Film und Kino als Spiegel. Siegfried Kracauers Filmschriften aus Deutschland und Frankreich by Viola Rühse

Abstract

Reviewed by: Film und Kino als Spiegel. Siegfried Kracauers Filmschriften aus Deutschland und Frankreich by Viola Rühse Frederic Ponten Film und Kino als Spiegel. Siegfried Kracauers Filmschriften aus Deutschland und Frankreich. By Viola Rühse. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. Pp. 328. Paper €69.95. ISBN 978-3110705751. The main topic of Viola Rühse's book is Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) and his early occupation with film as a journalist in the 1920s and early 1930s in Frankfurt and Berlin, as well as during his exile as a freelance writer in Paris from 1933 to 1941. His escape to the USA after the German attack against France serves as a biographical endpoint of Rühse's study, even though Kracauer's later prominent book publications on film, such as From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Theory of Film (1960), serve as a necessary horizon to understanding both continuities and ruptures in his work, most of which has been edited in the important Werkausgabe (2004–2012). The book neither aims to give an entirely new picture of Kracauer's early work, nor does it attempt to radically reorient views on Weimar cinema or 1920s film theory and largely follows in its general assessments the standard literature on the topic by Inka [End Page 167] Mülder-Bach, Miriam Hansen, and Helmut Stalder. In fact, the book's scope is pleasantly modest, as it promises to direct attention to some of the—so far—overlooked or underresearched Kracauer texts (and drafts) and their contexts. This leads Rühse, by examining archival materials in Kracauer's Nachlass and recently digitized collections of early twentieth-century journals and newspapers (19), to trace—with surprising intensity and depth—not only motifs in Kracauer's writing, but also social history, cultural history, media history, architectural history, and art history. The book sets off to a slow start: the introduction (chapter one) develops the topic of the book and mainly provides the state of the art of Kracauer research; the writing, particularly of the first pages, is unfortunately hindered by stylistic infelicities and would have benefitted from further copy-editing. The second chapter, the weakest of the seven chapters, highlights Kracauer's well-known reception of Karl Grune's film Die Straße (1923) in several publications. An excursus however, "die Analyse des Publikationskontextes des Aufsatzes 'Der Künstler in dieser Zeit'" (52), a text first published for the Jewish-German journal Der Morgen, adds an important piece to the puzzle of Kracauer's complicated relationship to his Jewish family background and the religious motifs in his thought. Chapter three dives into the social history of leftist film criticism and situates Kracauer's work on the spectrum of early political writing about film in Weimar Germany and shows for the first time the main quality of Rühse's book, which lies in its meticulous reconstruction of so far marginalized figures and voices that are in direct or indirect dialog with Kracauer's work. The same is true for the author's historicization of Kracauer's famous series of texts titled "Die kleinen Ladenmädchen gehen ins Kino" (1927). Rühse is able to reconstruct—against Kracauer's stereotypical views of the young unmarried women working in low-paying sales jobs—a perspective of these women that entails far more agency and film critical competencies than the common view of the "shop girl," held by most male intellectuals in the 1920s. Kracauer himself, as Rühse points out (99), arrived only later at a more nuanced position in his article "Mädchen im Beruf" (1932). Chapter four, the strongest chapter of the book, takes on Kracauer, the trained architect-turned-journalist, and his perspective on historic cinematic spaces. Rühse provides important contextualizations of the history of cinema architecture and its social history for Kracauer's famous essay "Kult der Zerstreuung" (1926) and his article "Kino in der Münzstraße" (1932). Rühse sheds light on how to situate Kracauer's writings on the pompous UFA Lichtspielpaläste, and on the role of cinemas frequented by the working class, who were threatened by unemployment after the financial crisis in 1929. Chapter five presents the largely...