Siegfried Kracauer

Siegfried Kracauer (1889 to 1966) was a German writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic and film theorist, sometimes associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main, he trained as an architect and took a doctorate in engineering in 1914 before working from 1922 to 1933 as film and literature editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung. His essays collected in The Mass Ornament (1927) treat popular culture, photography and film as ways of reading modern society, and The Salaried Masses (1930) examined the lives of the new white-collar employees. He left Germany for Paris in 1933 and reached the United States in 1941, where he wrote From Caligari to Hitler (1947), a study of German film and the rise of Nazism, and Theory of Film (1960), which argued that realism is cinema's most important function. He later directed research for applied social sciences at Columbia University and died in New York in 1966.