Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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endorsement of modernist aesthetics in the visual arts and music.
The literary-aesthetic sensibility that informs Kracauer’s text allows his own fascination with employee life and leisure to shine through and to complicate the study’s more overt critique of ideology. Conversely, the critique of ideology also provides a means of distancing himself from this fascination.76 A tension between critique and fascination, distance and familiarity inflects the writing subject’s position vis-à-vis the object of study. Kracauer understands himself as a “participant observer” and more than once draws attention to his own status as a salaried intellectual.77 At the same time, he maintains a critical stance by seeking to render strange the new that is all too quickly naturalized, by drawing attention to the “exoticism of the everyday”—that is, “normal existence in its imperceptible dreadfulness”—which tends to elude “even radical intellectuals” (SM 29, 101; W 1:218, 304).
Like none of the period’s other studies on the topic, Die Angestellten aims its heuristic lens at the junctures between the process of production and the sphere of consumption, between the rationalization of business and the business of distraction. The salaried employees emerge as the linchpin between the most advanced methods of capitalist production and the new entertainment culture. Specifically, they display a psychosocial profile that fuels Kracauer’s exasperation in his essay on “contemporary film and its audience [Publikum]” (reprinted as “Film 1928”), in which he extends his critique of the German film industry to the “public sphere which allows this industry to flourish” (MO 307–8). Already in this context he comments on the changing composition of the cinema audience, a mainstreaming that draws not only working-class patrons from the small neighborhood theaters but also members of most other social strata to the downtown picture palaces; within this new audience, he singles out the “low-level white-collar workers,” whose number had been rapidly increasing with rationalization, as the major moviegoing constituency. Furthermore, in both Die Angestellten and his 1927 article series on the “little shopgirls,” Kracauer draws attention to the unprecedented prominence, and simultaneous subordination, of women in the employee workforce and their growing presence in the heterosocial environment of the movie theaters. The discrepancy between these women’s new economic relevance, primarily as consumers and cheap labor, and their lack of real equality in social and legal status and the workplace increased their need for compensatory fantasies; in turn, they emerged as the subcultural addressee of the fables on screen.78
The reconfiguration of class, gender, status, and ideology is captured with epigrammatic precision in the juxtaposition of two anecdotes that open Kracauer’s study:
I.
Before a Labor Court, a dismissed female employee is suing for either restoration of her job or compensation. Her former boss, a male department manager, is there to represent the defending firm. Justifying the dismissal, he explains inter alia: “She did not want to be treated like an employee, but like a lady.” In private life, the department manager is six years younger than the employee.
II. An elegant gentleman, doubtless a person of some standing in the clothes trade, enters the lobby of a metropolitan night club in the company of his girlfriend. It is obvious at first glance that the girlfriend’s other job is to stand behind a counter for eight hours a day. The cloakroom lady turns to the girlfriend: “Perhaps Madam [gnädige Frau] would like to leave her coat?” (SM 27; W 1:215)
The juxtaposition of these vignettes illustrates the discrepancy between the employees’ consciousness and their material conditions of living and yields a more nuanced account of the ideological tug-of-war that defines the ongoing “process of social mixing.”79 In the first vignette, the discrepancy results from the déclassé employee’s bourgeois set of values, according to which age and gentility still command a certain respect—an expectation thwarted by rationalized business with its fetishization of youth and denigration of experience and the capitalist interest in a mobile labor force. The second vignette inverts the direction of social mobility: for the sales girl, barriers of class and status appear transcended in the medium of romance, antithetical yet not unrelated to the sphere of work (the “Nebenberuf,” or “other job”). Ironically, class transcendence is facilitated, on the part of the entertainment business, by resurrecting the very discourse of genteel femininity that capitalist rationalization had deprived of its social and economic foundations.
As in the essay on the mass ornament, Kracauer does not posit the nexus between rationalized production and mass-cultural consumption as a simple analogy but complicates it through a series of subtle mediations. In the section devoted to the employees’ leisure activities, “Shelter for the Homeless,” he explores the reconfiguration of public and private in employee culture through an extended architectural-geopolitical metaphor that links images of home, homelessness, and a new global space. The discrepancy between the employees’ consciousness and their increasingly precarious socioeconomic status makes them “spiritually homeless,” as Kracauer varies on Lukács’s influential phrase, all the more so since “the house of bourgeois ideas and feelings in which they used to live has collapsed, its foundations eroded by economic development” (SM 88). The literal dwelling or abode (Zuhause rather than Heim) that they inhabit does not afford them any of the traditional, that is, bourgeois-familial, ideals of protection, warmth, and intimacy. Kracauer reenacts this erosion of boundaries by metaphorically extending the space of “home” from a mere lodging to “an everyday existence outlined by the advertisements in the magazines for employees.” These advertisements mainly concern “things”—material objects and tools—as well as the small breakdowns of the human body: “pens; Kohinoor pencils; haemorrhoids; hair loss, beds; crêpe soles; white teeth; rejuvenation elixirs; selling coffee to friends; dictaphones; writer’s cramp; trembling, especially in the presence of others; quality pianos on weekly installments; and so on” (ibid.).
The misery signaled by these public intimations of personal needs and anxieties drives the salaried masses to seek “shelter” (Asyl) at night in the “pleasure barracks” that beckon them with the glamour and light missing from their monotonous working day. Behind the international-modern façade of New Objectivity or Sobriety, the fantasy of a national home, eponymic in the Haus Vaterland, mingles with emblems of an exoticized global space, the Bavarian landscape of the Löwenbräu bar, “ ‘Zugspitze with Eibsee—alpenglow,’ ” with the generic Americana of the Wild West Bar, “ ‘Prairie landscapes near the Great Lakes—Arizona—ranch— dancing . . .—Negro and cowboy jazz band.’ ” From the Bavarian Alps to America, “the Vaterland encompasses the entire globe” (SM 92).80 “The true counterstroke against the office machine . . . is the world vibrant with color. The world not as it is, but as it appears in the popular hits. A world every last corner of which has been cleansed, as though with a vacuum cleaner, of the dust of everyday existence” (SM 93).
The compensatory traffic between an all-too-close physical existence and the glamour of faraway places, like that of work and leisure, ultimately calls the very notion of home into question, as a sentimental residue of failed bourgeois promises propped onto an actual space. Kracauer’s exploration of the entertainment malls’ architectural geopolitics resonates with his evocation of a double exile—from both the stifling dreariness of the petty-bourgeois home and the alienating bustle of the modern city—in his reviews of Karl Grune’s film The Street (discussed in chapter 1). If in the earlier texts he rhetorically identified with the film’s lonesome wanderer, he now observes almost clinically how this mode of being was becoming paradigmatic of a modern, provisional, postconventional identity, a social identity no longer founded on tradition, origin, and class. In the meantime, however, the experience of the exiled individual had taken on mass proportions, with accordingly amplified social and political implications. In the entertainment malls, Kracauer states, “the masses play host to themselves; . . . not just from any consideration of the commercial advantage to the entrepreneur, but also for the sake of their own unavowed powerlessness.” Mass culture furnishes, if not a home, then at least a house of mirrors. “People warm each other; together they console themselves for the fact that they can no longer escape from the herd [Quantität]” (SM 91–92; W 1:292).