Preface

Introduction: Kracauer on and in Weimar Modernity

Chapter 1. "Location Suggests Content": Kracauer on the Fringe of Religious Revival
Chapter 2. Reading the War, Writing Crisis
Chapter 3. From Copenhagen to Baker Street: Kracauer, Kierkegaard and the Detective Novel
Chapter 4. Religion on the Street: Kracauer and Religious Flânerie

Conclusion: Criticism in the Negative Church
Afterword: From Don Quixote to Sancho Panza

Bibliography
Index

The journalist and critic Siegfried Kracauer is best remembered today for his investigations of film and other popular media, and for his seminal influence on Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodor Adorno. Less well known is his earlier work, which offered a seismographic reading of cultural fault lines in Weimar-era Germany, with an eye to the confrontation between religious revival and secular modernity. In this discerning study, historian Harry T. Craver reconstructs and richly contextualizes Kracauer's early output, showing how he embodied the contradictions of modernity and identified the quasi-theological impulses underlying the cultural ferment of the 1920s.

Harry T. Craver holds a doctorate from the University of Toronto and currently teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His work has appeared in publications such as New German Critique.