The Cultural Spaces of Siegfried Kracauer: The Many Surfaces of Berlin
New Formations › Nbr. 61, July 2007
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The Cultural Spaces of Siegfried Kracauer: The Many Surfaces of Berlin
The jumble of Berlin street life and the glossed over spaces of the city are recurrent themes in the writings of Siegfried Kracauer. So much so that one could be forgiven for thinking that, from his journalistic essays onwards, much of his life's work represents a sort of iterative journey designed to redeem the details of everyday life through the lens of the urban. Martin Jay's acute observation that Kracauer's seemingly disparate projects all share the same goal of 'redeeming contingency from oblivion'1 is certainly one that holds for his evocative descriptions of what many took to be the superficial spaces of Weimar Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s: the shopping arcades, the hotel lobbies, repair shops, bars, employment exchanges, underpasses, railway stations, and the like. Having been claimed for posterity as a film theorist, an historiographer and, more recently, as a pioneering critic of popular culture, it is equally plausible to claim Kracauer for urban studies, not merely for his ability to map the cultural contours of city life, but, more significantly, for his extraordinary urban sensibility.
In recognising something distinctive to Kracauer's approach to city landscapes, I follow the well-trodden path of those such as Inka Mulder-Bach, Miriam Hansen and other more explicit urban commentators like David Frisby and Anthony Vidler,2 who have all pointed to the metropolitan topography that so preoccupied him. What, to my mind, has tended to be underplayed in this recognition, however, is what singles him out from the crowd of metropolitan observers; namely his peculiar phenomenological appreciation of the culture, texture and feel of life as it is lived out 'on the surface' of the city. In certain respects, his approach to life 'on the face' of reality prefigures contemporary efforts to capture the active presence of daily life as it is performed from one city space to the next. What he shares with such performative accounts is an understanding that all that there is to consider is right in front of you and even though we may not always fully grasp its signi...See the full content of this document
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