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The Extraterritorial Life of Siegfried Kracauer

  • Martin Jay (author)
Chapter of: Extraterritorialities in Occupied Worlds(pp. 275–334)

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TitleThe Extraterritorial Life of Siegfried Kracauer
ContributorMartin Jay (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0131.1.16
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/extraterritorialities-in-occupied-worlds/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightJay, Martin
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2016-02-16
Long abstractOn February 8, 1889, Siegfried Kracauer was born in Frankfurt am Main, the son of a businessman, Adolf K. Kracauer and his wife, the for-mer Rosette Oppenheim; he died sev-enty-seven years later in New York City on November 26, 1966. For any normal biography, this bracketing of a life between two chronological points is a natural and unexamined beginning. For a biography of Kracauer, however, it constitutes a betrayal of the strongest taboo of his later life, a taboo he expressed in a series of letters deliberately set aside in his well-organized Nachlaß1to give any future biographer pause. These letters, written in the 1960swhen Kracauer was consumed by his final project on the philosophy of his-tory, were filed under the heading of “extra-territoriality.” In all of them, Kra-cauer vehemently opposed any effort to disclose his correct age, a campaign, as he surely must have known, which could only meet with temporary suc-cess.2 His reason for waging it, despite the certainty of ultimate failure, tran-scended the petty vanity of those who refuse to age gracefully. As he wrote to his friend Theodor W. Adorno in 1963: “It is not as if there is something for me in appearing young or younger; it is simply the horror of losing chronological anonymity through the fixating of a date and the unavoidable con-notations of such a fixation.”
Page rangepp. 275–334
Print length60 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors