French Literature Reviews - 2026

Siegfried Kracauer: Itinerary of a Nomadic Intellectual
History, Politics and Society

Enzo Traverso
Siegfried Kracauer: Itinerary of a Nomadic Intellectual
Revised and expanded edition

La Découverte
Collection "Textes à l'appui"
2006
ISBN: 2-7071-5008-8
20 euro(s)

Siegfried Kracauer's (1889–1966) life and thought were profoundly shaped by the monumental upheavals of the 20th century. A prominent figure of Weimar culture during his tenure as head of the arts section of the *Frankfurter Zeitung*—the most prestigious German daily newspaper of the 1920s—he came to embody, from 1933 onward, the fate of the exiled Jewish-German intelligentsia in both its material destitution and its spiritual grandeur. While he owes his fame to *From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film*, now regarded as a classic in the field, his wider body of work stands out today for its astonishing variety and richness, making Kracauer a truly unclassifiable intellectual.
Simultaneously a novelist and film critic, philosopher and historian, journalist and essayist, author of the earliest original studies on the detective novel and unforgettable sketches of Berlin and Weimar Germany, rigorous analyst of fascism and subtle interpreter of Parisian life under the Second Empire, Kracauer considered himself an "exterritorial" thinker, casting his inquisitive, nomadic gaze upon every facet of modernity.
In this book, Enzo Traverso paints an intellectual portrait of Siegfried Kracauer, tracing his path from Frankfurt to Berlin, and from Paris to New York. He contextualizes Kracauer's life and work within their historical framework (the Weimar Republic, exile, World War II and the Holocaust, and America in the 1950s and 1960s), while juxtaposing them with those of other major figures he encountered along the way or held close, from Fritz Lang to Georg Simmel, Theodor W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin, and Martin Buber to Ernst Bloch. In doing so, the author restores the profile of one of the defining cultural protagonists of our time.

Enzo Traverso, born in Italy in 1957, is a researcher at the Contemporary International Documentation Library in Nanterre and teaches sociology at the University of Paris VIII Saint-Denis. He is the author of The Marxists and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate 1843-1943 (PEC-La Brèche, 1990) and The Jews and Germany: From the "Judeo-German Symbiosis" to the Memory of Auschwitz (La Découverte, 1992).

Siegfried Kracauer occupied a unique position within twentieth-century intellectual history, bridging journalism, philosophy, sociology, and cultural criticism. Associated with the Weimar Republic's vibrant cultural scene and later marked by the harsh realities of exile, thinkers of this tradition frequently engaged with the shifting landscape of mass culture and modernity. Enzo Traverso examines Kracauer's trajectory alongside prominent contemporaries such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Georg Simmel, whose shared experiences of displacement profoundly influenced their critical perspectives on European society. Readers interested in the intellectual history of the Weimar era and the experiences of exiled German-Jewish intellectuals may find this study relevant.