Orpheus, Perseus, Ahasuerus: Reflection and Representation in Siegfried Kracauer's Underworlds of History

Abstract

This article argues that Siegfried Kracauer's History: The Last Things Before the Last articulates new modes of historical thought and historical representation that respond to the challenge to traditional ways of thinking about and representing history embodied by the Holocaust. The mode of historical thought Kracauer articulates, modeled on Orpheus’ underworld journey, envisions the past as a visual space through which the historian wanders, engaging with the images of particular periods and events he encounters there. The mode of historical representation, modeled on the “terrible face” of Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, seeks to capture the provisionality of the impressions created by the historian's journey through the underworld of history. This mode of representation, which Kracauer compares to the techniques of modernist literature and film montage, revises a more realist model of historical representation he articulated in Theory of Film, in comparing documentaries about the Holocaust to Perseus’ mirrored shield.