when he refers to Dziga Vertov as a “surrealist artist who listens to the conversation that the died-away, disintegrated life conducts with waking things.”104 The physiognomic aesthetics of such films makes them enact the surrealist objective to “render strange what is close to us and strip the existing of its familiar mask,” a formulation that echoes Benjamin’s trope of a “dialectical optic” in his 1929 essay on surrealism.105 What is more, the films’ dreamlike, mnemonic power opens up a different temporality (different from both chronological-industrial time and the regularized pace of classical narrative films) and exposes the viewer to involuntary, physiologically experienced encounters with material contingency. Increasingly, however, Kracauer also took contemporary French filmmakers, especially Clair, to task for lapsing into sentimentality and artsiness and for their romantic opposition to mechanization.106
As much as it offered the German writer asylum from the reign of simultaneity, speed, and dehumanization, Paris was not the alternative to Berlin or, for that matter, “Amerika.” Nor did Kracauer—at least not until his “social biography” of Jacques Offenbach (1937)—seek to understand the crisis of contemporary mass modernity, as Benjamin did, in terms of the political legacy surrounding the emergence of mass culture in nineteenth-century France. For one thing, “Berlin” was already present in the topography of Paris, in the constellation of faubourgs and center (the latter corresponding to modernized Berlin) that he traces in his “Analysis of a City Map” (MO 41–44). For another, notwithstanding his alarm over the destruction in Germany of a basic civility that he found still existing in France,107 Kracauer recognized that Berlin represented the inescapable horizon within which the contradictions of modernity demanded to be engaged. France was, after all, “Europe’s oasis” as far as the spread of rationalization and mass consumption was concerned, and Clair’s “embarrassing” spoof on the assembly line (in A nous la liberté) was only further proof of the French inability to understand “how deeply the mechanized process of labor reaches into our daily life.”108
In his first longer essay on the French capital, “Paris Observations” (1927), Kracauer assumes the perspective “from Berlin,” sketching the perceptions of someone who has lost confidence in the virtues of bourgeois life and who “even questions the sublimity of property,” who “has lived through the revolution [of 1919] as a democrat or its enemy,” and whose “every third word is America.” While he does not exactly identify with this persona, by the end of the essay he clearly rejects the possibility that French culture and civility could become a model for contemporary Germany. “The German cannot move into the well-warmed apartment that France represents to him today; but perhaps one day, France will be as homeless [obdachlos] as Germany.”109 The price of Paris life and liveliness is the desolation and despair of the banlieu and the provinces that Kracauer describes in his unusually grim piece “The Town of Malakoff.” Contemplating Malakoff’s melancholy quarters, he finds, by contrast, even in the barbaric mélange of German industrial working-class towns signs of hope, protest, and a will toward change.110 When he returns from another trip to Paris in 1931, he is animated by a political conversation on the train, and as the train enters Berlin’s Bahnhof Zoo, the nightly city appears to him “more threatening and torn, more powerful, more reserved, and more promising than ever before.”111 In its side-by-side of “harshness, openness . . . and glamour,” Berlin is not only the frontier of modernity but also “the center of struggles in which the human future is at stake.”112
Paradoxically, the more relentlessly Kracauer criticizes the pathologies of mass-mediated modernity, the less he seems to subscribe to his earlier utopian thought that, someday, “America will disappear.” In fact, the more German film production cluttered the cinemas with costume dramas and operettas reviving nationalist and military myths, and the more the film industry accommodated to and promoted the political drift to the right, the more it became evident that America must not disappear, however mediocre, superficial, and inadequate its current mass-cultural output might be. The constellation that is vital to Kracauer’s understanding of cinema and modernity is therefore not that between Paris and Berlin, but that between a modernity that can reflect upon, revise, and regroup itself, albeit at the expense of (a certain kind of) memory, and a modernity that parlays technological presentness into the timelessness of a new megamyth: monumental nature, the heroic body, the re-armored mass ornament—in short, the kind of Nazi modernism exemplified by Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl.
This constellation emerges from the juxtaposition of two vignettes that, like his writings on the circus, project the problems and possibilities of mass-mediated modernity onto an earlier institution of leisure culture, the Berlin Luna Park. In an article published on Bastille Day, 1928, Kracauer describes a roller coaster whose façade shows a painted skyline of Manhattan: “The workers, the small people, the employees who spend the week being oppressed by the city, now triumph by air over a super-Berlinian New York.” Once they’ve reached the top, however, the façade gives way to a bare “skeleton”:
So this is New York—a painted surface and behind it nothingness? The small couples are enchanted and disenchanted at the same time. Not that they would dismiss the grandiose city painting as simply humbug; but they see through the illusion and their triumph over the facades no longer means that much to them. They linger at the place where things show their double face, holding the shrunken skyscrapers in their open hand; they have been liberated from a world whose splendor they nevertheless know.113
In the shrieks of the riders as they plunge into the abyss, Kracauer perceives not just fear but ecstasy, the bliss of “traversing a New York whose existence is suspended, which has ceased to be a threat.” This image evokes a vision of modernity whose spell as progress is broken, whose disintegrating elements become available in a form of collective reception in which self-abandonment and jouissance provide the impulse for critical reflection.
Two years later, in an article entitled “Organized Happiness,” Kracauer reports on the reopening of the same amusement park after major reconstruction. Now the attractions have been rationalized, and “an invisible organization sees to it that the amusements push themselves onto the masses in prescribed sequence,” he writes, anticipating Adorno as much as Disney World.114 Contrasting the behavior of these administered masses with the unregulated whirl of people at the Paris foires, Kracauer makes the familiar reference to the regime of the assembly line. Like the rationalized Sarrasani Circus, where the space for improvisation and playful parody has disappeared with “the elimination [Ausfall] of the clowns,” the organization of the refurbished Luna Park does not leave “the slightest gap.”115 When he arrives at the newly refurbished roller coaster, the scene has changed accordingly. Most of the cars are driven by young girls, “poor young things who are straight out of the many films in which salesgirls end up as millionaire wives.” They relish the “illusion” of power and control, and their screams are no longer that liberatory. “[Life] is worth living if one plunges into the depth only to dash upward again as a couple [zu zweit].” The seriality of the girl cult is no longer linked to visions of gender mobility and equality, but to the reproduction of private dreams of heterosexual coupledom and fantasies of upward mobility. Nor is this critique of the girl cult available, let alone articulated, in the same sphere or medium as the phenomenon itself (unlike Hollywood’s own demontage of the girl cult that Kracauer had celebrated in his review of Frank Urson’s film Chicago116); rather, it speaks the language of a critique of ideology in which the male intellectual remains outside and above the largely female, and feminized, public of mass consumption.
The hallmark of stabilized entertainment, however, is that the symbol of the illusion has been replaced. Instead of the Manhattan skyline, the façade is now painted with an “alpine landscape whose peaks defy any depression [Baisse].” All over the amusement park, in fact, Kracauer notes the popularity of “alpine panoramas”—“a striking sign of the upper regions that one rarely reaches from the social lowlands.” The image of the Alps not only naturalizes and mythifies economic and social inequity but also
