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“Owing to its breathtaking sweep and force of argument, its uncommonly scrupulous research, and the impeccable quality of writing in evidence at every turn, The Curious Humanist represents a landmark achievement in Kracauer scholarship.”—Noah Isenberg, author of Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins
“Between cultured cosmopolitanism and embattled exile, Siegfried Kracauer stands in this eloquent, intelligent account as one of war-time and postwar America’s ablest cultural critics. Von Moltke’s demonstration of Kracauer’s complex relationship to the New York Intellectuals is particularly brilliant and makes this book an accomplished exercise in intellectual history.”—Dana Polan, New York University
“This engrossing study joins the dots in the scattered extant scholarship on the New York Kracauer, revealing a skeptically humanist cultural critic whose work—as von Moltke demonstrates through painstaking archival reconstructions and scintillating re-readings of classical works—offers key insights into aesthetics and politics in our allegedly posthumanist times.”—Erica Carter, King’s College London
About the author
Johannes von Moltke is Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures and Professor and Chair of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. He is the author of No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema and the editor of two volumes of writings by and about Siegfried Kracauer.
Summary
During the Weimar Republic, Siegfried Kracauer established himself as a trenchant theorist of film, culture, and modernity, and he is considered one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century. The author details the intricate ways in which the American intellectual and political context shaped Kracauer's seminal contributions to film studies.
Additional text
"[Moltke] argues in defense of Kracauer’s writing in America and in English against the mild skepticism it met with from those who found him a better writer in Europe and in German. Setting up this resistance to the “classic figure of the intellectual in exile” (6), he sets out to show how adeptly Kracauer found his feet with a new audience on a new stage."
