{"title":"Chapter 5: On the Task of a Realist Historiography in Kracauer’s History: The Last Things Before the Last","authors":"Siegfried Kracauer’s, Lucienne Astruc","doi":"10.1515/9783839406816-005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839406816-005","url":null,"abstract":"Siegfried Kracauer’s plans for a project on history can be traced back to early 1960, during the busy months in which he was completing the 1 final draft of Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. In a letter to Leo Löwenthal (dated February 15, 1960) Kracauer states that – upon completion of the book – he plans to have a “creative break”, during which time he would like to “read a lot”, and write “a couple of es2 says on history”. Upon return from a four month trip to Europe between July and October of the same year, Kracauer notes that, although he has not yet “brought anything to paper”, he “meditated a lot about history on the trip”. “I am very enthusiastic [passioniert]”, he writes, “about my attempt to make an incursion in this field. What may come out of it, I don’t yet know; perhaps a series of interrelated [zusam3 menhaengender] essays”. By December of 1960, Kracauer’s plans for a series of essays on","PeriodicalId":216454,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Imagination","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127839100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chapter 4: “Film as the Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life”: Kracauer and the Promise of Realist Cinema","authors":"T. Forrest","doi":"10.14361/9783839406816-004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839406816-004","url":null,"abstract":"In the years following the publication of Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of 1 Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality in 1960 , the book came under fire by a number of critics, whose reactions to Kracauer’s delineation of the promise of the medium were both patronising and acrimonious. As Miriam Hansen has argued in her introduction to Theory of Film, foremost among those analyses of the book which “assumed an unusually 2 condescending tone” were Pauline Kael’s hostile account of Kracauer’s “German pedantry” and Dudley Andrew’s dismissive references to the “utterly transparent” nature of the concerns addressed in Kra3 cauer’s “huge homogeneous block of realist theory” . Indeed, as revealed by Richard Corliss’s highly critical account of the book, it appears that Kracauer’s “irredeemable sin” lies in the perceived extent to which,","PeriodicalId":216454,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Imagination","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130855755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Manfred Osten, Joseph Vogl, J. Kersten, Ulrike Sprenger, P. Berling
{"title":"Chapter 7: Raw Materials for the Imagination: Kluge’s Work for Television","authors":"Manfred Osten, Joseph Vogl, J. Kersten, Ulrike Sprenger, P. Berling","doi":"10.1515/9783839406816-007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839406816-007","url":null,"abstract":"As Christian Schröder has argued in his review of Alexander Kluge’s television programs, tuning in to watch Kluge’s work on late night German television is akin to the experience of stumbling upon a literary 1 bookshop in the middle of a red-light district. Wedged between the pornographic movies, crime thrillers, and live competition and shopping programs which constitute the regular evening fare on the commercial stations, Kluge’s 10 vor 11 (10 to 11), News and Stories, Mitternachtsmagazin (Midnight Magazine), and Primetime Spätausgabe (Prime Time Late Edition) certainly strike the viewer as strange anomalies. Constructed, in a similar vein to his films, out of a highly diverse collection of raw materials (including photographs, drawings, diagrams, clips from movies, and documentary footage), Kluge’s programs are – in both their form and content – certainly unlike anything on German television. Organised predominantly around interviews with writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, academics, and directors from both theatre and 2 opera , the aim of the programs is to provide what Kluge describes as “cultural windows” for the “old media” within the comparatively “new” medium of television. These interviews (which provide the backbone for","PeriodicalId":216454,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Imagination","volume":"171 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134036165","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chapter 1: Benjamin, Proust and the Rejuvenating Powers of Memory","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783839406816-001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839406816-001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":216454,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Imagination","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123137531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chapter 2: The Politics of Aura and Imagination in Benjamin’s Writings on Hashish","authors":"T. Forrest","doi":"10.14361/9783839406816-002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839406816-002","url":null,"abstract":"In a letter to Gershom Scholem written in July 1932, Benjamin recounts with disappointment a list of projects that – due to the prolonged precariousness of his financial situation – remain untouched or uncompleted. He writes that amongst the books which “mark off the real site of ruin or catastrophe” is “a truly exceptional book about hashish”. “Nobody”, he cautions Scholem, “knows about this [project], and for the time being it 2 should remain between us” . However, while Benjamin’s plans for a book on hashish appear concretely for the first time in this letter, as early as 1919 he had expressed an interest in exploring the psychological effects produced by hashish and opium. Inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s writings on the topic in Artificial Paradise (which was written in","PeriodicalId":216454,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Imagination","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131235969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chapter 6: From History’s Rubble: Kluge on Film, History, and Politics","authors":"T. Forrest","doi":"10.14361/9783839406816-006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839406816-006","url":null,"abstract":"The central figure in Alexander Kluge’s 1979 film The Patriot (Die Patriotin) is Gabi Teichert, a high school history teacher from the German state of Hesse, whose dissatisfaction with the shortcomings of her discipline guides us through the eclectic collection of photographs, drawings, poems, stories, maps, posters, and staged and documentary footage out of which the film is constructed. The fictional character of Gabi Teichert (who is played by Hannelore Hoger) does not only feature in The Patriot, but actually made her film debut some twelve months earlier in Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst) – a collaborative film project undertaken by Kluge and other prominent members of the New German Cinema including Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff. As Kluge and his co-directors have noted in their brief analysis of the project, the impetus for Germany in Autumn sprang from the perceived extent to which the events that took place in Germany during the Autumn months of 1977 – including the kidnapping and murder of Daimler-Benz board member Hanns-Martin Schleyer by the Red Army Faction (RAF), the highjacking of a Lufthansa plane, and the alleged suicides of terrorists Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader, and Jan-Carl Raspe in Stammheim Prison – seemed to pass into the annals of German 1 history without undergoing any rigorous public debate. Constructed out of a series of thematically interrelated episodes (which consist of","PeriodicalId":216454,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Imagination","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128170963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Other Works Cited","authors":"T. Forrest","doi":"10.14361/9783839406816-010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839406816-010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":216454,"journal":{"name":"The Politics of Imagination","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123610220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}