fateful” unity of the nation; and, for that matter, against socialist and communist notions of the collective. While the community had secreted individuals “who believe themselves to be formed from within” (MO 76), the mass consists of anonymous, atomized particles that assume meaning only in other-directed contexts, whether mechanized processes of labor or the abstract compositions of the mass ornament. But for Kracauer the progressive aspect of the mass ornament rests precisely in this transformation of subjectivity—in the erosion of bourgeois notions of personality that posit “a harmonious union of nature and ‘spirit’ ” and in the human figure’s “exodus from lush organic splendor and individual shape toward the realm of anonymity” (MO 83; S 5.2:64). The mass ornament’s critique of outdated concepts of individual personality turns the Medusan sight of the anonymous metropolitan mass into an image of liberating alienation and open-ended possibility, at times even a vision of diasporic solidarity; that is, Kracauer sees possibilities for living where others see only leveling and decline.⁶⁹ Put another way, the democratization of social, economic, and political life, the possibility of the masses’ self-determination, is inseparably linked to the surrender of the self-identical masculine subject and the emergence of a decentered, disarmored and disarming subjectivity exemplified by figures such as Chaplin and Kracauer’s own Ginster.

This vision, however, as Kracauer knew all too well, had more to do with the happy endings of fairy tales than with ongoing social and political developments. His more empirically oriented work on mass society focused on a group that personified the modern transformation of subjectivity and at the same time engaged in a massive effort of denial: the mushrooming class of white-collar workers or salaried employees to whom he devoted a groundbreaking series of articles in 1929, subsequently published as Die Angestellten.

Although by the end of the twenties salaried employees still made up only one-fifth of the workforce, Kracauer considered them, more than any other group, the subject of modernization and modern mass culture. Not only did their numbers increase fivefold (to 3.5 million, of which 1.2 million were women) over a period during which the number of blue-collar workers barely doubled, but their class profile was deeply bound up with the impact, actual or perceived, of the rationalization push between 1925 and 1928. The mechanization, fragmentation, and hierarchization of the labor process and the resulting threat of dequalification, disposability, and unemployment made the working and living conditions of the employees effectively proletarian. Yet, while actually a rather heterogeneous group (comprising both upwardly mobile working-class and déclassé members of the bourgeoisie), they fancied themselves as a new Mittelstand, a middle estate rather than class, asserting their distinction from the working class by, among other things, recycling the remnants of bourgeois culture.⁷⁰ Unlike the industrial proletariat, they were “spiritually homeless,” seeking escape from the everyday in the metropolitan picture palaces and entertainment malls like the Haus Vaterland or the Moka-Efti—in the very cult of distraction to which Kracauer, three years earlier, had still ascribed a radical potential. With the impact of the international economic crisis, the employees’ self-delusion and frustrated ambition, as Kracauer was one of the first to warn, made them vulnerable to National Socialist propaganda; it was these “stand-up collar proletarians” who were soon to cast a decisive vote for Hitler.⁷¹ In this sense, then, Kracauer’s report “from the newest Germany” (the book’s subtitle) reads not just as “a description of the modernization of everyday life” but at the same time as “a diagnosis of the beginning of the end of the first German republic.”⁷²

The salaried employees had been the object of research from unionist and sociological perspectives both before and during the Weimar period.⁷³ As a number of commentators have noted, several features distinguish Kracauer’s study from these publications. Methodologically, while the study is directed toward empirical social reality, Kracauer problematizes the very notion of an empirically given reality: “Reality is a construction” (SM 32). This in turn mandates a method of self-aware critical construction that explores the subject “from its extremes,” that is, through exemplary instances of the reality of salaried employees in Berlin, Germany’s most advanced site of modernization (SM 25). Kracauer pioneers an eclectic mode of writing that combines literary and sociographic methods, though he distances his approach from that of the fashionable Weimar genre of left -wing reportage.⁷⁴ Claiming to reproduce authentic reality, he argues, reportage shares the limitations of photography as defined by its predominant positivist usage (a point Bertolt Brecht was to echo two years later).⁷⁵ “A hundred reports from a factory do not add up to the reality of the factory, but remain for all eternity a hundred views of a factory” (SM 32)—what is missing is a sense of context or relationality. By contrast, Kracauer experiments with a form he likens to a “mosaic,” made up of quotations, conversations, and reflections, scenes and situations, images and metaphors. The fragmentary and citational character of the textual material also recalls Kracauer’s earlier affinity with avant-garde practices of collage, in particular their valorization of ordinary, discarded, and found objects, and his explicit endorsement of modernist aesthetics in the visual arts and music.

The literary-aesthetic sensibility that informs Kracauer’s text allows his own fascination with employee life and leisure to shine through and to complicate the study’s more overt critique of ideology. Conversely, the critique of ideology also provides a means of distancing himself from this fascination.⁷⁶ A tension between critique and fascination, distance and familiarity inflects the writing subject’s position vis-à-vis the object of study. Kracauer understands himself as a “participant observer” and more than once draws attention to his own status as a salaried intellectual.⁷⁷ At the same time, he maintains a critical stance by seeking to render strange the new that is all too quickly naturalized, by drawing attention to the “exoticism of the everyday”—that is, “normal existence in its imperceptible dreadfulness”—which tends to elude “even radical intellectuals” (SM 29, 101; W 1:218, 304).

Like none of the period’s other studies on the topic, Die Angestellten aims its heuristic lens at the junctures between the process of production and the sphere of consumption, between the rationalization of business and the business of distraction. The salaried employees emerge as the linchpin between the most advanced methods of capitalist production and the new entertainment culture. Specifically, they display a psychosocial profile that fuels Kracauer’s exasperation in his essay on “contemporary film and its audience [Publikum]” (reprinted as “Film 1928”), in which he extends his critique of the German film industry to the “public sphere which allows this industry to flourish” (MO 307–8). Already in this context he comments on the changing composition of the cinema audience, a mainstreaming that draws not only working-class patrons from the small neighborhood theaters but also members of most other social strata to the downtown picture palaces; within this new audience, he singles out the “low-level white-collar workers,” whose number had been rapidly increasing with rationalization, as the major moviegoing constituency. Furthermore, in both Die Angestellten and his 1927 article series on the “little shopgirls,” Kracauer draws attention to the unprecedented prominence, and simultaneous subordination, of women in the employee workforce and their growing presence in the heterosocial environment of the movie theaters. The discrepancy between these women’s new economic relevance, primarily as consumers and cheap labor, and their lack of real equality in social and legal status and the workplace increased their need for compensatory fantasies; in turn, they emerged as the subcultural addressee of the fables on screen.⁷⁸

The reconfiguration of class, gender, status, and ideology is captured with epigrammatic precision in the juxtaposition of two anecdotes that open Kracauer’s study:

I.

Before a Labor Court, a dismissed female employee is suing for either restoration of her job or compensation. Her former boss, a male department manager, is there to represent the defending firm. Justifying the dismissal, he explains inter alia: “She did not want to be treated like an employee, but like a lady.” In private life, the department manager is six years younger than the employee.

II. An elegant gentleman, doubtless a person of some standing in the clothes trade, enters the lobby of a metropolitan night club in the company of his girlfriend. It is obvious at first glance that the girlfriend’s other job is to stand behind a counter for eight hours a day. The cloakroom lady turns to the girlfriend: “Perhaps Madam [gnädige Frau] would like to leave her coat?” (SM 27; W 1:215)

The juxtaposition of these vignettes illustrates the discrepancy between the employees’ consciousness and their material conditions of living and yields a more nuanced account of the ideological tug-of-war that defines the ongoing “process of social mixing.”⁷⁹ In the first vignette, the discrepancy results from the déclassé employee’s bourgeois set of values, according to which age and gentility still command a certain respect—an expectation thwarted by rationalized business with its fetishization of youth and denigration of experience and the capitalist interest in a mobile labor force. The second vignette inverts the direction of social mobility: for the sales girl, barriers of class and status appear transcended in the medium of romance, antithetical yet not unrelated to the sphere of work (the “Nebenberuf,” or “other job”). Ironically, class transcendence is facilitated, on the part of the entertainment business, by resurrecting the very discourse of genteel femininity that capitalist rationalization had deprived of its social and economic foundations.

As in the essay on the mass ornament, Kracauer does not posit the nexus between rationalized production and mass-cultural consumption as a simple analogy but complicates it through a series of subtle mediations. In the section devoted to the employees’ leisure activities, “Shelter for the Homeless,” he explores the reconfiguration of public and private in employee culture through an extended architectural-geopolitical metaphor that links images of home, homelessness, and a new global space. The discrepancy between the employees’ consciousness and their increasingly precarious socioeconomic status makes them “spiritually homeless,” as Kracauer varies on Lukács’s influential phrase, all the more so since “the house of bourgeois ideas and feelings in which they used to live has collapsed, its foundations eroded by economic development” (SM 88). The literal dwelling or abode (Zuhause rather than Heim) that they inhabit does not afford them any of the traditional, that is, bourgeois-familial, ideals of protection, warmth, and intimacy. Kracauer reenacts this erosion of boundaries by metaphorically extending the space of “home” from a mere lodging to “an everyday existence outlined by the advertisements in the magazines for employees.” These advertisements mainly concern “things”—material objects and tools—as well as the small breakdowns of the human body: “pens; Kohinoor pencils; haemorrhoids; hair loss, beds; crêpe soles; white teeth; rejuvenation elixirs; selling coffee to friends; dictaphones; writer’s cramp; trembling, especially in the presence of others; quality pianos on weekly installments; and so on” (ibid.).

The misery signaled by these public intimations of personal needs and anxieties drives the salaried masses to seek “shelter” (Asyl) at night in the “pleasure barracks” that beckon them with the glamour and light missing from their monotonous working day. Behind the international-modern façade of New Objectivity or Sobriety, the fantasy of a national home, eponymic in the Haus Vaterland, mingles with emblems of an exoticized global space, the Bavarian landscape of the Löwenbräu bar, “ ‘Zugspitze with Eibsee—alpenglow,’ ” with the generic Americana of the Wild West Bar, “ ‘Prairie landscapes near the Great Lakes—Arizona—ranch— dancing . . .—Negro and cowboy jazz band.’ ” From the Bavarian Alps to America, “the Vaterland encompasses the entire globe” (SM 92).⁸⁰ “The true counterstroke against the office machine . . . is the world vibrant with color. The world not as it is, but as it appears in the popular hits. A world every last corner of which has been cleansed, as though with a vacuum cleaner, of the dust of everyday existence” (SM 93).

The compensatory traffic between an all-too-close physical existence and the glamour of faraway places, like that of work and leisure, ultimately calls the very notion of home into question, as a sentimental residue of failed bourgeois promises propped onto an actual space. Kracauer’s exploration of the entertainment malls’ architectural geopolitics resonates with his evocation of a double exile—from both the stifling dreariness of the petty-bourgeois home and the alienating bustle of the modern city—in his reviews of Karl Grune’s film The Street (discussed in chapter 1). If in the earlier texts he rhetorically identified with the film’s lonesome wanderer, he now observes almost clinically how this mode of being was becoming paradigmatic of a modern, provisional, postconventional identity, a social identity no longer founded on tradition, origin, and class. In the meantime, however, the experience of the exiled individual had taken on mass proportions, with accordingly amplified social and political implications. In the entertainment malls, Kracauer states, “the masses play host to themselves; . . . not just from any consideration of the commercial advantage to the entrepreneur, but also for the sake of their own unavowed powerlessness.” Mass culture furnishes, if not a home, then at least a house of mirrors. “People warm each other; together they console themselves for the fact that they can no longer escape from the herd [Quantität]” (SM 91–92; W 1:292). I read this observation less as a sarcastic commentary than as a trace of Kracauer’s earlier insistence on the ambiguity of mass formations theorized in the essay on the mass ornament. Even in Die Angestellten, the pessimistic tenor of the study is punctured by the possibility, though weak at this point, of self-representation and self-reflection on a mass scale.

Rationalization and distraction dovetail specifically in the emergence of new forms of socialization and identity fashioning. Under the heading “Selection,” Kracauer examines the criteria by which individuals succeed, or fail, in a competitive labor market. In addition to youth, which is paramount to employability and accordingly fetishized in employee culture, a generally “pleasant appearance” is as important as regular physical features and proper dress. The ideal personality is “ ‘not exactly pretty,’ ” Kracauer quotes a staff manager of a Berlin department store as saying; “ ‘what’s far more crucial is . . . oh, you know, a morally pink complexion’ ” (SM 38). Neither too severely moral nor too passionately pink, the proper skin color is supposed to warrant an instantaneous legibility of inner qualities through outwardly visible features. This shift toward the visible exterior in turn encourages the cultivation of a uniform appearance on the part of the subjects under scrutiny. “It is scarcely too hazardous to assert that in Berlin a salaried type is developing, standardized in the direction of the desired complexion. Speech, clothes, gestures, and physiognomies become assimilated and the result of the process is that very same pleasant appearance which can be widely reproduced by means of photographs” (SM 39; W 1:230).

If the employees are taking on “a photographic face,” to invoke Kracauer’s photography essay (MO 59), they are assisted in this effort by the movies. The circularity of mass-cultural identity formation becomes a topos in Kracauer’s writing around this time, as in the notorious statement from the shopgirls essay: “Sensational film drama and life usually correspond to each other because the mademoiselles-typists [Tippmamsells] fashion themselves after the models on screen; it may be, however, that the most spurious models are stolen from life itself ” (MO 292; W 6.1:309). Kracauer’s observation of a loop effect in the way mass culture has come to mediate the social construction of subjectivity anticipates similar observations in postmodern media criticism.

Kracauer’s insights into the workings of mass-cultural subjectivity are thrown into relief by a comparison with Benjamin’s reflections on the masses. As I discuss in more detail in chapter 3, these reflections oscillate between a turn-of-the-century pessimistic view of the mass or crowd, as distinct from the proletariat, and his attempt (famously in the artwork essay) to reclaim a progressive concept of the masses—in the plural—as revolutionary productive force by way of a structural affinity with technological reproduction, in particular film. Indebted to Béla Balázs, the assumption of such an affinity turns on the phenomenological claim that film, in Kracauer’s paraphrase, “by breaking down the distance of the spectator that had hitherto been maintained in all the arts, is an artistic medium turned toward the masses.”⁸¹ Benjamin establishes the revolutionary potential of film from the by now familiar argument aligning the fate of art and the aesthetic with the rise of industrial-technological re/production. As a result, the masses figure primarily as the hypothetical subject of a technologically mediated mode of perception rather than an empirical entity defined by the social, psychosexual, and cultural profile of the moviegoing public. The masses that Benjamin sees structurally corresponding to the cinema do not coincide with the actual working class (whether blue-collar or white-collar) but with the proletariat as a category of Marxist philosophy, a category of negation directed against existing conditions in their totality. As the self-sublating prototype of the proletariat, the cinematic masses are attributed a degree of homogeneity that misses the actual and unprecedented mixture of classes—as well as genders and generations—that had been observed in cinema audiences early on (notably by sociologist Emilie Altenloh in her 1914 study).⁸² This construction ultimately leaves the intellectual in a position outside, at best surrendering to the masses’ existence as powerful, though still unconscious, other. Where Kracauer self-consciously constructs the reality of the salaried employees through at once participatory and critical observation, Benjamin’s image of the masses, whether projected backward into the nineteenth century or forward into the not-yet of the proletarian revolution, ultimately remains a philosophical, if not aesthetic, abstraction.

One could argue that Kracauer’s analysis of mass culture as employee culture is just as one-sided as Benjamin’s linkage of film and proletariat. He himself stresses the specificity of Berlin’s leisure culture as a pronounced Angestelltenkultur, “i.e. a culture made by employees for employees and seen by most employees as a culture” (SM 32). Yet to say that this particular focus eclipses the rest of society, especially the working class, would be as misleading as to conceive of mass culture and employee culture as an opposition.⁸³ Rather, Kracauer’s analysis recognizes the dynamic by which the subculture of the employees, with their self-image as new middle estate, was becoming hegemonic for society as a whole; in its fantasies of class transcendence and fixation on outward appearance and visuality, employee culture provided a matrix for a specifically modern, social and national, imaginary. In an article “on the actor” (occasioned by a radio lecture by Max Reinhardt), Kracauer links this process to the shift from industrial to finance capital, which makes even the executive director a salaried employee. “More and more people today turn into employees; they are employed, though, by a power that has no meaning.”⁸⁴ The ostensible inevitability of the economic system encourages a social behavior of “role-playing.” Increasingly removed from the production of material goods, individuals resort to acting in a double sense: “For one thing, they have to play a role because there is no substance that would tie them to a particular part; for another, they want to play a role because they are who they are not by themselves but by means of external recognition” (S 5.2:233).

This double sense of social role-play implies the possibility of a performative self-fashioning; at the same time, it circumscribes that creativity as specular and narcissistic. The cinema facilitates both tendencies through a phantasmatic mode of perception in which the boundaries between self and heteronomous images are liquefied, revealed to be porous in the first place, allowing viewers to let themselves “be polymorphously projected” (MO 332; S 5.1:279). While in the mid-twenties this psychoperceptual mobility still beckoned Kracauer with pleasures of self-abandonment and anonymity, by the end of the decade it made him view “the unreal film fantasies” as the “daydreams of society,” and thus symptomatic of contemporary ideology: “In reality it may not oft en happen that a scullery maid marries the owner of a Rolls Royce. But don’t the Rolls Royce owners dream that the scullery maids dream of rising to their level?” (MO 292; W 6.1:309). In other words, by channeling legitimate dreams of upward mobility into a narrative dispositif that couples romance and class transcendence, the film industry organizes the “interplay of the fantasies of the ruling class with those of the ruled” (Benjamin);⁸⁵ it thereby generates and perpetuates a social imaginary that prevents the recognition of—and action upon—economic and class inequality.

In granting such film fantasies—and the desire bound up in them—a substance of their own, Kracauer implicitly distances himself from more orthodox Marxist concepts of ideology. To be sure, he shares and emphatically endorses the insight “that the form of our economy determines the form of our existence. Politics, law, art, and morality are the way they are because capitalism is.”⁸⁶ And while he pinpoints particular ideologies and their internal dynamics, he nevertheless recognizes the logic of ideology in the singular, as a matrix that structures social relations and the cultural practices that work to diffuse the contradictions endemic to capitalist society. But for Kracauer the systemic character of ideology is not sufficiently accounted for by the commodity form or a Lukácsian logic of reification. Rather, he identifies equally important sources of systematicity in areas that orthodox Marxists would assign to a deterministically understood superstructure, in particular language and the unconscious. “This after all is the genius of language,” he writes analyzing the signs in an unemployment office, “that it fulfills orders that were not given to it and erects bastions in the unconscious.”⁸⁷

In one of his two reviews of Die Angestellten, Benjamin acclaims Kracauer’s literary, in particular satiric, forays into the psychic disposition that constitutes ideology as “false consciousness.” As long as the Marxist doctrine of the superstructure does not address the genesis of false consciousness, he glosses Kracauer, one can only resort to the Freudian model of repression (Verdrängung) to answer the key question “How can the contradictions of an economic situation give rise to a form of consciousness inappropriate to it?”⁸⁸ The film fantasies not only reveal society’s repressed wishes but also participate in the repression of those aspects of reality that would disturb the illusion of imaginary plenitude and mobility: “The very things that should be projected onto the screen have been wiped away, and its surface has been filled with images that cheat us out of the image of our existence” (MO 308)—an image that includes, we might fill in, “the tiny catastrophes that make up the everyday” (SM 62; W 1:258).

Kracauer’s growing concern over the collective denial of misery and violence makes him refrain from the more dialectical argument pursued by Benjamin regarding nineteenth-century mass culture, which would read fantasies of class transcendence and abundance as at once ideological and utopian, as myths expressing the desire for a classless society. Rather, he perceives an economic nexus between the reality of mass-cultural fantasies and the missing representation of another, and other, reality: “The flight of images is a flight from revolution and from death” (SM 94). In his review, Benjamin radicalizes this insight by inverting the emphasis: “The more thoroughly [the immense desolation] is repressed from the consciousness of the strata overcome by it, the more creative it proves— according to the law of repression—in the production of images” (SW 2:308). In the economy of image production and repression, the business of distraction assumes a systematic function in capitalism’s effort to generate and perpetuate a “consciousness inappropriate to it”—that is, to invest in a mass culture that demobilizes any potential resistance on the part of its customers and inures them to contradiction.

Kracauer’s prescient insights into the functioning of mass-cultural ideology, specifically the psychoperceptual processes constituting subjectivity as a social imaginary, could well be considered in light of poststructuralist concepts of ideology, in particular film theory of the 1970s and ’80s drawing on Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault, as well as postmodern media criticism in the vein of Guy Debord and Baudrillard.⁸⁹ This lineage, however, also elucidates the difference, both historical and philosophical, that speaks from his writings. The loop effect touched on earlier—“Does film imitate reality or does reality imitate film?”—is still to some extent hyperbole, troping on Oscar Wilde’s apothegm of nature imitating art.⁹⁰ For one thing, Kracauer remains astonished that the cinema, itself a culturally despised phenomenon little more than a decade earlier, has assumed a key role in constructing social identity and thus has the power to marginalize and exclude whole areas of experience or to transmute any radical implications their representation might have into narratives of uplift and upward mobility. For another, as he discerns how signature fads of Weimar culture—nature worship, body culture, sports, kinky eroticism—had acquired the systematicity of a social discourse, he confronts the question (for example in the photography essay and the shopgirls series) of how the media’s simultaneous exclusion of vital realities tallies with their voracious inclusion of these realities, and what kind of mechanisms operate in the process of their coming into discourse.⁹¹

Kracauer’s distress over what and how this discourse excludes is not necessarily synonymous with an endorsement of representational realism, to which his position was reduced by later critics. As I argue with regard to the photography essay, the reality in transition that he insisted mandated acknowledgment crucially included the experience of the materially contingent subject. The transformations he was tracking in everyday existence, labor, and leisure culture revolved around the nexus between forms of subjectivity symptomatic of modern mass culture and the social and economic conditions that both enabled and regulated them. If he discerned in the cinema a powerful agent of these changes, he also imagined it as a sensory-perceptual dispositif that allowed a new kind of audience to grasp and engage with the discontinuities and contradictions of modern experience, and to do so in a public and collective form.

COMPETING MODERNITIES, NARROWING OPTIONS

I have traced Kracauer’s reflections on mass culture from his welcoming of Americanist entertainment forms as surface phenomena more truthful to contemporary reality than efforts to restore bourgeois culture and as playful relief from traditional social norms; through his perception of the mass as public and of mass culture as a form of collective self-representation; to a more critical assessment of mass culture as an ideological matrix that advances an imaginary social and national identity. While these shifts do not necessarily mark an evolution toward a more “mature,” realistic stance that would cancel out the earlier positions, they clearly respond to acute political and economic developments.

After the 1929 stock market crash and a sharp rise in unemployment internationally, American cultural imports such as jazz and chorus lines could not but seem inadequate and posthumous. As Kracauer writes in “Girls and Crisis” (1931), “as much as they may enthusiastically swing their legs, they come as a procession of phantoms out of a dead past.”⁹² At this point, the “muteness” of the mass ornament seems absolute, irredeemable; the chances that American-style entertainments could provide a critical supplement to rationalization were dwindling. Devoid of promises of abundance and equality, Fordist-Taylorist technology assumed a more sinister face; as Bloch put it regarding James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), the “golem” represents “technology with false consciousness, the fear of an America, without prosperity, of itself.”⁹³ At the same time, the crisis of liberal democracy and rise of National Socialism brought into sharper view different national variants of modernization, whether adaptations of the American model or indigenous modernities competing with it.

In concluding this chapter, I sketch Kracauer’s attempts to delineate alternative modernities and to assess them in light of mounting political pressure and diminishing options. The onset of the Great Depression reinforced Kracauer’s critical stance toward technological modernization unaccompanied by changes in property relations and a public reflection on its psychosocial effects. Resuming his earlier critique of rationalization as a regime that seizes all domains of experience and reduces them to spatiotemporal coordinates, he increasingly assails the destruction of memory advanced as much by modern architecture and urban planning as by illustrated magazines and the entertainment business. While occasionally still echoing the pessimistic critique of mechanization and a mechanistic reduction of life by the natural sciences on the part of Lebensphilosophie, Kracauer directs his misgivings not at technology as such but at the social conditions and protocols that regulate its uses and abuses. Praising Battleship Potemkin for, among other things, showing the “matter-of-fact interaction between humans and technology” in Soviet Russia, he pinpoints the separation of technological and spiritual spheres as a specifically German, and bourgeois, problem: “Where we engage in ‘interiority’ [Innerlichkeit], anything machinic meets with contempt. Where technology is the thing, spiritual matters are not exactly a concern. Cars travel through geographical space; the soul is cultivated in the parlor” (W 6.1:236). This split, in Kracauer’s analysis, advanced a development in which the discourse of technological rationality increasingly served to naturalize the contradictions of capitalist modernity and turn it into a new mythical eternity.

It is not surprising that Kracauer rejected the tabula rasa mentality of what came to be called “hegemonic modernism.” He remained skeptical throughout of aesthetic efforts to ground visions of social change in the model of technology, in particular as elaborated by the functionalist school of modern architecture and urban planning (Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, the Bauhaus). The “culture of glass” that Benjamin so desperately welcomed as the deathblow to bourgeois culture (and attendant concepts of “interiority,” “trace,” “experience,” “aura”) leaves Kracauer, an architect by training, filled with “scurrilous grief ” over the historical-political impasse that prevents the construction of housing responsive to human needs.⁹⁴ He counters the functionalist crusade against the ornament (initiated by Adolf Loos) by showing how the repressed ornament returns in the very aesthetics of technology that ordains the mass spectacles of chorus lines, sports events, and party rallies. And he criticizes the knockoff Bauhaus style of Neue Sachlichkeit in the Berlin entertainment malls and picture palaces for its secret complicity with the business of distraction and the social repression of the fear of aging and death.

The site and symbol of modernist contemporaneity, simultaneity, and presentness is the city of Berlin, the “frontier” of America in Europe.⁹⁵ “Berlin is the place where one quickly forgets; indeed, it appears as if this city has a magical means of wiping out all memories. It is the present and puts its ambition into being absolutely present. . . . Elsewhere, too, the appearance of squares, company names, and stores change; but only in Berlin these transformations tear the past so radically from memory.”⁹⁶ This tendency is particularly relentless on the city’s major commercial boulevard, the Kurfürstendamm, which Kracauer dubs “street without memory.” Its façades, from which “the ornaments have been knocked off,” “now stand without a foothold in time and are a symbol of the ahistorical change that takes place behind them.”⁹⁷ The spatialization of time and memory into a seemingly timeless present, its uncoupling from temporality in the emphatic sense, blocks from public view any sites of actual decay, failure, and misery.

Like Benjamin, Kracauer found a counterimage to contemporary Berlin in the city of Paris. There, the “web”—“maze,” “mesentry”—of streets allows him to be a real flâneur, to indulge in a veritable “street high” (Straßenrausch).⁹⁸ There, history is allowed to live on, and the present in turn has a glimmer of the past, inspiring memories “in which reality blends with the multistory [vielstöckigen] dream we have of it and garbage mingles with celestial constellations.”⁹⁹ There, the crowds are constantly in motion, circulating, unstable, unpredictable, an “improvised mosaic” that never congeals into “readable patterns.”¹⁰⁰ The impression of flux and liquidity in Kracauer’s writings on Paris is enhanced, again and again, by textual superimpositions of ocean imagery (reminiscent of Louis Aragon’s vision of the Passage de l’Opéra in Paris Peasant) and evocations of the maritime tradition and milieu. The Paris masses display a process of mingling that does not suppress gradations and heterogeneity and which goes so far that, as Kracauer somewhat naively asserts, even people of African descent can be at home—and be themselves—without being “jazzified” or otherwise exoticized.¹⁰¹ There, too, the effects of Americanization seem powerless, deflected into aesthetic surplus, as in the case of the electric advertisements that project undecipherable hieroglyphs onto the Paris sky: “It darts beyond the economy, and what was intended as advertising turns into an illumination. This is what happens when businessmen meddle with lighting effects.”¹⁰² In Kracauer’s play with literal and metaphoric senses of illumination, the aesthetic surplus eludes commercial intention and opens up a space for experience.

Paris, for Kracauer, is also the city of surrealism and the site of a film production that stages the jinxed relations between people and things in ways different from films adapting to the regime of the stopwatch. In the films of René Clair, Jacques Feyder, and Jean Vigo, Kracauer praises a physiognomic capacity that endows inanimate objects—buildings, streets, furniture—with memory and speech, an argument that bridges Balázs’s film aesthetics with Benjamin’s notion of an “optical unconscious.”¹⁰³ It is this quality that Kracauer extols in the best Soviet films—for instance, when he refers to Dziga Vertov as a “surrealist artist who listens to the conversation that the died-away, disintegrated life conducts with waking things.”¹⁰⁴ The physiognomic aesthetics of such films makes them enact the surrealist objective to “render strange what is close to us and strip the existing of its familiar mask,” a formulation that echoes Benjamin’s trope of a “dialectical optic” in his 1929 essay on surrealism.¹⁰⁵ What is more, the films’ dreamlike, mnemonic power opens up a different temporality (different from both chronological-industrial time and the regularized pace of classical narrative films) and exposes the viewer to involuntary, physiologically experienced encounters with material contingency. Increasingly, however, Kracauer also took contemporary French filmmakers, especially Clair, to task for lapsing into sentimentality and artsiness and for their romantic opposition to mechanization.¹⁰⁶

As much as it offered the German writer asylum from the reign of simultaneity, speed, and dehumanization, Paris was not the alternative to Berlin or, for that matter, “Amerika.” Nor did Kracauer—at least not until his “social biography” of Jacques Offenbach (1937)—seek to understand the crisis of contemporary mass modernity, as Benjamin did, in terms of the political legacy surrounding the emergence of mass culture in nineteenth-century France. For one thing, “Berlin” was already present in the topography of Paris, in the constellation of faubourgs and center (the latter corresponding to modernized Berlin) that he traces in his “Analysis of a City Map” (MO 41–44). For another, notwithstanding his alarm over the destruction in Germany of a basic civility that he found still existing in France,¹⁰⁷ Kracauer recognized that Berlin represented the inescapable horizon within which the contradictions of modernity demanded to be engaged. France was, after all, “Europe’s oasis” as far as the spread of rationalization and mass consumption was concerned, and Clair’s “embarrassing” spoof on the assembly line (in A nous la liberté) was only further proof of the French inability to understand “how deeply the mechanized process of labor reaches into our daily life.”¹⁰⁸

In his first longer essay on the French capital, “Paris Observations” (1927), Kracauer assumes the perspective “from Berlin,” sketching the perceptions of someone who has lost confidence in the virtues of bourgeois life and who “even questions the sublimity of property,” who “has lived through the revolution [of 1919] as a democrat or its enemy,” and whose “every third word is America.” While he does not exactly identify with this persona, by the end of the essay he clearly rejects the possibility that French culture and civility could become a model for contemporary Germany. “The German cannot move into the well-warmed apartment that France represents to him today; but perhaps one day, France will be as homeless [obdachlos] as Germany.”¹⁰⁹ The price of Paris life and liveliness is the desolation and despair of the banlieu and the provinces that Kracauer describes in his unusually grim piece “The Town of Malakoff.” Contemplating Malakoff’s melancholy quarters, he finds, by contrast, even in the barbaric mélange of German industrial working-class towns signs of hope, protest, and a will toward change.¹¹⁰ When he returns from another trip to Paris in 1931, he is animated by a political conversation on the train, and as the train enters Berlin’s Bahnhof Zoo, the nightly city appears to him “more threatening and torn, more powerful, more reserved, and more promising than ever before.”¹¹¹ In its side-by-side of “harshness, openness . . . and glamour,” Berlin is not only the frontier of modernity but also “the center of struggles in which the human future is at stake.”¹¹²

Paradoxically, the more relentlessly Kracauer criticizes the pathologies of mass-mediated modernity, the less he seems to subscribe to his earlier utopian thought that, someday, “America will disappear.” In fact, the more German film production cluttered the cinemas with costume dramas and operettas reviving nationalist and military myths, and the more the film industry accommodated to and promoted the political drift to the right, the more it became evident that America must not disappear, however mediocre, superficial, and inadequate its current mass-cultural output might be. The constellation that is vital to Kracauer’s understanding of cinema and modernity is therefore not that between Paris and Berlin, but that between a modernity that can reflect upon, revise, and regroup itself, albeit at the expense of (a certain kind of) memory, and a modernity that parlays technological presentness into the timelessness of a new megamyth: monumental nature, the heroic body, the re-armored mass ornament—in short, the kind of Nazi modernism exemplified by Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl.

This constellation emerges from the juxtaposition of two vignettes that, like his writings on the circus, project the problems and possibilities of mass-mediated modernity onto an earlier institution of leisure culture, the Berlin Luna Park. In an article published on Bastille Day, 1928, Kracauer describes a roller coaster whose façade shows a painted skyline of Manhattan: “The workers, the small people, the employees who spend the week being oppressed by the city, now triumph by air over a super-Berlinian New York.” Once they’ve reached the top, however, the façade gives way to a bare “skeleton”:

So this is New York—a painted surface and behind it nothingness? The small couples are enchanted and disenchanted at the same time. Not that they would dismiss the grandiose city painting as simply humbug; but they see through the illusion and their triumph over the facades no longer means that much to them. They linger at the place where things show their double face, holding the shrunken skyscrapers in their open hand; they have been liberated from a world whose splendor they nevertheless know.¹¹³

In the shrieks of the riders as they plunge into the abyss, Kracauer perceives not just fear but ecstasy, the bliss of “traversing a New York whose existence is suspended, which has ceased to be a threat.” This image evokes a vision of modernity whose spell as progress is broken, whose disintegrating elements become available in a form of collective reception in which self-abandonment and jouissance provide the impulse for critical reflection.

Two years later, in an article entitled “Organized Happiness,” Kracauer reports on the reopening of the same amusement park after major reconstruction. Now the attractions have been rationalized, and “an invisible organization sees to it that the amusements push themselves onto the masses in prescribed sequence,” he writes, anticipating Adorno as much as Disney World.¹¹⁴ Contrasting the behavior of these administered masses with the unregulated whirl of people at the Paris foires, Kracauer makes the familiar reference to the regime of the assembly line. Like the rationalized Sarrasani Circus, where the space for improvisation and playful parody has disappeared with “the elimination [Ausfall] of the clowns,” the organization of the refurbished Luna Park does not leave “the slightest gap.”¹¹⁵ When he arrives at the newly refurbished roller coaster, the scene has changed accordingly. Most of the cars are driven by young girls, “poor young things who are straight out of the many films in which salesgirls end up as millionaire wives.” They relish the “illusion” of power and control, and their screams are no longer that liberatory. “[Life] is worth living if one plunges into the depth only to dash upward again as a couple [zu zweit].” The seriality of the girl cult is no longer linked to visions of gender mobility and equality, but to the reproduction of private dreams of heterosexual coupledom and fantasies of upward mobility. Nor is this critique of the girl cult available, let alone articulated, in the same sphere or medium as the phenomenon itself (unlike Hollywood’s own demontage of the girl cult that Kracauer had celebrated in his review of Frank Urson’s film Chicago¹¹⁶); rather, it speaks the language of a critique of ideology in which the male intellectual remains outside and above the largely female, and feminized, public of mass consumption.

The hallmark of stabilized entertainment, however, is that the symbol of the illusion has been replaced. Instead of the Manhattan skyline, the façade is now painted with an “alpine landscape whose peaks defy any depression [Baisse].” All over the amusement park, in fact, Kracauer notes the popularity of “alpine panoramas”—“a striking sign of the upper regions that one rarely reaches from the social lowlands.” The image of the Alps not only naturalizes and mythifies economic and social inequity but also asserts an untouched, timeless nature, a place beyond contradiction and political crisis. Against the mass-mediated “urban nature”—with “its jungle streets, factory massifs, and labyrinths of roofs”—the alpine panoramas, like the contemporary mountain films, proffer a presumably unmediated nature as the solution to modernity’s discontents.¹¹⁷ The recourse to antimodern symbols does not make this alternative any less modern: As Kracauer increasingly excoriates the return, in German films and revues, of the Alps, the Rhine, Old Vienna and Prussia, of lieutenants, fraternities, and royalty, he recognizes it as a specific version of technological modernity, an attempt to nationalize and domesticate whatever liberatory, egalitarian effects this modernity might have had.

In his earlier discovery of “Amerika,” Kracauer had hoped for a German version of mass-mediated modernity that would be capable of enduring the tensions between a capitalist economy in permanent crisis and the principles and practices of a democratic society. Crucial to this modernity would have been the ability of cinema and mass culture to function as a sensory-reflexive matrix in which a heterogeneous mass public could recognize and negotiate the contradictions they were experiencing, and in which they could confront otherness and mortality instead of repressing or aestheticizing it. Whatever stirrings of such modernity the Weimar Republic saw, it did not find a more long-term German, let alone European, elaboration—Berlin never became the capital of the twentieth century. Instead, “Berlin” was polarized into an internationalist (American, Jewish, diasporic, politically and artistically radical) modernism and a Germanic one that assimilated the most advanced technology to the reinvention of tradition, authority, community, nature, and race. When the National Socialists perfected this form of modernism into the millennial modernity of total domination and mass annihilation, “America” had to become real, for better or for worse, for Kracauer and others to survive.