Collection: Siegfried Kracauer

Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) was born and raised in Frankfurt am Main. Perhaps best known for his pioneering studies in sociology and film theory, he initially trained as an engineer and architect, emerging in the Weimar years as a gifted journalist. When the Nazis came to power in early 1933, he was chief of the Berlin bureau of the left-leaning Frankfurter Zeitung. He fled, first to France and then, in 1941, to the United States, where he resolved to write only in English. His From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) and his magnum opus, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), were completed in New York, where he spent time working in the film library of the Museum of Modern Art and at Columbia University. Kracauer's novels—Ginster (1928) and Georg (1934, first published in 1963)—testify to his dramatic about-face from literary expressionism to the New Objectivity of the 1920s. Theodore Adorno, who spoke of Ginster as Kracauer's most notable achievement, paid tribute to his lifelong friend on his seventy-fifth birthday by claiming that as a young man he had already learned more about the study of philosophy from Siegfried Kracauer than he ever did from any of his academic teachers.