ancient cities

dealing with the widest possible array of subject
matter drawn from the everyday lifeworld of
Frankfurt and Berlin; articles relating particular
(sometimes uncanny) experiences in the city’s
streets and squares; curious encounters with eccentric
figures; visits to various bars, cafés, and restaurants;
discussions of metropolitan architecture,
planning, and design; numerous film and literary
reviews; reports on contemporary exhibitions,
shows, and premieres; and, additionally, occasional
communiqués from other cities, Paris in
particular.
For Kracauer, these miniature texts were of
greater and more enduring significance than mere
commonplace journalism. In true modernist fashion,
and like his contemporaries Walter Benjamin
and Ernst Bloch, Kracauer eschewed any systematic,
totalizing account of the modern cityscape.
Instead, he and they recognized the potential of
textual fragments for authentically capturing and
representing the disparate, fractured reality of
mundane metropolitan existence. For Kracauer, in
particular, the seemingly innocuous “surface manifestations”
of the cityscape were nothing other
than traces, hieroglyphs, or dream images that,
once recovered and deciphered by the critical theorist,
could render the metropolis momentarily
legible.
Many years later Kracauer selected a number of
these fragments for inclusion in two collections:
Das Ornament der Masse (1963, translated as The
Mass Ornament, 1995) and Strassen in Berlin und
Anderswo (1964). These textual mosaics, or montages,
repeatedly foreground the superficial and
transient features of the urban environment.
Shunning the planned and permanent architectural
fabric of the city, for example, Kracauer is fascinated
by the spontaneous figures and serendipitous
formations fleetingly composed by the crowds and
traffic in motion on the urban street. He is irresistibly
drawn to the intricate play of memory, to the
ephemeral glimpsed en passant, to the instantaneous
and improvised. Indeed, “improvisation”
understood as a freedom of flow between forms, as
an effortless process of emergence and disappearance,
as intentionless, endless unfolding, becomes
the key concept in his writings. Improvisation, be
it as a writer, a musician, an acrobat or dancer,
be it as a flâneur in the city, is a kind of idiosyncratic
and utopian mode of creative composition
Kracauer, Siegfried
423
in contrast to the strictly calculated and controlled
routines choreographed by the culture industry
and exemplified by the machine-like precision and
repetition of the Tiller Girls dance troupe, the mass
ornament par excellence.
Writing the Urban Ethnography
Kracauer’s journalistic writings came together in
a slightly different form during the Weimar
Republic. Originally serialized in the Frankfurter
Zeitung, his 1929 “ethnography” of the emergent
and increasingly dominant class of white-collar
workers in Berlin, Die Angestellten (The Salaried
Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany)
constitutes a pioneering study of the terra incognita
of the contemporary urban petite bourgeoisie.
Drawing on a wealth of diverse documentary
sources, interviews, and observations, Kracauer’s
study presents the thoroughly rationalized and
routinized lifeworld of office employees as blighted
by spiritual homelessness and boredom, impoverished
by inner meaninglessness and existential
isolation, abject feelings for which the distracting
products of the city’s rapidly expanding culture
industry were peddled as compensation and consolation.
In response to this crisis, the alienated
modern individual, like the Tiller Girl, desperately
sought integration into the wider social group,
longed for a sense of purpose and belonging, all
too happily fell into step, be it dancing, be it
marching. Kracauer’s eclectic ethnography presents
a timely series of images of an urban petite
bourgeoisie soon to swap its white collars for
brown shirts.
Writing the Paris Cityscape
On the advice of the Frankfurter Zeitung, on
February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire,
Kracauer left Berlin for exile in Paris. There he
began work on, and in 1937 published, Jacques
Offenbach and the Paris of His Time, a “societal
biography” (Gesellschaftsbiographie), which, instead
of foregrounding the life of an individual like
conventional biographies, took the experiences of
the famous composer as a lens with which to view
the socioeconomic, cultural, and political life of
Parisians during the Second Empire. In tracing
the fluctuating popularity of Offenbach’s witty