Kracauer, Siegfried

Writing the Urban Experience in Frankfurt and Berlin

Between 1921 and 1933, Kracauer wrote nearly 2,000 contributions to the Frankfurter Zeitung[Page 423]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 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.

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