H arry T. C raver . Reluctant Skeptic

As Harry T. Craver’s Reluctant Skeptic: Siegfried Kracauer and the Crises of Weimar Culture makes clear, the life and work of Siegfried Kracauer comprised a variety of curious tensions. Publishing philosophical deliberations in newspaper feuilletons, Kracauer scrutinized modern visual culture in search of the essence of modernity. His essays and books reveal his simultaneous dread of both relativism and the presumption of absolute truths. He both embraced Marxist positions and scorned Marxist reduction of reality to economic postulations. Kracauer was intrigued by the concept of redemption but was equally suspicious of utopian approaches, both religious and secular. Unable to “just push aside” his “Jewishness,” his writings on the topic varied between indifference, disdain, and endorsement of Judaism (Kracauer to Löwenthal, March 1, 1922, quoted on 191). Frequently seen as an icon of Weimar culture and its heritage, Kracauer nevertheless perceived himself as “extraterritorial” and protested his very classification as a “Weimar intellectual” (see discussion in Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America [1985], 152–197, here 152–153). The dismissal of conventional categories is a fundamental motif of Kracauer’s writings. Perhaps the most curious expression of this tendency was his endeavor to locate the “hollow places” between universal abstractions and contingent facts, spaces that could give rise to genuinely critical observations. Several scholars have long noted this recurring theme in Kracauer’s thought. Some have read his “paradoxical” views as manifestations of different stages in his intellectual development (see Gertrud Koch, Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction [2000], 25; Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno [2012], 24–25). Others have defined it as the pillar of his evolving “humanist stance” (Johannes von Moltke, The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America [2016], 186).

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