A landmark, now classic, study of the rich cinematic history of the Weimar Republic, From Caligari to Hitler was first published by Princeton University Press in 1947. Siegfried Kracauer--a prominent German film critic and member of Walter Benjamin's and Theodor Adorno's intellectual circle--broke new ground in exploring the connections between film aesthetics, the prevailing psychological state of Germans in the Weimar era, and the evolving social and political reality of the time. Kracauer's pioneering book, which examines German history from 1921 to 1933 in light of such movies as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis , and The Blue Angel , has never gone out of print. Now, over half a century after its first appearance, this beautifully designed and entirely new edition reintroduces Kracauer for the twenty-first century. Film scholar Leonardo Quaresima places Kracauer in context in a critical introduction, and updates the book further with a new bibliography, index, and list of inaccuracies that crept into the first edition. This volume is a must-have for the film historian, film theorist, or cinema enthusiast. In From Caligari to Hitler , Siegfried Kracauer made a startling (and still controversial) claim: films as a popular art provide insight into the unconscious motivations and fantasies of a nation. In films of the 1920s, he traced recurring visual and narrative tropes that expressed, he argued, a fear of chaos and a desire for order, even at the price of authoritarian rule. The book has become an undisputed classic of film historiography, laying the foundations for the serious study of film. Kracauer was an important film critic in Weimar Germany. A Jew, he escaped the rise of Nazism, fleeing to Paris in 1933. Later, in anguish after Benjamin's suicide, he made his way to New York, where he remained until his death in 1966. He wrote From Caligari to Hitler while working as a "special assistant" to the curator of the Museum of Modern Art's film division. He was also on the editorial board of Bollingen Series. Despite many critiques of its attempt to link movies to historical outcomes, From Caligari to Hitler remains Kracauer's best-known and most influential book, and a seminal work in the study of film. Princeton published a revised edition of his Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality in 1997 .

First published in 1930, Siegfried Kracauer’s work was greeted with great acclaim and soon attained the status of a classic. The object of his inquiry was the new class of salaried employees who populated the cities of Weimar Germany. Spiritually homeless, divorced from all custom and tradition, these white-collar workers sought refuge in entertainment—or the “distraction industries,” as Kracauer put it—but, only three years later, were to flee into the arms of Adolf Hitler. Eschewing the instruments of traditional sociological scholarship, but without collapsing into mere journalistic reportage, Kracauer explores the contradictions of this caste. Drawing on conversations, newspapers, adverts and personal correspondence, he charts the bland horror of the everyday. In the process he succeeds in writing not just a prescient account of the declining days of the Weimar Republic, but also a path-breaking exercise in the sociology of culture which has sharp relevance for today.

Siegfried Kracauer’s Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time brilliantly reconfigures the biography form into a remarkable work of social and cultural history. In a book that has frequently been compared with Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Kracauer uses the life and work of Offenbach to assemble a penetrating portrayal of Second Empire Paris. By examining the superficiality and mystification of collective experience, Kracauer provides the reader with a revelatory “physiognomy” of social reality itself. Offenbach’s immensely popular operettas have long been seen as part of the larger historical amnesia and escapism in the aftermath of 1848. But Kracauer insists that Offenbach’s productions have to be understood as more than simply glittering distractions. The fantasy realms of his operettas, occurring amid the urban renewal of Baron Haussmann and the fanfare of Universal Expositions, were on the one hand fully continuous with the unreality of Napoleon III’s imperial masquerade, but on the other made a mockery of the pomp and pretenses surrounding the apparatuses of power. His music “originated in an epoch in which social reality had been banished by the Emperor’s orders, and for many years it flourished in the gap that was left.” Offenbach’s dreamworlds were embedded with a layer of utopian content that can be seen as an indictment of the fraudulence and corruption of the times. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in modern critical and cultural studies. This edition includes Kracauer’s preface to the original German edition, translated into English for the first time, and a critical foreword by Gertrud Koch.

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