meaning only in other-directed contexts, whether mechanized processes of labor or the abstract compositions of the mass ornament. But for Kracauer the progressive aspect of the mass ornament rests precisely in this transformation of subjectivity—in the erosion of bourgeois notions of personality that posit “a harmonious union of nature and ‘spirit’ ” and in the human figure’s “exodus from lush organic splendor and individual shape toward the realm of anonymity” (MO 83; S 5.2:64). The mass ornament’s critique of outdated concepts of individual personality turns the Medusan sight of the anonymous metropolitan mass into an image of liberating alienation and open-ended possibility, at times even a vision of diasporic solidarity; that is, Kracauer sees possibilities for living where others see only leveling and decline.69 Put another way, the democratization of social, economic, and political life, the possibility of the masses’ self-determination, is inseparably linked to the surrender of the self-identical masculine subject and the emergence of a decentered, disarmored and disarming subjectivity exemplified by figures such as Chaplin and Kracauer’s own Ginster.
This vision, however, as Kracauer knew all too well, had more to do with the happy endings of fairy tales than with ongoing social and political developments. His more empirically oriented work on mass society focused on a group that personified the modern transformation of subjectivity and at the same time engaged in a massive effort of denial: the mushrooming class of white-collar workers or salaried employees to whom he devoted a groundbreaking series of articles in 1929, subsequently published as Die Angestellten.
Although by the end of the twenties salaried employees still made up only one-fifth of the workforce, Kracauer considered them, more than any other group, the subject of modernization and modern mass culture. Not only did their numbers increase fivefold (to 3.5 million, of which 1.2 million were women) over a period during which the number of blue-collar workers barely doubled, but their class profile was deeply bound up with the impact, actual or perceived, of the rationalization push between 1925 and 1928. The mechanization, fragmentation, and hierarchization of the labor process and the resulting threat of dequalification, disposability, and unemployment made the working and living conditions of the employees effectively proletarian. Yet, while actually a rather heterogeneous group (comprising both upwardly mobile working-class and déclassé members of the bourgeoisie), they fancied themselves as a new Mittelstand, a middle estate rather than class, asserting their distinction from the working class by, among other things, recycling the remnants of bourgeois culture.70 Unlike the industrial proletariat, they were “spiritually homeless,” seeking escape from the everyday in the metropolitan picture palaces and entertainment malls like the Haus Vaterland or the Moka-Efti—in the very cult of distraction to which Kracauer, three years earlier, had still ascribed a radical potential. With the impact of the international economic crisis, the employees’ self-delusion and frustrated ambition, as Kracauer was one of the first to warn, made them vulnerable to National Socialist propaganda; it was these “stand-up collar proletarians” who were soon to cast a decisive vote for Hitler.71 In this sense, then, Kracauer’s report “from the newest Germany” (the book’s subtitle) reads not just as “a description of the modernization of everyday life” but at the same time as “a diagnosis of the beginning of the end of the first German republic.”72
The salaried employees had been the object of research from unionist and sociological perspectives both before and during the Weimar period.73 As a number of commentators have noted, several features distinguish Kracauer’s study from these publications. Methodologically, while the study is directed toward empirical social reality, Kracauer problematizes the very notion of an empirically given reality: “Reality is a construction” (SM 32). This in turn mandates a method of self-aware critical construction that explores the subject “from its extremes,” that is, through exemplary instances of the reality of salaried employees in Berlin, Germany’s most advanced site of modernization (SM 25). Kracauer pioneers an eclectic mode of writing that combines literary and sociographic methods, though he distances his approach from that of the fashionable Weimar genre of left -wing reportage.74 Claiming to reproduce authentic reality, he argues, reportage shares the limitations of photography as defined by its predominant positivist usage (a point Bertolt Brecht was to echo two years later).75 “A hundred reports from a factory do not add up to the reality of the factory, but remain for all eternity a hundred views of a factory” (SM 32)—what is missing is a sense of context or relationality. By contrast, Kracauer experiments with a form he likens to a “mosaic,” made up of quotations, conversations, and reflections, scenes and situations, images and metaphors. The fragmentary and citational character of the textual material also recalls Kracauer’s earlier affinity with avant-garde practices of collage, in particular their valorization of ordinary, discarded, and found objects, and his explicit endorsement of modernist aesthetics in the visual arts and music.
The literary-aesthetic sensibility that informs Kracauer’s text allows his own fascination with employee life and leisure to shine through and to complicate the study’s more overt critique of ideology. Conversely, the critique of ideology also provides a means of distancing himself from this fascination.76 A tension between critique and fascination, distance and familiarity inflects the writing subject’s position vis-à-vis the object of study. Kracauer understands himself as a “participant observer” and more than once draws attention to his own status as a salaried intellectual.77 At the same time, he maintains a critical stance by seeking to render strange the new that is all too quickly naturalized, by drawing attention to the “exoticism of the everyday”—that is, “normal existence in its imperceptible dreadfulness”—which tends to elude “even radical intellectuals” (SM 29, 101; W 1:218, 304).
Like none of the period’s other studies on the topic, Die Angestellten aims its heuristic lens at the junctures between the process of production and the sphere of consumption, between the rationalization of business and the business of distraction. The salaried employees emerge as the linchpin between the most advanced methods of capitalist production and the new entertainment culture. Specifically, they display a psychosocial profile that fuels Kracauer’s exasperation in his essay on “contemporary film and its audience [Publikum]” (reprinted as “Film 1928”), in which he extends his critique of the German film industry to the “public sphere which allows this industry to flourish” (MO 307–8). Already in this context he comments on the changing composition of the cinema audience, a mainstreaming that draws not only working-class patrons from the small neighborhood theaters but also members of most other social strata to the downtown picture palaces; within this new audience, he singles out the “low-level white-collar workers,” whose number had been rapidly increasing with rationalization, as the major moviegoing constituency. Furthermore, in both Die Angestellten and his 1927 article series on the “little shopgirls,” Kracauer draws attention to the unprecedented prominence, and simultaneous subordination, of women in the employee workforce and their growing presence in the heterosocial environment of the movie theaters. The discrepancy between these women’s new economic relevance, primarily as consumers and cheap labor, and their lack of real equality in social and legal status and the workplace increased their need for compensatory fantasies; in turn, they emerged as the subcultural addressee of the fables on screen.78
The reconfiguration of class, gender, status, and ideology is captured with epigrammatic precision in the juxtaposition of two anecdotes that open Kracauer’s study:
I.
Before a Labor Court, a dismissed female employee is suing for either restoration of her job or compensation. Her former boss, a male department manager, is there to represent the defending firm. Justifying the dismissal, he explains inter alia: “She did not want to be treated like an employee, but like a lady.” In private life, the department manager is six years younger than the employee.
II. An elegant gentleman, doubtless a person of some standing in the clothes trade, enters the lobby of a metropolitan night club in the company of his girlfriend. It is obvious at first glance that the girlfriend’s
