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Georg
Best remembered today for his exploration of early German cinema (From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Study of the German Film), Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) was the editor for cultural affairs at Germany’s leading liberal newspaper during the Weimar Republic until its disastrous end. His Georg is a panorama of those years as seen through the eyes of a rookie reporter working for the fictional Morgenbote (“Morning Herald”). In a defeated nation seething with extremism right and left, young Georg is looking for something to believe in. For him, the past has become unusable; for nearly everyone he meets, paradise seems just around the corner. But which paradise? Kracauer’s grimly funny novel takes on a confused and dangerous time which can remind us of our own. The style is briskly cinematic.
- GenresFictionGerman Literature
381 pages, Paperback
First published March 11, 2013
1 person is currently reading
69 people want to read
About the author
Siegfried Kracauer
97 books77 followersBorn to a Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main, Kracauer studied architecture from 1907 to 1913, eventually obtaining a doctorate in engineering in 1914 and working as an architect in Osnabrück, Munich, and Berlin until 1920.
Near the end of the First World War, he befriended the young Theodor W. Adorno, to whom he became an early philosophical mentor.
From 1922 to 1933 he worked as the leading film and literature editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung (a leading Frankfurt newspaper) as its correspondent in Berlin, where he worked alongside Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, among others. Between 1923 and 1925, he wrote an essay entitled Der Detektiv-Roman (The Detective Novel), in which he concerned himself with phenomena from everyday life in modern society.
Kracauer continued this trend over the next few years, building up theoretical methods of analyzing circuses, photography, films, advertising, tourism, city layout, and dance, which he published in 1927 with the work Ornament der Masse (published in English as The Mass Ornament).
In 1930, Kracauer published Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses), a critical look at the lifestyle and culture of the new class of white-collar employees. Spiritually homeless, and divorced from custom and tradition, these employees sought refuge in the new "distraction industries" of entertainment. Observers note that many of these lower-middle class employees were quick to adopt Nazism, three years later.
Kracauer became increasingly critical of capitalism (having read the works of Karl Marx) and eventually broke away from the Frankfurter Zeitung. About this same time (1930), he married Lili Ehrenreich. He was also very critical of Stalinism and the "terrorist totalitarianism" of the Soviet government.
With the rise of the Nazis in Germany in 1933, Kracauer migrated to Paris, and then in 1941 emigrated to the United States.
From 1941 to 1943 he worked in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, supported by Guggenheim and Rockefeller scholarships for his work in German film. Eventually, he published From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), which traces the birth of Nazism from the cinema of the Weimar Republic as well as helping lay the foundation of modern film criticism.
In 1960, he released Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, which argued that realism is the most important function of cinema.
In the last years of his life Kracauer worked as a sociologist for different institutes, amongst them in New York as a director of research for applied social sciences at Columbia University. He died there, in 1966, from the consequences of pneumonia.
His last book is the posthumously published History, the Last Things Before the Last.
Near the end of the First World War, he befriended the young Theodor W. Adorno, to whom he became an early philosophical mentor.
From 1922 to 1933 he worked as the leading film and literature editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung (a leading Frankfurt newspaper) as its correspondent in Berlin, where he worked alongside Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, among others. Between 1923 and 1925, he wrote an essay entitled Der Detektiv-Roman (The Detective Novel), in which he concerned himself with phenomena from everyday life in modern society.
Kracauer continued this trend over the next few years, building up theoretical methods of analyzing circuses, photography, films, advertising, tourism, city layout, and dance, which he published in 1927 with the work Ornament der Masse (published in English as The Mass Ornament).
In 1930, Kracauer published Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses), a critical look at the lifestyle and culture of the new class of white-collar employees. Spiritually homeless, and divorced from custom and tradition, these employees sought refuge in the new "distraction industries" of entertainment. Observers note that many of these lower-middle class employees were quick to adopt Nazism, three years later.
Kracauer became increasingly critical of capitalism (having read the works of Karl Marx) and eventually broke away from the Frankfurter Zeitung. About this same time (1930), he married Lili Ehrenreich. He was also very critical of Stalinism and the "terrorist totalitarianism" of the Soviet government.
With the rise of the Nazis in Germany in 1933, Kracauer migrated to Paris, and then in 1941 emigrated to the United States.
From 1941 to 1943 he worked in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, supported by Guggenheim and Rockefeller scholarships for his work in German film. Eventually, he published From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), which traces the birth of Nazism from the cinema of the Weimar Republic as well as helping lay the foundation of modern film criticism.
In 1960, he released Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, which argued that realism is the most important function of cinema.
In the last years of his life Kracauer worked as a sociologist for different institutes, amongst them in New York as a director of research for applied social sciences at Columbia University. He died there, in 1966, from the consequences of pneumonia.
His last book is the posthumously published History, the Last Things Before the Last.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 30, 2017
Georg, Siegfried Kracauer’s second novel, is a revelation for readers familiar with the German critic’s seminal, if somewhat dour, writings about film and popular culture in the tumultuous Weimar Republic. Georg sardonically chronicles it’s eponymous central character’s search for purpose in a homeland wracked by post-war socio-economic anomie. Devoid of both personal agency and a decisive worldview, Georg seems trapped in a kaleidoscope whose abrupt shifts in outlook deprive him of lasting insight. Paradoxically, however, nearly every aspect of the novel is filtered through Georg’s point of view, which veers from objective to subjective modes of depiction: thus richly detailed descriptions of class struggle precipitously elide into comically surreal transformations of Georg’s surroundings, motivated solely by his isolated perceptual experience.
Driven to “become someone,” a public figure, Georg drifts from the salons of bourgeois faux revolutionaries to a position as a reporter at the Morning Herald, a spurious socialist newspaper whose opportunistic shift to the political right mirrors developments in the society it purports to critique. Ironically, drifting seems to be Georg’s only course of action: his allegiances lurch from Catholicism to communism, from profound homosexual infatuation to casual heterosexual encounters, none of which assuage his inability to connect with anyone or anything as the kaleidoscope's rotation shunts him to another prospect of diminishing returns.
The most surprising aspects of Georg are its modernist narrative devices and bursts of trenchant humor. As a filmgoer, Kracauer clearly developed more than his theory of a national unconscious reflected in its movies. He also absorbed the grammar of silent film, whose precise construction of space and time could be disrupted by editing practices like jump cutting (rapid change of position within a single shot) and crosscutting (alternating depictions of two events occurring simultaneously in different spaces). Kracauer continually creates literary equivalences of cinematic editing in his prose, bestowing an almost cubistic effect on its narrative structure. And who would expect an affiliate of Frankfurt School luminaries like Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno to unleash hilarious one liners when least expected? This surprising lightness of touch leavens Georg’s grim realism, where little hope is to be found as the kaleidoscope casts a glimpse on Germany’s fate after the Weimar Republic’s demise.
Mention should be made of Carl Skoggard’s nimble translation of a text filled with dramatic changes in style and emotional register. Skoggard captures wonderfully the nuances of speech among a multitude of characters, never injecting false notes of anachronism or Anglicization. Also, the meticulous research on display in his endnotes is an always welcome enhancement of the reading experience.
Driven to “become someone,” a public figure, Georg drifts from the salons of bourgeois faux revolutionaries to a position as a reporter at the Morning Herald, a spurious socialist newspaper whose opportunistic shift to the political right mirrors developments in the society it purports to critique. Ironically, drifting seems to be Georg’s only course of action: his allegiances lurch from Catholicism to communism, from profound homosexual infatuation to casual heterosexual encounters, none of which assuage his inability to connect with anyone or anything as the kaleidoscope's rotation shunts him to another prospect of diminishing returns.
The most surprising aspects of Georg are its modernist narrative devices and bursts of trenchant humor. As a filmgoer, Kracauer clearly developed more than his theory of a national unconscious reflected in its movies. He also absorbed the grammar of silent film, whose precise construction of space and time could be disrupted by editing practices like jump cutting (rapid change of position within a single shot) and crosscutting (alternating depictions of two events occurring simultaneously in different spaces). Kracauer continually creates literary equivalences of cinematic editing in his prose, bestowing an almost cubistic effect on its narrative structure. And who would expect an affiliate of Frankfurt School luminaries like Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno to unleash hilarious one liners when least expected? This surprising lightness of touch leavens Georg’s grim realism, where little hope is to be found as the kaleidoscope casts a glimpse on Germany’s fate after the Weimar Republic’s demise.
Mention should be made of Carl Skoggard’s nimble translation of a text filled with dramatic changes in style and emotional register. Skoggard captures wonderfully the nuances of speech among a multitude of characters, never injecting false notes of anachronism or Anglicization. Also, the meticulous research on display in his endnotes is an always welcome enhancement of the reading experience.
March 31, 2022
Ein für mich anfangs etwas träger aber dann doch sehr faszinierender Entwicklungsroman, der in Verbindung mit Kracauers soziologischer Untersuchung "Die Angestellten" einen nützlichen Einblick in die Zeit zwischen den Weltkriegen ermöglicht.
January 13, 2024
3,5. Konnte mich mit dem Protagonisten nicht recht anfreunden; in sprachlicher Hinsicht ist der Autor jedoch sehr kreativ, viele interessante, auch humorvolle Metaphern (über das in der Zeitungsredaktion erhaltene Zimmer - "ein viereckiges Loch, das wie ein Blinddarm an einem der Korridorschläuche hing" oder "dass sein Gesicht mit einem Mal an einen abgegessenen Teller gemahnte". Insgesamt kam mir das Buch sehr modern vor.
Ich werde möglicherweise noch "Ginster" lesen (wo Erfahrungen im 1. Weltkrieg verarbeitet werden).
Ich werde möglicherweise noch "Ginster" lesen (wo Erfahrungen im 1. Weltkrieg verarbeitet werden).
September 12, 2023
Ich hatte mir "Georg" als Gegenprogramm zum aufgeregten Schlüsselroman von Stuckrad-Barre zurechtgelegt, auf den ich keine Lust hatte, und bin mit der Setzung meiner Prioritäten ganz zufrieden. In diesem, auch einem, Journalistenroman bewegt sich die Hauptfigur Georg sprunghaft in den unterschiedlichsten Kreisen wie ein von einer spiegelnden Oberfläche zurückgeworfener Lichtfleck. Gezeigt wird ein integrer Mensch, der sich gerade aufgrund seiner absoluten, unerfahrenen und biegsamen Integrität peinlich verhält. Die Szenen wechseln so ruckhaft wie die Prüfung verschiedener Weltanschauungen, z. B. Vulgärpazifismus > Katholizismus > Kommunismus. Nicht klein sind die Teile, die, traditionell modern, in Gesellschaften spielen. Das ist alles bösartig und witzig auserzählt, und Michael Rutschky hätte das niemals gekonnt. Wenn man in den Subtext eintaucht, findet man heraus, dass der Roman voll von geheimen Lüsten ist. Die sonderbare Beziehung Georgs zu seinem Nachhilfeschüler, dessen anziehende Traurigkeit sich zu einem kosmopolitischen BWL-Naturell wandelt, ist nur eine davon. Kracauers Sprachakrobatik ist ziemlich gewagt, aber mir hat sie gefallen.
Ansonsten gilt: Georg vor Fabian anytime!
Ansonsten gilt: Georg vor Fabian anytime!
February 17, 2021
Holy meow, Kracauer LOVES an extended metaphor / dream sequence, at least when he writes fiction. It took a second to get used to the style (or the style of the translation), but once I gave in to the more hallucinatory aspects of the text and stopped trying to figure out what was "actually" going on, I found myself - quite enjoying myself. It's like a novel of ideas / reverse bildungsroman where everybody ends up worse off than where they started - most people don't learn anything; the best ones become communists. It's startlingly easy to identify (morbidly) with the hapless title character. Good book to read for an American in 2021.
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June 10, 2024took us forever to read! something about moving to a new apartment right after you start a book makes it hard to keep going
Read
May 26, 2024I had prepared “Georg” as a counterprogram to the meddlesome 2023 roman à clef by Stuckrad-Barre, which I had no desire to read, and I am quite happy with the way I have set my priorities. In this, also a journalist's novel, the main character Georg meanders in a variety of different environments like a spot of light reflected from a mirror surface. He is a person of integrity whose actions will quickly embarrass others precisely because of his absolute, inexperienced and flexible integrity. The scenes change as abruptly as the examination of different world views, e.g. from vulgar pacifism to catholicism to communism. Several parts play in pseudo-Bohemian get-togethers. It's all narrated in a subtly malicious and funny way. If you delve into the subtext, you find that the novel is full of secret lusts. One of them is Georg's special relationship with his pupil, whose attractive sadness turns into a personality fit for cosmopolitan business administration. Kracauer's linguistic acrobatics are quite daring, but I liked them. And then, you shall not differentiate between your children, I mean, book you’ve read, but: Georg over Fabian any time!
Rating: *****
Rating: *****
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews