Light Sorrow

To study a well-known author within a lesser-known discipline is not to diminish his accomplishments or stature. Historians of modem thought are well aware that Siegfried Kracauer was first an architect, then a sociologist, ajournalist, and a novelist, and finally a historian and a theorist of film and historiography. But are we thus obligated to maintain that he approached his Sociology as Science scientifically, his novels literarily, The White-Collar Workers sociologically, Jacques Offenbach musically, film cinematically, and history historically, as his critics in the various disciplines have traditionally argued? In other words, did his object determine his methods, or did his methods determine his objects? To be sure, the architect used buildings to critique imperial architecture; the novelist wrote Ginster and Georg to critique New Objectivity; the sociologist used montage imagery to critique The White-Collar Workers; the chronicler of the Second Empire used its internal tendencies toward Bonapartism to critique the Kaiserreich; the film historian put fascism on trial; the philosopher of history Kracauer's last role critiqued the privileging of linear time. Using existing conditions as his raw material, this author managed to propose countermodels for these same conditions for always implicit in his critique was an emphatic belief in the perfectability of the basic social contract. As Kracauer developed from a critic of his day into a historiographer of his time, the energy driving him, already apparent in his work at the Frankfurter Zeitung, was later channeled into deeply meditative books that took decades to write. There is no question that the exile experience was damaging to every aspect of the exiles' lives, and Kracauer was no exception. Still, the trace left by this transition in the fabric of

Art · Literature · Sorrow · European history and politics · German Literature and Culture Studies