Reluctant Skeptic: Siegfried Kracauer and the Crises of Weimar Culture
ISBN: 9781785334597
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Berghahn Books
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Kracauer Siegfried 1889–1966 -- Criticism and interpretation; Germany -- Intellectual life -- 20th century;

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.

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.

hidden image for function call