matthewhandelman thedialecticsofotherness:siegfried ... · kracauer finds so objectionable is the...

Matthew Handelman

The Dialectics of Otherness: SiegfriedKracauer’s Figurations of the Jew, Judaismand Jewishness

Kracauer between “Deutschtum” and “Judentum”

In the early 1920s, the Berlin lawyer and founder of the Verband national-deutscher Juden, Max Naumann, published a series of provocative pamphletsthat divided German Jewry into three distinct groups: national-German Jews,Jewish nationalists, and “in-betweeners” [Zwischenschichtler]. Particularly pro-blematic, according to Naumann, was the third category that ambiguously occu-pied a place between the assimilationist and Zionist standpoints:

The third group is the in-between class [Zwischenschicht]. It sits between the classes whosepath is paved by clear and forceful feeling. It sits between the national-German Jew, whosenational consciousness is rooted [wurzelt] steadfastly in the soil [Boden] of the Germanhomeland [Heimat] and the Jewish national, whose national feeling hovers in limbo[schwebt] in the clouds. (1921, 9)

For Naumann, the “in-betweeners” represent an abnormal evolution of post-emancipation Jewish life in Germany, distrustful after millennia as the pariah,unable or unwilling to identify fully with their Jewishness, and, in the end,disliked by Jews and non-Jews alike (1920, 11–13). In 1922, towards the beginningof his tenure writing for the Frankfurter Zeitung, the German-Jewish cultural critic,journalist and later film-theorist Siegfried Kracauer begged to differ:

The author [Naumann] has thought up a scheme, which at first sight seems convincing, butwhich is really too crude to capture reality. With his characterization and rejection of the“in-betweeners,” he makes the situation far too simple. The superficiality [Oberflächlichkeit]of his depiction of the dominant trends within Jewry [Judentum], a depiction that betrays hisignorance of the opinions of Jewish religiosity and cannot be exonerated from unkindnessand arrogance, such superficiality equals the ambiguity of his stance towards Germanness[Deutschtum]. (2011 5.1, 459)1

1 Henceforth quotations from Siegfried Kracauer will be followed, when available, by TomLevin’s translations from The Mass Ornament (Kracauer 1995). Other translations, or modifica-tions, aremy own. Olivier Agard shows howKracauer later writes from Parisian exile in 1935 to theeditor of the paper that dismissed him, the Frankfurter Zeitung’s Friedrich T. Gubler, reflecting onhis own relationship to Jewishness in precisely Naumann’s terms: “The foundation [Grund] in my

DOI 10.1515/YEJLS-2015-0007

For an intellectual like Kracauer, who is increasingly garnering attention for hiscritical writings on culture, photography, and film, the above quote may surpriseus on two fronts: Kracauer not only speaks here on behalf of “Jewish religiosity,”but also seemingly rejects the idea of the “in-betweener” when the idea of the“medium” figures so prominently in his theories of media and history. Maybe,then, what Kracauer finds objectionable is not Naumann’s term itself. Maybe whatKracauer finds so objectionable is the lack of theoretical rigor and efficacy thatNaumann affords the position of the German-Jewish “in-between,” a social posi-tion and concept that, as this article explores, help shape Kracauer’s diagnosis ofthe crisis of modernity in the Weimar Republic as well as offer new avenues tounderstand his otherwise undertheorized relationship to Jewishness itself.

The curiousness of Kracauer’s resistance to Naumann’s idea of the “in-betwe-ener” lies in the term’s proximity to a handful of concepts that Kracauer himselfoften deploys to describe his own biography and thought: marginal, Other,intermedial, extraterritorial and liminal, to name a few.2 Born of the first criticalengagements with mass media and culture, these terms – especially the outsiderand exilic perspective, the anteroom type of thinking, the surface-level phenom-enon – provide the foundation upon which renewed interest in Kracauer’s filmtheory, philosophy of history, and “unique cultural critique” builds (Gemündenand von Moltke 2012, 3). As I argue in the following article, however, the theore-tical centrality of such terms, in particular the concept of the Other and Otherness,emerges in a discourse focused on the figure of the Jew, a rejection of Judaism,and a negotiation of Jewishness in Kracauer’s cultural and philosophical writingsof the early Weimar Republic. Yet the centrality of the Other here is much morethan just a simple exchange, as in Peter Gay’s dictum, of the “Outsider” for“Insider” (2001). Rather, the ways by which Kracauer’s position on the marginssimultaneously place him in the middle of modernist intellectual and culturaldebates reveal the paradox and nuance of not only a figure like Kracauer, who wethought we were coming to understand better, but also many of Kracauer’s more

work is very Jewish (but certainly not in the sense of the Zionists or even the Assimilationists!)”(KracauerNachlass,German Literary Archive, Marbach amNeckar; henceforth as KNDLA)2 These are some of the terms often invoked by scholarship on Kracauer. See, for instance, MartinJay, who writes: the term “extraterritoriality” served as the heading under which Kracauer filednumerous letters in his Nachlass in the 1960s relating to his biography (1985b, 152). Cf. Kracauer’sown usage of the term in History: The Last Things Before the Last 1995, 86. In 1930, WalterBenjamin likewise refers to Kracauer as an “Outsider” [Außenseiter] (1991, 219). Recent scholar-ship on Kracauer emphasizes the importance and contemporary relevance of an extraterritorialview in his work as a cultural critic; see Gemünden and von Moltke’s introduction (2012, 1–5) andmany of the essays in that collection, includingMülder-Bach (2012, 276–291).

The Dialectics of Otherness 91

well-known German-Jewish friends and compatriots, including members of theFrankfurt School.

The name Kracauer is often remembered and cited today less because of hisnegotiation of German Jewishness, and more for his work as the feuilleton editorat the Frankfurter Zeitung, his exile in 1933 for political as much as religiousreasons, and his adopted home in the United States, where he would composeand publish his best-known writings on film and history. But a closer look atKracauer up into the middle of the 1920s paints a more complicated picture of hisrelationship to Judaism as a religion and Jewishness as a cultural and socialidentity.3 Born into an assimilated, lower-middle class Jewish family on themargins of Frankfurt’s high-bourgeois Jewish community, Kracauer grew upcelebrating yet dreading religious events and holidays.4 Kracauer came of age ina familial setting not fully disassociated from its Jewish heritage and his uncleIsidor even compiled and published a history of the Jews in Frankfurt, as docu-mented in Kracauer’s autobiographical novel Ginster (1928).5 Kracauer’s brief yetintense participation in explicitly “Jewish” religious circles occurs in the yearsfollowing the First World War, during which he belonged to the circle of youngintellectuals (including Leo Löwenthal, Erich Fromm, Franz Rosenzweig, andothers), who gathered around the charismatic youth leader and rabbi in Frankfurtam Main, Anton Nehmias Nobel.6 While Kracauer eventually broke ties with morereligiously engaged German-Jewish figures such as Rosenzweig, Martin Buber,and Margarete Susman later in the 1920s, which I will discuss in detail below,prominent Kracauer scholars such as Miriam Hansen nevertheless maintain thatJewish religious themes, such as gnosticism and messianism, play a salient rolein his theories of history and film well into the 1960s.7 The incongruence of manyelements of Kracauer’s biography – his roots in the lower echelons of Frankfurt’s

3 A few articles examine Kracauer’s biographical relationship to, and his conceptual engagementwith, Jewishness, Jewish culture, Judaism and his German-Jewish intellectual contemporaries.See Agard (2007, 347–348); Brodersen (2001, 7–16); Belke (1994, 45–55).4 Cf. biographical details and letters in Belke and Renz (1989, 1–10) and Brodersen (2001, 10–11).5 Kracauer (2004W 7, 346–47). See also Isidor Kracauer (1925–1927).6 See accounts by Handelman (2011, 237–243); Lesch and Lesch (1990, 176–179); and Jay (1985a,198–211). On Kracauer's early work, seeMülder (1985).7 In part, my goal here is to clarify how, as Miriam Hansen astutely claimed in 1991, Kracauerpartakes in significant if not also complicated ways “in the discourse of modern Jewish Messian-ism.” For Hansen, Kracauer’s early writings, some examined below, and his later theories ofhistory and film show how the intellectual can work toward redemption via the “cabalist conceptof tikkun,” [“restoration”]. Hansen (1991, 52–58, here 52). See also Hansen (2012, 21–23); Agard(2007, 350) and Michael Kessler’s discussion of the confluence of Jewish theology in Kracauer’sphilosophy of history (1990, 105–128, especially 123).

92 Matthew Handelman

Jewish bourgeoisie, his hostility to his contemporaries, his underexplored com-mitment to a theory of redemption – compel us to rethink the narratives that bothGerman-Jewish intellectuals and those who study them have told about theJewish experience of modernity in Germany – as a cultural symbiosis, a cata-strophic failure, a longing for community, and a search for authenticity, to namea few.8

Roughly between the years 1919 and 1922, Kracauer’s writings reveal a newperspective on the German-Jewish experience, one either forgotten or overlookedbecause of the contrarian position it frequently takes to Judaism and other Ger-man-Jewish intellectuals. In this brief period Kracauer confronts us with a stand-point that is anathema to the symbiotic union of Germanness and Jewishnessthat, for example, Rosenzweig proposed in 1918: “Let us be Germans and Jews;both, without worrying about the ‘and,’without speaking too much about it, trulyboth.”9 What Kracauer adds to the debate is what later commentators, such asJacques Derrida, emphasize as the moment of disjunction and rupture in Rosenz-weig’s phrase “Germans and Jews” (1991, 43–45). For Kracauer, the double Other-ness associated with such disjointedness transforms the connection of “German-ness” [Deutschtum] to “Jewishness” [Judentum] from an “and” to a “neither-nor,”in which the dual negation does not stop in philosophical aporia. Rather, Kra-cauer moves in the interstices between “Germanness” and “Jewishness” throughwhat I call a dialectics of Otherness: a position that emerges from “in-between”both Germanness and Jewishness, that draws on facets of both philosophical andcultural traditions without accepting either or simply swapping one for theother.10 As we shall see, such dialectics permeate deep into Kracauer’s thinking:as much as he is ascribed a position of distance or indeed distances himself fromeach pole of the German-Jewish continuum, the intellectual identity he cultivatesand for which he is known in the present ultimately carries with it a philosophicalcommitment to critique and traces of religious fidelity to negative theology oftenassociated with both the German or the Jewish traditions.

In order to explore these dynamics, the following analysis studies two keymoments in Kracauer’s intellectual career roughly encompassing the periodbounded by the end of the First World War and Kracauer’s gradual transition intoa fixed position at the Frankfurter Zeitung in the early 1920s. First, it examineshow Otherness arises in Kracauer’s writings around 1919, centering on the figureof the Jew and the Self as Other in European society and focusing on tropes of

8 See Isenberg (1999) and Brenner (1998), as well as the contributions in the present volume.9 Rosenzweig (1979, 508).10 For another usage of the concept “dialectics of Otherness,” as a point of intersection betweentheology and philosophy, see Floyd (1988).


homelessness, the wandering Jew, and the stranger. Second, it examines howKracauer consciously positions himself as the Other in relation to numerousdiscourses in contemporary German-Jewish intellectual life, especially thosefocused on messianism, mysticism and gnosticism. Under the sign of dialectics, Icontend that Kracauer positions Otherness both in the figure of the Jew andagainst Judaism and Jewish religious ideas in ways that, in the end, work toreinstate him as a major German and Jewish modernist intellectual. The spaceKracauer forges for himself between Germanness and Jewishness is significant,not only because it shows how the method of “keep[ing] binary alternatives insuspension” is unique to Kracauer’s cultural-critical writings and must be seen inthe context of an ongoing engagement with Jewishness, the figure of the Jew, andthe Other (Gemünden and von Moltke 2012, 3). The space that Kracauer carves outfor himself is also significant because it suggests that the origins of and ongoinginterest in Critical Theory – in the work of some of Kracauer’s closest friends andcontemporaries – often occupies a similar region “in-between” Germanness andJewishness, especially in the first few chaotic decades of the twentieth century.

Wandering, the Jew, and Modernity

Born in 1889, Kracauer began his career as a cultural critic and philosopher byworking his way up to feuilleton editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1924, where inthe coming decade he gained notoriety for his astute analyses of mass culture,media, and modernity during the Weimar Republic. Yet, decades before better-known texts like “The Mass Ornament” (1927), Kracauer’s youthful reflections onJewishness and Otherness foreshadow many of the tropes and metaphors thatinform his diagnosis of the crises of modernity. Separated from German society bythe sheer fact of his Jewishness, the young Kracauer frequently connects aprofound sense of foreignness and isolation to his physical appearance, smallstature, and perceived lack of social acceptance, as many accounts of his earlybiography demonstrate.11 Seeing himself as “not attractive” [nicht schön] and the“smallest” [der Kleinste], Kracauer’s self-awareness of social non-belonging per-colates into his student years, during which he explains: “I would like to find ahuman soul [Menschenseele], just one with whom I could connect through com-munal work in the closest friendship for life. Everything in me drives me towards

11 As Belke writes relating a dream about exile Kracauer recorded in his diary in 1918: “Anywayone would like to interpret this dream, the feeling of ‘foreignness’ developed quite early inKracauer’s life.” (1990, 46)


a friend, my entire current life and desire is directed toward only one thing: thesearch for a friend.”12 Indeed, Kracauer’s friends at various points commented onhis status as an “Outsider” and many of his intellectual counterparts left unflat-tering records of his “non-European” and “African” appearance.13 Moreover, asIngrid Belke writes, Kracauer’s most socially estranging experience was linked tostammering, which tortured him as a schoolchild and prohibited his career as ateacher or academic later in life.14 For Kracauer, social relationships palpablyshape and resurface in ideas at the heart of his thinking. A non-Europeanappearance and stammer situate Kracauer, for instance, directly within an anti-Semitic discourse in German culture and society that had for centuries locatedJewish Otherness in physiognomy and speech.15 Especially in a case such asKracauer’s, whose main theoretical contributions have tended to come from hisanalyses of the “surface” [Oberfläche] or “surface-level-expressions” [Oberfläche-näußerungen], a relationship between surface-level appearance and the me-chanics of social inclusion and exclusion is anything but superficial.16

Parallel to Kracauer’s reflections on physiognomy, many of his first theore-tical texts further associate the trope of Otherness with, and at times embody it in,the figure of the Jew as an outcast in the German and Christian world.17 Towardthe end of his architectural studies in 1911, Kracauer composed an unpublished

12 Quoted in Belke and Renz (1989, 5 and 9).13 Cf. Benjamin (1991, 219). Joseph Rothwrites in 1925: “Dr. Kracauer is a poor wretch. Once everyten years he’s given his head, and is allowed to visit Berlin for a week or just a weekend, but – onaccount of his speech impediment and his un-European appearance – he’s never allowed torepresent the paper [Frankfurter Zeitung] abroad. He has a clever and ironical mind with noimagination, but in spite of so much understanding he remains naïvely likable. […] I myself amalways learning from him, I just muster the patience to wait for half an hour while he stammersout his pearls of wisdom. It’s worth it, believe me” (Roth 2012, 60–61). See various remarks onKracauer’s appearance made by Asja Lacis, Hans Mayer, and Rudolf Arnhem (in Jay 1985, 153),Günther Anders (in Belke 1990, 46), and Rosenzweig (2002, 779).14 “A young Kracauer found,” Belke writes, “his worst deficit probably to be his speech impedi-ment: he stuttered and, despite all efforts, could not overcome it. Any future teaching activity wasthus out of the question.” (1990, 46).15 For discourses on the Jewish body, see Gilman (1991).16 Here I refer to the opening line of Kracauer’s 1927 essay “The Mass Ornament”: “The positionthat an epoch” or, wemay add, person “occupies in the historical process can be determinedmorestrikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’sjudgments about itself.” (2011 5.2, 612; 1995, 75)17 As Kracauer writes to Benjamin in 1935 on adjusting in exile to the “Anglo-Saxon countriesand France”: “it should actually be easier for me than for many others to make such anadjustment, since I have always taken an alien, even hostile view of whatever might be called theGermanmentality,” in Kracauer and Benjamin 1987, 82. Translation fromKoch 1991, 95.


text entitled “Die ewigen Juden” that sheds new light on the topics of identity andmodernity in Kracauer’s early thinking. As a short notebook entry, the text linksthe trope of homelessness and wandering with the figure of the “eternal Jew” ascharacteristic of the prevailing intellectual circumstance of the times. In otherwords, the text translates Kracauer’s anxiety over Otherness in terms of appear-ance into terms of transcendence: “There certainly must be something like home-less souls [heimatlose Seelen].”18 Invoking tropes of uprootedness, homelessness,and a lack of divine authority, “Die ewigen Juden” prefigures topics essential toKracauer’s diagnosis of modernity a decade later. Indeed, it even anticipatesGeorg Lukács’ famous characterization of the novel as the aesthetic reflection ofthe age of “transcendental homelessness” in Theorie des Romans (1920).19 ForKracauer, “[t]he outcast” [Ausgestoßene] and “those lonely by necessity” [Verein-samte aus Notwendigkeit] share the fate of “the eternal Jew, who must wanderincessantly without being allowed to find a home [Heimat].”20 In anti-SemiticChristian-German discourses, the legendary “eternal” or “wandering” Jew repre-sents the curse of immortality and homelessness that stands not just for the Jewsas a people in general, but, more specifically, for the figure of Ahasuerus, who,according to one major variant of the legend, must wander the earth after denyingChrist respite while carrying the cross to Golgotha.21 Kracauer, however, turns anarchetypically pejorative tale of the Jew in the Christian legend on its head, as“wandering” and “homeless” souls can, as per “Die ewigen Juden,” find solace ifthey recognize their proper realm [Reich] as “between people” [zwischen denMenschen].22 Linking the figure of the Jew, the trope of homelessness, and theindividual’s experiences of modernity in the concept of the “between,” the text“Die ewigen Juden,” constructs a theoretical forerunner to, as we shall see, the

18 “Die ewigen Juden,” KNDLA.19 “[T]he novel form is, like no other, an expression of this transcendental homelessness,”Lukács 1971, 41. See also Kracauer’s enthusiastic review of Lukács (2011 5.1, 282–288).20 “Die ewigen Juden,” KNDLA.21 For an extensive account of the legend, see Anderson (1965). Even before the propagandafilms in the 1940s, the German legend often emphasized longevity (“der ewige Jude”), while boththe French (“Juif errant”) and English (“wandering Jew”) variants foreground wandering; see thebibliography in Edelmann (1986, 1–2). According to Edelmann, the element of wandering becamean important element of the legend with the infamous 1602 chapbook Kurtze Beschreibung undErzehlung von einem Judenmit Namen Ahasuerus, etc. 3–4.22 Noteworthy, but beyond the scope of the current study, is how Kracauer incorporates numer-ous concepts from Friedrich Nietzsche in “Die ewigen Juden.” He describes, for instance, thehomeless soul’s acceptance of his or her place in society in terms of the constructive resignationNietzsche calls fati amor.


type of hesitant, provisional, and anteroom thinking he privileges in the WeimarRepublic and finds in film and history after the SecondWorld War.

However, Kracauer is not alone in linking the tropes of Jewish eternality,wandering and nomadism with modernity, but rather these leitmotifs are deeplyand problematically ensconced in the foundational texts of early-twentieth cen-tury German sociology by Max Weber, Werner Sombart, and Georg Simmel.23

Weber, Sombart, and Simmel were major figures in Kracauer’s early intellectualinterest and work in sociology, which directly engages Weber and Simmel andintermittently mentions Sombart.24 For Simmel, Sombart and Weber, the trope ofJewish nomadism provides the conditions for the emergence and spread ofmodern capitalism. But where Weber and Sombart emphasize the affinities thatrational and exchange societies exhibit with traits often associated with Jews,Jewishness or Judaism, the connection Simmel argues for between Jews andcapitalism hinges on historical circumstances of sociological marginality, limin-ality and mobility – ideas that resonate with and resurface in Kracauer’s writings.

In Die Philosophie des Geldes (1900), Simmel compares the essence of moneyto socially marginal groups, such as the Moors in Spain, the Chettiar in India, andthe Jews in Europe. The Jews serve Simmel as the “best example” of the relation-ship between “money interests” and “social deprivation”:

The basic trait of Jewish mentality to be much more interested in logical-formal combina-tions than in substantive creative production must be understood in the light of theireconomic condition. The fact that the Jew was a stranger [Fremder] who was not organicallyconnected with his economic group directed him to trade and its sublimation in puremonetary transactions. […] It was of particular importance that the Jew was a stranger notonly with regard to the local people, but also with regard to religion. Since the medieval banon taking interest was therefore not valid for him, he became the recognized person formoney lending. The high interest rate charged by Jews was the result of their being excludedfrom land ownership [Gelöstheit vom Boden]: mortgages on landed property were never safefor them, and so they always feared that a higher authority would declare their claims nulland void. (Simmel 2011, 242 and 1920, 225)

23 As Sombart forcefully claims: “the rationalism which, as we have seen, is inseparable fromnomadic life, here entered into play, and it is not too much to say that ‘Nomadism’ is theprogenitor of Capitalism. The relationship between Capitalism and Judaism thus becomes moreclear.” (1913, 343) See Rehberg (1988) and other theorizations of the connection between Jews andcapitalism, such as Slezkine (2004, 53–54) andMuller (2010, 46–60).24 Kracauer attended Simmel’s lectures in Berlin (Belke and Renz 1989, 11–12). For Kracauer’swritings on Weber, see “The Crisis of Science” (2011 5.1, 591–601; 1995, 213–224) and for his briefreferences to Sombart, see (2011 5.1, 666 and 2011 5.2, 135).


On a thematic level, Simmel counters Sombart’s image of the calculating (“logi-cal-formal”) Jew, relocating the source for Jewish prevalence in “pure monetarytransactions” within their social and economic liminality in the Diaspora. On thelevel of discourse, however, Simmel grounds Jewish marginality not just in thefigure of the “stranger” [Fremder], a sociological figure that Simmel expandsupon in conjunction with European Jews in his famous study Soziologie (1908).The conditions for Jews acting as agents of capitalism – lending money and takinginterest – resides for Simmel in their religious foreignness and “exclusion fromland ownership.” The original German phrase (“Gelöstheit vom Boden”), how-ever, invites a second interpretation: Jewish marginality not only exists, asSimmel put it above, “with regard to the local people,” but also is predicated onmetaphysical disjointedness, a spiritual incongruence with the terrestrial andspiritual powers that be in Europe since the Middle Ages. Less important for bothSimmel and Kracauer are any specific religious tenets of Judaism or even self-constructions of Jewish identity; rather, for them, the Jew’s special social statusand potential are byproducts of their mobility, homelessness and status of Other-ness ascribed to them in Christian Europe.

Yet the homelessness and mobility embodied by the figure of the Jew servesKracauer not only as a lens through which to decipher his own experience of theearly twentieth century, but also as the defining feature of the historical epochitself. Likewise, Simmel sets the terms of the discourse on the Jew in Europe inwhich Kracauer participates while also falling victim to the crisis in modernthought that those terms indicate, as Kracauer’s treatise “Georg Simmel: EinBeitrag zur Deutung des geistigen Lebens unserer Zeit” (1919) argues. Published inpart during Kracauer’s lifetime, the text critiques Simmel’s methodology of creat-ing an analytical web that connects its sociological objects of study, while alsoserves as an homage.25 In its final analysis and evaluation of Simmel’s work, thetext shifts tone from philosophical and scientific to literary and allegorical in orderto capture what Kracauer considers the essential problem of Simmel’s philosophy:

A person meanders through dark streets. Lights shine through every window, inviting himin. He hurries into the houses and stays awhile in all of the bright rooms, experiencing thelife in each of them for a short time. What their inhabitants never know, and never willknow, this reveals itself to him. His soul touches concealed connections and the secret underthe surfaces. Because he, as a stranger [Fremder], is not interwoven in the effects andcounter-effects of those who are at home in these chambers, he has the power and freedomto say, wherever he may go, the unsayable. But he is only a stranger, someone who comes inonly to leave again soon. Therefore: as much as he knows of the lives of those who are

25 Only the first section was published during Kracauer’s lifetime (2004 9.2, 139–280; 2011 5.1,129–164;1995, 225–258). The full treatise was first publishedwith his collectedworks in 2004.


bound to a location, he has never experienced their actual happiness. He is a thousandtimes richer than them, for he passes by them, at once close and familiar and he is athousand times poorer than them, because he has no home [Heimat] as they do. This personis Simmel: a guest, a wanderer [ein Gast, ein Wanderer]. (2004 9.2, 270–271)

Within the context of Simmel’s oeuvre, Kracauer reapplies Simmel’s well-knowndiscussion of the stranger [Fremder], in which Simmel distinguishes the socio-logical type of the wanderer (who comes and immediately departs) from thestranger (who comes and stays).26 But Kracauer notably blurs the rigid socio-logical types of the stranger [Fremder], wanderer [Wanderer] and guest [Gast] thatSimmel explicitly separates. Alongside the contrasting imagery of the streets andthe houses, the dark and the inviting light, Kracauer’s emphasis falls as much onSimmel’s intellectual transience as on his lack of a home [Heimat]. Even thoughKracauer never mentions Simmel’s Jewishness in the treatise, the text’s imageryhinges on Simmel as a wanderer, not just in all nations, but in all systems ofbelief, and at home in none. Simmel is the homeless soul and the wandering JewKracauer postulated in 1911, the living symptom of a time – call it moderncapitalism – in which the ability to be at home has become fundamentallyproblematic.

For Kracauer though, the tropes of homelessness, the wanderer, and the Jewembodied by Simmel are endemic of a much larger and systemic problem of theearly twentieth century: the intellectual character of modernity as a whole.Certainly, “Georg Simmel” offers an example of such intellectual wandering androotlessness when viewed from Simmel’s theory of the infinite interconnected-ness of all spiritual and social phenomena.27 But such mobility is not Simmel’sproblem alone; rather, he symbolizes the inability to escape fully from a form ofphilosophical relativism indicative of the destabilizing effect that capitalism,secularization and the natural sciences have exerted on the institutions of author-ity and religious belief. “Simmel too is a relativist,” Kracauer writes. “The Abso-lute finds no place [Stätte] and can find none here, because no idea is rooteddeeply enough in the essence of his thinking so that it could form the unshakablefoundation of the multitude of his spiritual expressions” (2011 9.2, 231). Again cast

26 See “Excursus on the Stranger” (Simmel 2009, 601–605, here 601). See also Kracauer’sassociation of the stranger with photography in reference to Proust in Theory of Film (1997, 14);thanks to Johannes vonMoltke for the reference.27 According to Kracauer, Simmel slips logically unrestricted from subject to subject, drawingconnections via analogy [Analogie] and comparison [Gleichnis]: “All expressions of spiritual/intellectual life are interrelated in countless ways. No single one can be extricated from this webof relations, since each is enmeshed in the web with all other such expressions.” (2004 9.2,150–154; 1995, 232)


in terms of the lack of a home [as Heimat or Stätte], the main ailment of modernityfor which Simmel is a symptom is less a problem with “the Absolute” per se, andmore the experience of a world abandoned by “the Absolute.” God is not dead toKracauer, but any connection to the Absolute has been lost in, to quote InkaMülder-Bach, “the exile of modernity” (2012, 276).28

Precisely here, in Kracauer’s diagnosis of homelessness as the key ingredientin a theory of modernity, is where one aspect of the dialectics of Othernessemerges. The nuance between Kracauer’s adaptation and reapplication of theidea of transcendental homelessness and Lukács’ original coinage of the termprovides the key distinction: Lukács emphasizes “transcendence” and the loss of“totality,” while the emphasis falls, for Kracauer, on the troubled nature of theidea of home, of “Heimat” itself – as dubious as the term’s conservative andnationalist overtones may be. As documented in the critical literature and evidentin numerous essays that Kracauer published between 1918 and his preeminentsociological study Die Angestellten (1930), the experience of modernity in theearly twentieth century for Kracauer is, in the sense of Yuri Slezkine’s “JewishCentury,” the experience of the Jew par excellence: exile, diaspora and the radicalabsence of places, approaches, or theories one could reasonably call an intellec-tual home.29 The paradoxical centrality of the Jew as a figure of Otherness is oftenhidden but paramount, as Kracauer writes in his 1926 review of the first edition ofFranz Kafka’s The Castle: “according to mythological imagination, he who lookedat the face of Medusa turned into stone; the Jew Kafka brings the horror [dasEntsetzen] into the world, because the face of truth eludes the world.” (2011 5.2,

28 Many of Kracauer’s critical essays from the late 1910s and early 1920s that explain his criticalsentiments – on Simmel, Max Scheler, or Ernst Bloch – are targeted less at individuals and moreat each thinker as a symptom of the immediate postwar period of political chaos and lack ofintellectual authority. See the subtitle to Kracauer’s Simmel essay itself: “A Contribution to theInterpretation of the Spiritual Life [des geistigen Lebens] of Our Times.” (2004 9.2, 139) Likewise,as he concludes his negative review of Scheler’s Vom Ewigen im Menschen (1921): “The figure ofScheler that shines forth from this work with all its weaknesses and merits is in many respectscharacteristic of our time [unsere Zeit].” (2011 5.1, 316; 1995, 210) Similarly, in his review of Bloch’sThomas Münzer (1921), Kracauer writes: “Shrouded in darkness, living in worldly subjugation, wewait doubly keen on words that bring a message; it is now, since so many souls await, truly aproductive hour for the breath of prophetic speech.” (2011 5.2, 460)29 Slezkine (2004, 1) and Spector (2006). As Kracauer writes in 1917: “The most painful ill of ourtimes is the lack of general rules for our conduct and the development of our inner lives, a lackwhich has as a following […] an isolating [vereinsamendes] and painful ignorance to the questions‘where to’ and ‘what for.’” (2011 5.1, 27) Similar motifs resurface in Kracauer’s Angestellten: in thechapter “Shelter for the Homeless” [Asyl für Obdachlose], Kracauer writes that “the mass ofsalaried employees differ from the worker proletariat in that they are spiritually homeless [geistigobdachlos].” (2006 1, 288–297, here 288; Kracauer 1998, 88–95, here 88)


494) The wandering Jew not only resurfaces in Kracauer’s final work, History: theLast Things before the Last (published posthumously in 1969), but, as mentionedabove, the tropes of homelessness, mobility and wandering prefigure the verybasis of anteroom thinking – a way of thinking that does not “lend itself to beingdealt with in a definitive way” and “eludes the grasp of systematic thought” –which Kracauer advocates in the 1960s (1995, 191). All this is to say that Kra-cauer’s experience of Jewish Otherness and his figurations of the Jew as Other inGermany, in the end, reveal their centrality to German modernist discourses, bothin Kracauer’s time and in how we have come to understand modernism in thepresent. Indeed, the almost obsessive prominence of provisionality, non-systema-ticity, and Otherness in Kracauer’s oeuvre makes one wonder, in retrospect, ifKracauer himself did not find a final intellectual refuge, perhaps even somethingakin to a home, in these very same terms.

An Unreligious Man: Kracauer and Judaism

The figure of the Jew embodies for Kracauer the experience of modernity, but, atthe same time, a strong and enduring intellectual hostility toward Judaism andcertain Jewish religious ideas permeates Kracauer’s writings of the early 1920s. Asnumerous letters and some of his first critical essays to appear in the FrankfurterZeitung reveal, Judaism provides no solution for Kracauer to the exile of moder-nity, for which, paradoxically, the figure of the Jew stood above. A missive in 1921to Leo Löwenthal, a lifelong friend and later central member of the FrankfurtSchool, serendipitously summarizes Kracauer’s position vis-à-vis other German-Jewish intellectuals and their stance towards Jewish religious ideas:

Teddie [Adorno] bought himself [Bloch’s] Geist der Utopie and finds Lukács more significant,which I was delighted to hear. I will still have to give the lectures at the “Jewish Lehrhaus,”Rosenzweig is implacable. You are not allowed to come to them, I can tell you that already,because it will be a fiasco (linguistically!). (Löwenthal and Kracauer 2003, 24)

As a Jew in Germany, Otherness was out of his control above; here, however,Kracauer willfully distances himself from major strands of secular and religiousJewish thought in the Weimar Republic: the neo-Marxist messianism of Lukácsand Ernst Bloch and the Jewish renewal efforts headed by Rosenzweig. Referen-cing Rosenzweig, a leading philosopher, pedagogue, and public intellectual inFrankfurt after the First World War, Kracauer forecasts his later 1921 lecture onreligious movements at the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, the institute for adulteducation focusing on the revitalization of Jewish traditions that Rosenzweighelped found in 1920. That the lecture ended in the “fiasco” Kracauer had


predicated, due as one may suspect to his stutter, in no way eased the well-documented tensions between Kracauer and the Jewish renewal efforts lead byRosenzweig, Martin Buber and others associated with the Lehrhaus.30 For Kra-cauer, any attempt to recapture the eternal truths of Judaism as text and traditionruns the risk, as he writes in his scathing criticism of Rosenzweig and Buber’sBible translation project, of being out of touch with an epoch more deeply andurgently afflicted by the social sea change of mass culture and media as well asthe instability of the postwar economy.31

But as much as he rejects Rosenzweig’s revivalist standpoint, Kracauer alsovehemently opposes in the letter above the neo-Marxism, messianism, and uto-pianism in Bloch’s Geist der Utopie (1918), a critical stance often under-theorizedin scholarship on Kracauer’s early work.32 Without doubt, Kracauer and Blochreconciled their philosophical differences later in the 1920s and remained lifelongfriends.33 Yet Kracauer’s initial hostility to what Anson Rabinbach detects inBloch’s and Benjamin’s messianism as “Jewishness without Judaism” is signifi-cant, not least because Kracauer functions here as an important mentor andinterlocutor to a milieu of younger intellectuals, including many future membersof the Frankfurt School (1997, 30). Moreover, the questions that messianism raisesfor Kracauer deserve closer scrutiny because current interest in Kracauer’s the-ories of film and history often brings both into the proximity of such messianicthinking.34 The core of Kracauer’s hostility to messianism surfaces in his letters to

30 See Handelman (2011) and Lesch and Lesch (1990). Rosenzweig reflects on Kracauer’s lectureat the Lehrhaus in a letter from 1922: “Kracauer was mymistake, because, as a result of his speechimpediment, he cannot speak publicly – privately his stutter gets a bit better. I encouraged himtremendously, because I thought that I could help him overcome his nervousness. He was quitetaken by this idea and thus all themore depressedwhen, in the end, it did not work.” (1979, 861)31 See Kracauer’s essay “Die Bibel auf Deutsch” (2011 5.2, 374–388; 1995, 189–201) and Jay’sseminal study (1985a).32 See Rabinbach (1997) andWeissberg (1994).33 Regarding their reconciliation, compare Bloch’s epistolary response in 1922 to Kracauer’scriticism of Bloch’s Thomas Münzer to Bloch’s welcoming missive in 1926 responding to Kra-cauer’s review of Rosenzweig and Buber in “Die Bibel auf Deutsch” (Bloch 1985, 265–271). Cf. Koch(2000, x).34 Hansen (2012, 21–23). I do not wish to suggest that Kracauer’s resistance to the messianicelements in Bloch’s thinking in 1921 precludes his later participation in similar discourses. Indeed,as Hansen shows, redemption and restoration remains a leitmotiv in Kracauer’s thinking through-out his intellectual career. Yet, with the evidence provided here, a deeper reconstruction of themessianic elements in Kracauer’s thinking is warranted. Unfortunately, a more definitive analysisof the origins of Kracauer’s link to messianism is an assignment beyond the scope of the currentanalysis.


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Löwenthal, many of which were intended to sway the latter away from Bloch’sintellectual influence:

There is a cramp in this messianism, which skips over the entire world, which is foreign[fremd] to me at the deepest level. I would like to apply your wonderful words here,‘blasphemous piousness.’ God himself cannot have wanted this demonic mad-dash to him,or he created humanity and the world in a fit of devilish malice. Truthfully stated: I don’tbelieve in the messianic time (the ‘time filled with meaning’ from Lukács means somethingdifferent). I don’t believe in this God, and if only this desperado attitude is religious, then Iam a fully unreligious man and will stay that way too. (Löwenthal and Kracauer 2003,31–32; emphasis in original)

Not only does Bloch’s messianic thinking neglect the materiality of the world –despite its own Marxist commitments – but it exhibits a haste and intrusiveness,which Kracauer argues, time and again, lack the modesty and patience that truebelief should have. As with Kracauer’s analysis of Simmel, it is imperative to lookat the terms employed to reject messianism, which hinge on the word “foreign”[fremd]. Foreignness, however, cuts both ways for Kracauer. Bloch’s Marxist-Jewish messianism is “foreign” to the materialist undercurrents that informKracauer’s thinking on mass culture and film. At the same time, Kracauer’sunwillingness to accept Bloch puts Kracauer in a self-assumed Outsider position,marginal to some of the most well-known currents in secular Jewish intellectualthinking after the First World War.35

But more is afoot in Kracauer’s hostility to Bloch’s messianism than merephilosophical posturing. Their disagreements in the early 1920s rather emphasizeKracauer’s adherence to a set of theoretical principles that underlie, as GertrudKoch puts it, “his recalcitrant insistence on critique,” which estranged him fromfellow German-Jewish thinkers, such as Rosenzweig, Buber and Susman (2000, 9).As a new Jewish attitude or ethos, “Jewish messianism” emerges in Bloch’s worktowards the end of the FirstWorldWar, when, as LilianeWeissbergwrites, “Jewishreligion was often no longer accepted,” but “Jewishness could be redefined withina philosophical and political context.” (1992, 38) Philosophical and political,Bloch’s messianism proposed an alternative viewpoint on being Jewish in Ger-many to the assimilationist, nationalist, and renewal movements predominant atthe end of the nineteenth century. According to the logic of Bloch’s messianism,radical rupture such as the First World War potentially precipitates the messianic

35 I mean “well-known” both in terms of his time and in current historiography of the period.See, for instance, the letter from Bloch responding to Kracauer’s critical review of Bloch’s ThomasMünzer, mentioned in a note above: “I can assure you that in Berlin, where I was just in the circlesaround Döblin and Lukács, your review caused the most astonished shaking of heads andprompted the question of how such a thing is still possible today.” (Bloch 1985, 266)


Kingdom’s [Reich] entrance into history, which redeems humanity from the emer-gent problems of modernity, such as capitalism, hyper-rationalization, and theloss of community.36 As Bloch describes it, to reach the messianic Kingdom wemust “overcome, through the power of transmigrational dispersal, and finallythrough the Apocalypse, as the absolute work of the Son of Man, the history thatcannot be experienced in its entirety.” (2000, 255) Given the emphasis Kracauerputs in other texts from the same period on the trope of homelessness, one can seehow Bloch’s messianic “Kingdom” provided Kracauer with significant cause forconcern. And, as we shall see, such concern also signals Kracauer’s dialecticalreturn to amore traditional, if not alsomore “Jewish,”mode of thinking.

The first problem with Bloch’s messianism for Kracauer resides in the apoc-alyptic and chiliastic vision of history that Bloch employs to make predictionsabout, supposedly, the coming messianic Kingdom. More specifically, not onlyBloch, but also many of his fellow German-Jewish intellectuals lack for Kracauerthe kind of tangible evidence needed to back up such serious theological andphilosophical claims. As Kracauer writes again to Löwenthal in 1921:

I can’t believe in this Messiah: to wish something into existence, which I don’t believe in, isimpossible for me. In contrast, were the Messiah not to be a reality, and instead some sort ofregulative ideal, then this, in the end, is what German Idealism yearns for (which means thatit yearns just as much as such a messianism). My entire embitterment with these new“homines religiosi” is that they speak of things, which au fond they really know nothingabout. Rosenzweig babbles about God and the Creation of the world, as if he had been therehimself and even Buber is a gnostic and a mystic. Scheler does the same with phenomenol-ogy and Bloch is outspokenly intrusive. (Notice, here, how nobly Lukács behaves!!!) Incomparison, my catechism is quite sparse: I believe that a higher being rules over us and thatwe are creatures and, as such, have no access to the secrets of the Creator. I strictly reject allstatements regarding the beginning of the world, the end of the world, and so forth.37

Anticipating Kracauer’s essay “Prophetentum,” his harsh review of Bloch’s Tho-mas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution in 1922, the epistolary passage abovefunctions onmultiple rhetorical levels.38 For Kracauer, themessianic theologies ofthe present are untenable, not just because such “yearning” for the “Messiah” is

36 See Rabinbach (1997, 29): “Messianism demanded a complete repudiation of the world as it is,placing its hope in a future whose realization can only be brought about by the destruction of theold order. Apocalyptic, catastrophic, utopian, and pessimistic, messianism captured a generationof Jewish intellectuals before the First WorldWar.”37 Quoted in Belke and Renz (1989, 36).38 See “Prophetentum” (2011 5.1, 460–469) and the discussion in note 32 above. Coincidentally,Kracauer’s review of Bloch’s Thomas Münzer directly followed his criticism of Naumann, quotedabove (2011 5.1, 459–460).


really just another form of Idealism, a system of thought that the First World Warand the fall of the German Empire rendered obsolete. The intellectuals listed above(Rosenzweig, Bloch, Buber, and Max Scheler) are thus dubious for Kracauer, inthat they make claims about “the beginning of the world, the end of the world,”which could form the building blocks of systematic thought. Such systemeticity isanathema to the type of “anteroom” or “provisional” that Kracauer privilegesmore or less explicitly from his first book, Soziologie als Wissenschaft (1921), to hislast, History.39 At a deeper level, though, Kracauer also upholds if not defends thefundamental sacredness and, hence, unnameability and unrepresentability of the“Messiah” and the “Creator.”Here, Kracauer betrays his own relative orthodoxy incontrast to his contemporaries and announces, with his “catechism,” nothing lessthan a personal prohibition on messianic and theocentric imagery. In the act ofdistancing himself from such preeminent German-Jewish “homines religiosi,”Kracauer in effect reinscribes his own conservative, if not also paradoxicallycentral and traditional, position within these very same discourses.

The second, and more general, problem with Bloch’s messianism lies in itsattempt to overcome the conditions of wandering and homelessness that, as perthe example of Simmel, Kracauer believes to underlie the experience of modernityitself. For Kracauer, Bloch not only represents a symptom of the crises of moder-nity, but also stands in the way of their resolution. Scholarship on Kracauer hasfrequently located the programmatic formulation of Kracauer’s solution in his1922 essay “Those Who Wait,” which delimits three primary spiritual reactions toexistence rendered empty by the disappearance of an Absolute. While scholarlyfocus usually falls on Kracauer’s third position of “hesitant openness,”which pits“self-preparation” against speculation over the “last things,” Kracauer’s descrip-tion of the first reaction to the emptiness of modern life embodied by the “skepticas a matter of principle” and, especially, the second by the “short-circuit person”are much more revealing of Kracauer’s position towards Judaism and Jewishreligious ideas (2011 5.1, 389–393; 1995, 135–139; translation modified).40 AsKracauer evaluates the thinking that motivates “short-circuit” intellectuals:

39 See, for instance, Soziologie als Wissenschaft, in which Kracauer attempts to apply EdmundHusserl’s recent work in phenomenology to construct a “pure” sociology, whose judgments arevalue-free and, like mathematics, based in objective necessity. The project is a successful failure,in asmuch as sociology’s subject of study constitutes a “bad infinity” incongruent with “closeablesystematic attention.” (2006 1, 28–29) Adorno locates Kracauer’s resistance to closure in hisinfamous “The Curious Realist” in the “antisystematic tendency in Kracauer’s thought and hisaversion to idealism in the broadest sense of the term.” (1991, 161)40 See, in English, Levin’s introduction to Kracauer (1995, 13–14) as well as Hansen (2012, 21–22and 24). For Kracauer, Max Weber best represents the “skeptic as a matter of principle.” (2011 5.1,


Similar to the wanderer [Wanderer], who, after many odysseys, thinks he has spotted thesheltering homestead [Heimstätte], so too do all those today experience looking to theedifice of the various religions from the outside and with new eyes, with yearning eyes.These wondrous living constructs, which have grown over time – both unconcerned withand defiant of it – encompass a world and a reality different from the one in which physicalevents and economic processes unfold in their chaotic diversity. They guarantee the faithfula unification of the I with the God and with the Thou, and, thanks to the tradition in whichthey incorporate themselves and by means of which they endure, they transport the faithfulout of the sphere of meaningless change into the sphere of an eternity saturated withmeaning. The consequences of such insights and encounters are presently becoming appar-ent everywhere. (2011 5.1, 388; 1995, 134; translation modified)

Through terms such as “wanderer” and “homestead,” the passage pulls togethernumerous tropes Kracauer invoked above to discuss Simmel. Kracauer’s pointhere is simple. Thinkers such as Buber (referenced by the “I […] with the Thou”)and Rosenzweig and Bloch (“all those today”) represent a pattern of intellectualescapism, fleeing the disorientation of modern life (“the sphere of meaninglesschange”) into a transcendental home (“the sphere of an eternity saturated withmeaning”) provided by Judaism or, in Rabinbach’s words, “Jewishness withoutJudaism.” As much as such messianic claims lack the empirical evidence neededto prove them and attempt to represent the unrepresentable, even more egregiousfor Kracauer is that figures like Bloch find a spiritual home – a transcendentalsignifier, the place where thought starts and ends – in Judaism and Jewishreligious ideas, when, in the exile of modernity, such a home no longer exists.

Here again, at the apparent impasse of Kracauer’s extraterritoriality to bothGermany and his Jewishness, is precisely where Kracauer’s dialectics of Othernessresurfaces. As the First World War rendered nationalistic perspectives untenable,so too theological and philosophical revitalizations of Judaism or Jewishnessremained fundamentally problematic for Kracauer, inasmuch as they proselytizedthe advent of a socialist utopia through the Apocalypse (Bloch) or a theological-philosophical argument for Judaism as a relevant system of redemption in moder-nity (Rosenzweig). Here, Otherness functions dialectically for Kracauer on multi-ple levels. On the one hand, the conditions for Kracauer’s enduring rejection ofhis contemporaries’ philosophical and theological agendas distance him frommajor strands of Jewish intellectual discourse in Germany during the WeimarRepublic, while also revealing him as a central if not mediating voice in these verysame debates. On the other hand, the philosophical concepts that Kracauer

389; 1995, 135) Representative of the “short-circuit” thinkers are, as Kracauer writes to Löwenthal,Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock, see Kracauer and Löwenthal (2003, 34).


proposes to deal with the extant problems of modernity – including the putativephilosophical sacrilege of his contemporaries – often align Kracauer with muchmore traditional “Jewish” positions. In contrast to Rosenzweig, Bloch, or Benja-min, Kracauer’s commitments to “waiting” and “hesitant openness” programma-tically reject visions of God or the Messiah, based on an ongoing belief in ourinability to know, much less represent, the “secrets of the Creator.”41 Suchconclusions are indeed surprising. In Kracauer we recognize an intellectuallycomplex, if not paradoxical, figure who is simultaneously committed to a culturalversion of the German tradition of Kantian critique and who is also equallyfaithful to a negative theology reminiscent of a more orthodox and conservativeJewish thinker, stubbornly conscious of false messiahs and false prophets. ThatKracauer plays with the figure of the Jew as Other in Germany and, at the sametime, opposes Judaism or Jewish ideas as a spiritual home suggests that the stateof exile that Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno, Kracauer, and many others would come toinhabit began, at least for Kracauer, long before any of them became physicalexiles in 1933.

Kracauer’s Legacy, Jewishness and Critical Theory

Within the relatively small span of Kracauer’s early texts examined above, a richand far-reaching discussion of figures of Jewishness and Judaism opens up thatlays the groundwork for many of the powerful theoretical tools Kracauer uses –which we still use today – to talk about film, history and modernity. Any under-standing of Otherness, extraterritoriality, or intermediality in Kracauer’s biogra-phy and oeuvre must, I contend, reckon with how Kracauer self-consciouslyconstructs such terms through the example of the Jew in the Christian world or incontrast to the theological-messianic programs of his fellow German Jews. In-deed, the dynamic ways in which these terms arise in Kracauer’s thinking revealhow many of the productive but often disparate terms, on which renewed interestin Kracauer tends to focus, are interrelated: on the one hand, ideas of the margins,the extraterritorial, the Other and, on the other hand, ideas of the middle, themedium, the liminal and in-between. As such, the significance of the dialectics ofOtherness in Kracauer’s early work is limited neither to an examination of Kra-cauer, nor to the experience of German Jewry. Rather, what it shows us is thenuance with which many modernist thinkers approached the interrelatedness of

41 See, for instance, Rosenzweig’s understanding of Kracauer’s stance in the former’s letter from1921 (Baumann 2011, 172).


center and margin, home and exile, middle and border. Before Derrida writes thatbeing “German and Jewish” is as much a juxtaposition and disassociation as it isa problematic union, the idea of the margin was already central to the idea of thecenter and the Other, at least for Kracauer, already an essential part of theconception of the Self.

To stake such claims, however, does not equal an argument for any sort of“intrinsic” Jewish “essence” to either Kracauer’s thinking or the experience ofmodernity. Rather, what is legible in many of Kracauer’s early writings are theways topics from and thematicizations of Judaism, Jewishness and the figure ofthe Jew in Germany are inseparable from a critique of modernity, alongside itsassociated products such as film and photography. Much more than just taggingalong with the philosophical and messianic projects of his contemporaries, Kra-cauer’s discussion of the Jew, Judaism and Jewishness thus provides scholars inthe present with terms to understand more fully the varied landscape of German-Jewish intellectual life before the rise of National Socialism. Kracauer’s critique ofmodernity is, in Rabinbach’s words, as much a new “Jewish sensibility” as that ofBloch’s and Benjamin’s writings, which engage and oppose the personal, intellec-tual renewal movements ventured by Buber and Rosenzweig (1997, 27). At thesame time, however, certain core principles of Kracauer’s project – the commit-ment to materialism and a critical form of realism, for instance – reveal strands ofGerman-Jewish intellectual life incongruous with the idea of “Jewishness withoutJudaism.” What Kracauer affords us, in both theory and practice, could perhapsbe best called “Jewishness despite Judaism,” which answers the German-Jewishquestion with a response of “neither-nor.” Such Jewishness despite Judaism seeksto reveal and critique the contradictory and constructed nature of both German-ness and Jewishness, while employing theoretical tools borrowed from both toenact the critique.

Perhaps the ultimate contribution of Kracauer’s engagement with Jewishnessin the early 1920s is, finally, a fuller understanding not only of Kracauer himself,but also of a handful of his close friends who have left a much larger mark on themap of modern philosophy. Kracauer’s rejection of both Germanness and Jewish-ness resonates with certain sentiments later formulated by members of theFrankfurt School. As Löwenthal recalls in the 1960s: “we always thought ofourselves as the antithesis to the status quo, we were radical non-conformists. Wedid not want to participate [mitmachen].” Defining a driving force of CriticalTheory, Löwenthal continues:

I remember often hearing the accusation in intellectual and personal conversations that onecannot always be critical; sometimes one has to be constructive. We were always offensive,the troublemaker. You know the saying from [Erich] Kästner that cuts through such idiocy:


“Mr. Kästner, where’s the positivity?” Precisely the negative was the positive, this awarenessof non-participation [des Nichtmitmachens], of refusal; the implacable analysis of the statusquo, as far as our competence would allow us, that is really the essence of Critical Theory.(Löwenthal 1980, 47 and 80)42

Indeed, the dialectics of negation and critique serves as a cornerstone for thefounding texts of the Frankfurt School, such as Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947).43

With Kracauer as one of his primary mentors and interlocutors in the 1920s,Löwenthal may be disingenuous here about his own intellectual identity. As wehave seen above, many of Critical Theory’s most cherished analytic tools – theimplacable insistence on critique, the privileging of the part over the whole, theenactment of radical and uncompromising Otherness – come, at least in part,from a figure who perhaps fittingly was and remains an outsider to the FrankfurtSchool itself.

Acknowledgement: I would like to thank Elizabeth Mittman, Johannes vonMoltke, Kathryn McEwen, and Pat McConeghy for their commentary on earlydrafts of this article. I would also like to thank Suhrkamp Verlag and theDeutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar for granting me permission toreprint the archival materials cited below.

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