Ansgar Martins: Judentum, Esoterik und Materialismus in der Philosophie Siegfried Kracauers, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

Siegfried Kracauer is renowned as a sociologist, film theorist, and cultural critic. Ansgar Martins reconstructs the religious questions that run through his oeuvre, often only tangentially, from his early writings of the Weimar Republic to his late works composed in American exile. The study focuses on three fields of discourse linked not only by Kracauer himself: Judaism, esotericism, and materialism. Combining close philological analysis with the history of religion, philosophy, and ideas, the author examines Kracauer's texts in the context of German-Jewish debates, the religious renewal movements that emerged after the First World War, and the formation of Western Marxism.

Kracauer's understanding of Judaism is informed by a secular messianism of reason, which takes shape through his engagement with contemporary antisemitism and figures of Jewish marginality. His reports on Hermann Keyserling, Rudolf Steiner, Eugen Diederichs, and other producers of worldviews during the interwar period simultaneously open up little-studied religious intermediary worlds of the Weimar Republic. From the mid-1920s onward, Kracauer ultimately transformed these religious quests into a materialist profane theology, developed in dialogue with Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno.

Ansgar Martin demonstrates how messianic and theological motifs persist in Kracauer's social criticism, film theory, and philosophy of history. His thought thus emerges as a philosophy of religion qualified by social theory: ultimate questions remain unresolved, while attention shifts to the material and contingent lifeworld. In this way, Ansgar Martins opens up new perspectives on Kracauer and on the interrelations of religion, philosophy, and political theory in the twentieth century.