1978 and richly fed by the annual Pordenone Giornate del Cinema Muto and other retrospectives. I felt drawn to the study of early cinema, not least because it engaged film history in a theoretically inspired mode that interlaced careful attention to formal and stylistic features with empirical research into conditions of production, distribution, and exhibition as well as broader questions concerning the complex set of transformations commonly referred to as modernity.
I had come from a country in which there was effectively no tradition of film qualifying as the object of academic inquiry (with a few exceptions during the early decades of the twentieth century). There was nothing comparable to the organizational efforts in instruction, archiving, and research in the United States and France, which in recent years have themselves become the object of historical research. To be sure, film history and film theory were part of the curricula of the film academies (Ulm, Munich, Berlin) that had been founded thanks to the film politics following the 1962 Oberhausen manifesto, but these topics had no place at the universities. At the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, where I was a student from 1967 to 1976, Karsten Witte’s courses on National Socialist film and on “theory of cinema” (1970–71) were an early exception, followed by the first film courses in American Studies, which was one of my fields.2 In addition, Alexander Kluge taught a series of compact seminars on film and media in 1975–76, which I attended (and which initiated an enduring relationship of collaboration between us).
It was not that Germany—more precisely, West Germany or the Federal Republic—was lacking a film culture. While commercial theaters had been closing in great numbers and audiences were staying home to watch television, a new wave of alternative repertory theaters, both private and municipally sponsored (Kommunale Kinos), took off around 1970; the same year, a festival of independent cinema (Frankfurter Filmschau ’70) was held on the campus of Frankfurt University. In the aftermath of the student movement, a new moviegoing public emerged, eager to overcome a history still deeply compromised by Nazi cinema’s usurpation of cinematic affect and pleasure. We watched everything: “Young German” and European auteurs, New Hollywood and old, Spaghetti Westerns, the canonic works of international silent and sound cinema, contemporary experimental and underground films. This new film culture crucially included intellectually pointed critical writing on film—in the Feuilleton or cultural sections of major papers such as Frankfurter Rundschau, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and occasionally, Frankfurter Allgemeine and Die Zeit—by authors such as Frieda Grafe, Helmut Faerber, Wolfram Schütte, Karsten Witte, Gertrud Koch, Hartmut Bitomsky, and others. And not least, there was the flourishing of independent filmmaking that benefitted from public television stations and from subsidy legislation fought for by Kluge and others, and from which a group of Autoren or auteur directors (Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, et al.) was to become New German Cinema once their work was shown at the New York Film Festival and other international venues such as the Goethe Institutes.
When I studied at Frankfurt University, Critical Theory was the leading intellectual tradition, one that had early on analyzed the economic, social, and political conditions of fascism and had presciently warned of the rise of National Socialism; it also had assumed a critical role vis-à-vis the social and cultural order of postwar Germany, in particular its inability to “come to terms” with that historical legacy.3 By the 1960s, the term Critical Theory was used in a broader sense to name both the Frankfurt School (referring to the members of the Institute for Social Research who had returned from exile, notably Max Horkheimer, who had coined the term Critical Theory; Adorno; and former members such as Herbert Marcuse and Leo Löwenthal who had opted to stay in the United States) and writers associated with various forms and degrees of Marxist thought, such as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, and Siegfried Kracauer, as well as a younger generation of writers such as Jürgen Habermas, Oskar Negt, and Kluge.4
If I now, in this book, think of Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno not only as Critical Theorists but also as part of the German-Jewish intellectual tradition, this was not necessarily the case when I first encountered their writings (and, with Adorno, his teaching); and one would probably not have thought of Adorno in that tradition before 1933. Being Jewish was not a topic of conversation at the university when I was a student, nor anywhere else beyond the small, newly emerging Jewish congregations and organizations devoted to Christian-Jewish cooperation. Jewishness was a relatively abstract, yet highly charged symbolic—philosophical, moral, and political—category, bound up with the history of anti-Semitism and annihilation. It had presence primarily as a repressed past that had to be brought to public consciousness and justice: this had been the twofold intention, at least, of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963–65 (which I occasionally attended because my mother was involved in taking care of survivor witnesses).5 But Jewishness referred to neither a living cultural identity nor the legacy of fractured biographies. This situation began to change only during the 1980s, after the broadcasting of the NBC miniseries Holocaust, with major retrospectives of Yiddish film in Frankfurt in 1980 and 1982; with the controversy surrounding Fassbinder’s play Garbage, the City and Death (1985); with the emergence of Jewish Groups at universities in Frankfurt and Berlin; and with the founding of the journal Babylon in 1986 (by, among others, Dan Diner, Gertrud Koch, and Cilly Kugelmann).6 For me, who had left Germany in 1977, it took living in the United States and encountering a Jewish culture that could be both secular and religious to recover that part of my history and identity.7
It is well known that cinema occupied a rather marginal place in Critical Theory, especially within the narrower circle of the Frankfurt School. Conversely, however, Critical Theory exerted a significant influence on film theory and criticism, as well as filmmaking and cinema politics. Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the capitalist culture industry—and Adorno’s continuation of that critique for the administrative cultural order of the Federal Republic8—was widely shared, yet led to different conclusions among those seeking to create and enable alternative forms of cinema, notably Kluge, and in debates conducted in journals such as Filmkritik and later the feminist journal Frauen und Film. When the writings of Benjamin and Kracauer were (re)discovered in the wake of the protest movements of 1968, the paradigm of the culture industry, renamed “consciousness industry,” had turned into a call to oppositional practice, and been radicalized with recourse to Brecht and Soviet avant-garde intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Tretyakov.9 While Benjamin’s writings were championed in new-left magazines (in particular Alternative, which leveled charges of censorship against Adorno), his work quite early on entered academic disciplines, especially literature and philosophy. In contrast, the reception of Kracauer’s work until the 1980s remained largely extra-academic, limited to the genre of the Feuilleton, in which he himself had published the bulk of his Weimar writings (which does not diminish them into mere “journalism”).10
The reception of Kracauer’s writings on film can be considered a seismograph for the major fault lines in the development of West German discourse on film since 1968. The first collection of Kracauer’s film essays and reviews, Kino, published by Witte in 1974, opens with the programmatic piece “The Task of the Film Critic” (1932), whose most often quoted phrase—“the film critic worth his salt is conceivable only as a social critic”—was written under the threat of the Nazis’ rise to power.11 At the same time, Kracauer’s Theory of Film, which had met with consternation or was largely ignored when first published in German in 1964, assumed an inspirational role a decade later when it was assimilated by the Munich movement of “Sensibilismus,” which galvanized around Wim Wenders’s writings and films such as Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976). This cineaste sensibility acclaimed films for “bringing the corporeal world into visibility,” celebrated the film experience qua experience, and pitted “looking” and “description” against “interpretation,” Marxist critique of ideology, and critical disagreement in conversations about film.12 Needless to say, the polarization between social and political concerns on the one hand and aesthetic experience on the other was as reductive of Kracauer’s work, from early to late, as it was of efforts in the tradition of Critical Theory
