Roughly years ago, Siegfried Kracauer wrote his first statements on fascism simultaneously with his first texts on film. This idea of ambivalence will inform his writings on film and fascism and, ex negativo , on questions of democracy. In the mass public sphere of the cinema, one that in big cities cuts across class divisions, film exposes and, in many cases β especially those of the slapstick and action films that Kracauer cherishes β remains true to the disorder of society.
In film and at the cinema, social contingency finds relatively good chances of being wahrgenommen ; of being perceived in a manner that takes β accepts and affirms β the truth of this very contingency, and thus its democratic potential, which Kracauer, especially in his most openly Marxist period, around , paints in strongly communist tones: a communism-to-come with shades of a post-messianic temporality.
This becomes especially evident by looking at the other side of the F-opposition, at fascism and the political shift to the nationalistic right of the s: here, social contingency is disavowed and compensated for politically. Middle classes, the boheme , youth movements β all of them shelterless with respect to the ideologies and institutions of the old class landscape capitalist bourgeoisie, proletarian labor, plus aristocracy, farmers, civic servants.
According to Kracauer, fascism is anti-political in that it is not about political struggle and conflict, but about ending all politics β and not in some utopian sense of Aufhebung , but in the sense of suppressing it.
It is also true that in his time it was much clearer, much more common knowledge than today when this fact is being disavowed that antisemitism is not particular to the Nazis, but a rather wide-spread attitude β a business strategy used by all types of political organizations on the right, including the Christian right known to flirt with fascism , plus an all-too frequent element of anti-capitalist propaganda. We cannot, however, label Kracauer an advocate of a cinema of sensation; a cinema of attraction and shock.
