UC Santa Barbara

In 1934 Walter Benjamin gave a peculiar address in Paris that has been preserved for readers as “Der Autor als Produzent.” In this speech, Benjamin outlines the radical political responsibility of an author, particularly a German author, in that era to inculcate a revolutionary ethos in the public. Among the strategies he outlines for achieving this goal, Benjamin highlights the newspaper as the embodiment of that age’s conditions and a means of subverting bourgeois forms and consciousness. Benjamin fails to mention, however, that his friend Siegfried Kracauer had striven for years during his tenure as an editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung’s feuilleton section to effect precisely that end through his journalistic writing. Understanding the project Kracauer tried to achieve elucidates an often overlooked front in the struggle for the German conscience and consciousness that played out in the feuilleton sections of both leftist and centrist periodicals during the Weimar Republic. By exploring Kracaeur’s journalistic program in its historical context as well as in context of the work of other leftist Weimar feuilletonists, this essay hopes to elucidate how, despite ultimately failing to effect a revolution in the bourgeois worldview that might have prevented the fascists’ rise to power, the work of Kracauer and his contemporaries nevertheless expanded the possibilities for culture writing and redrew the boundaries of political discourse within German journalism.