Siegfried Kracauer (February 8, 1889, Frankfurt am Main, Germany - November 26, 1966, New York) was a journalist, sociologist, and film critic.

Biography

Between 1907 and 1913 Kracauer studied architecture, eventually obtaining a doctorate in engineering in 1914 and working as an architect in Osnabrueck, Munich, and Berlin until 1920.

From 1922 to 1933 he worked as the leading film and literature editor of the Frankfurt newspaper in Berlin, where he worked alongside Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, amongst others. Between 1923 and 1925, he worte an essay entitled Der Detektiv-Roman (The Detective Novel), in which he concerned himself with the everday life phenomenom of modern civil society.

Kracauer contined this trend over the next few years, building up theoretical methods of analyzing circuses, photography, films, advertising, tourism, city layout and dance, which he published in 1927 with the work Ornament der Masse (Ornaments of the Masses).

He became increasingly critical of capitalism (having read the works of Karl Marx) and eventually broke away from Frankfurt newspaper. About this same time (1930), he married Lili Ehrenreich.

In 1933, Kracauer emigrated to Paris, for political reasons. However, Nazism continued to spread and so he, in 1941, immigrated to the USA.

From 1941 to 1943 he worked in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, supported by Guggenheim and Rockefeller scholarships for his work in German film. Eventually, he published From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, (1947) which traces the birth of National Socialism from the cinema of the Weimar Republic as well as helping lay the foundation of modern film criticism. (ISBN 0691115192)

In 1960, he released "Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality," which argues that realism is the most important function of cinema. (ISBN 0691037043)

In the last years of his life Kracauer worked as a sociologist for different institutes, amongst them in New York as a director of research for applied social sciences at Columbia University. He died there, in 1966, from the consequences of pneumonia.

Theory

Kracauer analyzed and critiqued the phenomena of modern mass culture. He built up a general theories based upon dozens of smaller examples. His attention to detail lends itself to an inductive method. He was one of the first to treat the cinema seriously; in it he saw a mirror of social conditions and desires.

Theodor Adorno viewed Kracauer as one of the major contributors to his work. Another alcolyte is Kurt Tucholsky, who admired Kracauer's scientific approach to writing.