Märchenhafter Materialismus. Zur Konkretion der profanen „Theologie“ Siegfried Kracauers in seinen Figurationen des Jüdischen

Abstract

In a polemic against Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig of 1926, Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) insisted that truth had come to reside in the spheres of the profane. The following article explains the theology of history underlying Kracauer’s postulate and traces its literary, political and philosophical variants in his texts and his correspondences. Prima facie, his single-minded focus on the profane seems to point to a form of negative theology. Relying on vague references to the Jewish prohibition of the image, Kracauer implies that the absolute may be identified only by critiquing profane reality. This claim notwithstanding, Kracauer repeatedly points to positive motifs too. His notion of Jewishness as the particularist embodiment of a universal form of reason and his references to hedonistic and aesthetic experiences that embody the Messianic are cases in point. While the latter tended ultimately to reflect Buber’s concept of Hasidism, Kracauer explicated this approach in his treatment of (actually or supposedly) Jewish artists such as Franz Kafka, Jacques Offenbach and Charlie Chaplin. Kracauer’s canonization of these figures as nonconformists bears a notable resemblance to Isaac Deutscher’s concept of the “non-Jewish Jew” and Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “Jew as pariah”.