Siegfried Kracauer > Quotes

“No one could honestly say that a musical makes sense.”
― Siegfried Kracauer

“We must rid ourselves of the delusion that it is the major events which have the most decisive influence on us. We are much more deeply and continuously influenced by the tiny catastrophes that make up daily life.”
― Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays

“...[G]enuine fairy tales are not stories about miracles, but rather announcements of the miraculous advent of justice.”
― Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays

“Nicht in dem Zirkel des natürliches Lebens bewegt sich die Vernunft. Ihr geht um die Einsetzung der Wahrheit in der Welt. Vorgeträumt ist ihr Reich in den echten Märchen, die keine Wundergeschichten sind, sondern die wunderbare Ankunft der Gerechtigkeit meinen.”
― Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays

“Perhaps the only remaining attitude is one of
waiting. By committing oneself to waiting, one neither blocks one's path
toward faith (like those who defiantly affirm the void) nor besieges this
faith (like those whose yearning is so strong, it makes them lose all
restraint). One waits, and one's waiting is a hesitant openness, albeit of a
sort that is difficult to explain.”
― Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays

“Es gibt eine Menge phantastischer E.T.A.-Hoffmann-Figuren unter den Angestellten vorgerückteren Alters. Irgendwo sind sie steckengeblieben und erfüllen seitdem ununterbrochen banale Funktionen, die alles andere eher als unheimlich sind.”
― Siegfried Kracauer, Die Angestellten

“For Kracauer, the quintessential figure in this regard was undoubtedly Chaplin, and Roth’s comparison of Ginster to the figure of the Tramp bumbling his way through a department store finds ample confirmation in the praise Kracauer heaps on Chaplin in his reviews. His 1926 appraisal of Chaplin’s Gold Rush, for example, had been a hymn to the character’s profound humanity—albeit a humanity that asserts itself by retreating, by opposing the literally self-less figure of the Tramp to the “great ego-bundles” that constantly threaten to overwhelm him. Kracauer revels in the way Chaplin reduces the character to a lacuna, “a hole into which everything falls” and which has the power to shatter people’s self-perceptions. To Kracauer, the figure of the Tramp is touching, even transformative. “His powerlessness is dynamite,” Kracauer contends, describing Chaplin’s comedy as revelatory in its ability to show the world as it could be. Measured against the fact that the world persists as it is, Chaplin’s films provoke a form of laughter tinged with tears, for they bear witness to the disproportion “between the violence of the world and the meekness with which it is encountered.” As he notes these and other reactions to seeing Chaplin’s films during the mid- to late 1920s, Kracauer seems to be working out the poetic conception of the literary figure he would introduce to his readers soon after his encounters as a reviewer with The Gold Rush, or 1928’s The Circus (he also appears to have been a regular at a series of reruns of old Chaplin films that played at the Frankfurt Drexel Cinema just as he would have been writing his novel in late 1927 and early 1928). But there is another incarnation of Chaplin that resonates even more directly with Ginster. Though we have no record of when Kracauer first encountered Ballet mécanique from 1924, we can only guess at the impact this famous French avant-garde film would have had on the author of Ginster.”
― Siegfried Kracauer, Ginster

“From the beginnings the German film contained dynamite...Chaos spread in Germany from 1918 to about 1923, and as its consequence the panic-stricken German mind was released from all the conventions that usually limit life. Under such conditions, the unhappy, homeless soul not only drove straightaway toward the fantastic region of horrors, but also moved like a stranger through the world of normal reality.... That free-wandering soul imagined the madmen, somnambulists, vampires and murderers who were haunting the expressionistic settings of the Caligari film and its like.”
― Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film

“Held together by nothing more than the animator’s imagination, this cubistic figure is perhaps Ginster’s closest relative in the culture of the 1920s: to paraphrase Roth, “Ginster in Kracauer’s novel, that’s Charlot in Ballet mécanique.” Not only does Léger’s Charlot fling his limbs in ways that recall the comedic scenes of Ginster learning to march or salute his superior officers. Both on screen and in Kracauer’s novel, body parts appear as exaggerated shapes or in close-ups and behave autonomously as if to question the unifying force of outdated notions such as consciousness, individuality, organic wholeness. In any event, this is how Ginster experiences his military training: “Continually up, then down, as if one were a toy a mother picks up so her infant can fling it out of the carriage again. Oftentimes regaining the upright state was immediately followed by marching. The legs were supposed to be hurled out from the body with such force that they flew across the entire barracks grounds—which would not have been so bad, quite the contrary, Ginster would have liked to liberate if not himself then at least a few body parts—but scarcely were the legs up in the air when they were forced back down to earth. He was still sensing how they detached themselves from him and already they were crashing down.”
― Siegfried Kracauer, Ginster

“Perhaps the only remaining attitude is one of waiting. By committing oneself to waiting, one neither blocks one's path toward faith (like those who defiantly affirm the void) nor besieges this faith (like those whose yearning is so strong, it makes them lose all restraint). One waits, and one's waiting is a hesitant openness, albeit of a sort that is difficult to explain.”
― Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays

“For some time now in Germany, especially in Berlin, a young, radical intelligentsia has developed that in journals and books comes out quite vigorously and uniformly against capitalism. To the superficial glance it seems to be a serious opponent of all powers that do not, like itself, strive directly for a reasonable human order. But even if its protests may be sincere and often fruitful, it makes protesting too easy for itself. For it is usually roused only by extreme cases - war, crude miscarriages of justice, the May riots, etc. - without appreciating the imperceptible dreadfulness of normal existence.”
― Siegfried Kracauer

“I'm twenty-eight now and hate architecture, my profession. Otto's dead. Mimi--women close themselves off from me. Everybody knows how to live, I see how they go on living without me, I can't find my way in. Walls always shove themselves in front of me, it's necessary to be polite and go in disguise. Still, there is something to me. And now the war...”
― Siegfried Kracauer, Ginster