Siegfried Kracauer (1889 - 1966), Journalist, Critical Sociologist and film German.

Architect of formation, one needs his beginnings as a journalist in 1922, activity which will make it famous for its chronicles based on a not very common direction of the observation. He is a friend of Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Bloch and a figure marking of the intellectual left under Germany of Weimar. He is related to the circle of intellectuals brought together around the Institute für Sozialforschung, that is to say the institutional core of what one will call later the School of Frankfurt. Its interest for the phenomena of company, like the various facts and the stories of detectives, the conduit to build an analytical method to discover the hidden aspect of the cinema and photography.

In 1927, it publishes Ornament der Masse ( Ornement of the masses ). Its interest for the Marxism the conduit to reject the majority of the aspects of the Capitalism. In 1933, Kracauer is exiled with Paris then in America in 1938. It is in 1947 that it publishes De Caligari with Hitler, a psychological history of German film . This fundamental work opens a creepage distance between the cinematographic esthetism and the psychological states which shake the German company and constitutes a fundamental text of the Sociologie of the cinema.

For Kracauer, the cinema carries in him the structures and superstructures of the Nazisme. Films like the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari of Robert Wiene or Metropolis of Fritz Lang explore the remote regions of psyché of a traumatized nation which seeks by the cinema a discharge system with its will for power. In spite of a Marxist approach of the phenomenon, Kracauer cannot escape the evocation from a “fantastic realism” which escapes the historical materialism. The phenomena of possession which Kracauer reveals cannot be confined with the field of rational any more and it is this aspect which will be later studied by Lotte Eisner in its work the démoniaque Screen

A plate in its homage is in the house where he lived in Frankfurt, in Sternstrasse 27. It is there that it was found each week with Adorno to speak about philosophy - Kracauer was the teaching one of Adorno whereas this one was still adolescent.

Works translated into French

• De Caligari with Hitler: a psychological history of the German cinema , the Age of Man, 1973

• employees: outlines of new Germany, 1929 , Avinus, 2000
• Jacques Offenbach or the secrecy of the Second Empire , the Walker-Gallimard, 1994
• the Detective novel: a philosophical treaty , Payot, 1981
• Streets of Berlin and besides , the Walker, 1995
• the voyage and dance: figures of city and sights of films , PUV, 1996
• History, of the penultimate things , Stock, 2006