“The Reparation of Dead Souls” — Siegfried Kracauer’s Archimedean Exile — The Prophetic Journey from Death to Bildung

Since the discovery of Siegfried Kracauer by the generation that was first spellbound by the writings of Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, T. W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, and Hannah Arendt, the Weimar legacy of the exile has been drawn on many times as a paradigm of the intellectual whose life was unfinished because so much of it was left in the past. Those whose bridges to the past were burned by the forgetfulness of the age might include Kracauer. Siegfried Kracauer’s work has fascinated for its outsider-ness and the difficulty of placing him in any canonical role as a founder of any movement or school. The literature on him has exploded to the point that one must wonder whether his reputation will forever be linked with some other than the exile generation and if so, which one?2 He seems so young and so old at the same time. Yet he remains a member of the generation of Klaus Mann, Stefan Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger, whose condition is described by Gunther Anders, who wrote There was not one among us who did not one day stand still at some corner of some city and discover that the calls and noises of the world suddenly sounded as if they were meant for others — who did not have the experience of no longer being there [… ]. The exile suicides simply sealed this loss of existence.3