Girls and Crisis - The Other Side of Diversion

Author(s): Sabine Hake

Source: New German Critique , Winter, 1987, No. 40, Special Issue on Weimar Film
Theory (Winter, 1987), pp. 147-164
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/488136

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Girls and Crisis - The Other Side of Diversion

by Sabine Hake

"The audience of the cinema is the classless audience." I

This essay will examine a group of early texts by Siegfried Kracauer

that pertain to the cinema and the pleasures it invites. Situating film in
relation to other phenomena of modern life, these texts map out a
landscape of desire and its modes of production. In doing so, they
could contribute to a conceptualization of a "history of pleasure," as
Thomas Elsaesser has suggested for the study of Weimar cinema in a
recent essay.2 "Kult der Zerstreuung" (Cult of Diversion), "Die
kleinen Ladenmadchen gehen ins Kino" (The Little Shopgirls Go to
the Movies) and "Das Ornament der Masse" (The Mass Ornament)
are central texts which are not only long overdue for critical evaluation
of Kracauer's writings in the United States - they also invite an exam-
ination of the structuring of desire that is highly relevant today.
Kracauer's central category in this enterprise is the concept of diver-
sion by which the cinema is thrown into a nexus of discourses that is
torn between modern regression and radical change. As a handy at-
tribute, the term Zerstreuung (diversion)3 acquired fashionable status in
the 1920s, recurring on the pages of the bourgeois press, and elegantly
combining disdain for the new medium and its uncultivated adher-
ents with an obsessive fascination. Kracauer was one of the first to pay
serious attention to the mechanisms of diversion which he closely

1. Carlo Mierendorff, "Hitte ich das Kino," in Anton Kaes (ed.), Kino-Debatte
(Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1978), p. 139.
2. Thomas Elsaesser, "Film History and Visual Pleasure: Weimar History," in
Patricia Mellencamp and Philip Rosen (eds.), Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices (Los
Angeles: American Film Institute, 1984), p. 51.
3. For this text I will translate Zerstreuung as "diversion" rather than as "distraction,"
since the latter, in my opinion, represses the ambivalences preserved in "diversion."
Through the process of translation, the word's original complex field of connotations
becomes fragmented, a political tendency thereby being disguised; a tendency that, af-
ter all, is fully restored when set against its conceptual opposite, namely concentration,
composure, knowledge.

147

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148 Girls and Crisis

linked to the development of the modern city, the economic changes

towards a society and culture of white-collar workers and the destruc-
tion of traditional class structure. He revealed the word's negative
connotation that derived from humanistic education and from overly
sharp distinctions between high and low culture. He was also one of
the first critics to approach popular culture as deserving of close scru-
tiny and to employ a theory of diversion reflecting the inherent
ambivalences of the studied subject itself. In an analysis of changed
relations between audience and popular culture, Kracauer's concept
of diversion not only qualifies as a tool of social theory, but as a neces-
sary category for progressive media theory. He asserts: "But the cine-
ma has more urgent tasks to take care of than to court the artsy-craftsy.
Its true purpose - of an aesthetic nature only when attuned to its so-
cial aspects - will be fulfilled only when it stops flirting with the
theater, anxiously attempting to restore a bygone culture. On the con-
trary, it needs to liberate representation from all alien elements and to
aim radically at a diversion that exposes the decline instead of disguis-
ing it."4
Crucial for a critical reading of Kracauer's texts on cinema are his
references to a specifically female audience. The cynicism of "The Lit-
tle Shopgirls Go to the Movies" reveals not only the sexism underlying
the concept of diversion, but illuminates it from a different perspec-
tive. The negative attribution of diversion to the feminine helps ex-
plain the concept's hidden ambivalences and obvious grey areas as an
evasion of the urgent issues behind it - most of all the social and po-
litical emancipation of women and the identification of the feminine
as a threat to the bourgeoisie. Instead of concentrating on the particu-
lar relation between image and individual spectator (as many contem-
porary theories do), Kracauer's concept of diversion has to be seen in
reference to a social body and socially conceived modes of entertain-
ment, held together in their shifting impact and oscillating qualities.
In the light of postmodern thinking, diversion cannot be dismissed as
an individual's private economy of drives or as omnipotent manipula-
tion, but needs to be reappropriated as a surface phenomenon that
usually escapes the critic's eye. Thus, with the undercurrent of
phenomenological thinking, it may prove helpful in establishing a so-
cial history of the cinema and the popular arts in general, a history that
also insists on differentiating between European and American cine-
ma as well as their positions within the culture industry. The

4. Siegfried Kracauer, "Kult der Zerstreuung," in Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt/
Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 317. All following translations are my own, unless indicated
otherwise.

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 Sabine Hake 149

formative years of German cinema were, after all, not only character-
ized by battles against the traditional representational art forms, but
also by a specific obligation to prove its cultural respectability. The ne-
cessity of proving moral alibis informed the specific qualities of th
German cinema (e.g. the lack of comedies) and a discourse on cinema
as it will be examined in Kracauer's scattered texts on diversion.

"It is always said of Georg Luktcs that his best stuff isn't in English.
Kracauer's best stuff isn't in English either."5 What Pauline Kael in-
tended as scathing remarks on Kracauer's Theory of Film, ironically -
within the larger context of Kracauer's writings - becomes true when
one has the chance to read his early texts, namely those published as
reviews and serials for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung. It is a reading ex-
perience full of surprises. The reception of Kracauer's writings in Ger-
many and the United States differs immensely. For American readers,
Kracauer emerges as a film theorist with his arrival in the United States
as a refugee and with his ambition to write in English only.6 With the
exception of two essays - one being "Bloch zu Ehren" - he never
again published in his native tongue, a decision that distinguished
him from the majority of the exile community. Possibly influenced by
his cultural displacement, the American Kracauer appears speculative
and often ponderous.7 His writings in English evidence a growing dis-
tance from the subject of his studies; they also take a more metaphysi-
cal direction. While From Caligari to Hitler conveys the need for a mate-
rialist analysis (including an excellent, unfortunately often ignored
methodological part) and is fueled by the knowledge of existing alter-
natives, the later Theory of Film is limited by a very narrow concep-
tualization of realism in film. On the other hand, there is the German
misconception of Kracauer as the eminence grise of film sociology. Ger-
man readers had to wait until 1979 for the publication of the complete
study of Weimar cinema, preceded only by a badly mutilated edition
(published by Rowohlt in 1958); initially the work was one-dimen-
sionally linked to a specific breed of politicized film criticism

5. Pauline Kael, "Is There a Cure for Film Criticism?" in I Lost It at the Movies (Bos-
ton: Little & Brown, 1965), p. 269.
6. In a letter to Hermann Hesse, Kracauer confesses: "I have written the book [From
Caligari to Hitler] in English. To conquer this language as a writer is a real passion for me,
and every inch of conquered territory means a lot to me." Siegfried Kracauer, Von
Caligari bis Hitler (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), appendix, p. 607.
7. Peter Harcourt evokes the image of somebody buried in a library, as quoted by
Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p.
107. Even German critic Frieda Grafe remarked in an review: "One should not blame
Kracauer. He, too, is a victim of books." Frieda Grafe, "Doktor Caligari versus Doktor
Kracauer," in Filmkritik 5/1970, p. 244.

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150 Girls and Crisis

emerging in the 1960s. According to Adorno, otherwise one of his

most caustic critics, Kracauer was one of the first to set the foundations
for such a tradition in German film criticism. Thus his name became
associated with the conceptualization of film history as a body of re-
current motifs, a conceptualization inspired by sociology and the ba-
sic assumptions of Critical Theory. However, this reference to
Kracauer's effect on contemporary followers strangely enough did not
stem from his own writings in the 1920's, but from his becoming a
phantom (indeed a later personification of Caligari) for a guilt-ridden
post-war generation looking for answers to the tragedy.
In 1921, after ten years of working as an architect in Hanover,
Osnabruck, Frankfurt and Munich, Kracauer, now in his thirties,
joined the Frankfurter Zeitung. He soon became acquainted with
Benjamin, Bloch and Adorno and it was on Bloch's advice that he de-
veloped a stronger interest in social theories. After having published
Soziologie als Wissenschaft (Sociology as a Science, 1922), he became cul-
tural editor of the Berlin branch of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Until 1933
and his emigration to Paris, he produced numerous reviews as well as
longer and more structured pieces of analysis - the essay became his
favorite medium. Therefore, despite its obvious impact, this side of
Kracauer remains to be discovered. Benjamin, not without reason,
described him a a "rag-and-bone-man, early - at the dawn of the rev-
olution."8 A reading of his essays indeed reveals this junkyard
atmosphere as well as the passion for the accidental find.
From a diametrically opposed point of view, Ilja Ehrenburg simi-
larly designates diversion as the most predominant characteristic of
cinema. Elaborated in Traumfabrik (Dream Factory, 1931), his notions of
cinema's manipulative powers may seem crude today, but they are,
particularly for the cinematic literary style, a good introduction into
the multilayered meanings of diversion and its range of inter-
pretations. Ehrenburg imagines a working-class couple leaving the
cinema: "Quick. The show is over. We'll miss the bus. Tomorrow
morning we have to get up early. Tomorrow like today, today like yes-
terday. Nancy Caroll is far away. No lingerie. Mend socks. You said
papa Zukor? Don't know him. I work for Smith & Co. Go home quick!
Quick! Night, moist, blue night. Smells different in each town, but is
full of tears and fear everywhere. Following the day, anticipating the
day. You can still jump into the river. In the Thames. Or the Seine. Or
the Hudson. Or the Spree. You can still open the gas. There is still time

8. Walter Benjamin, "Politisierung der Intelligenz," in Siegfried Kracauer, Die

Angestellten (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), p. 123.

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 Sabine Hake 151

to sleep. Sleep. Just sleep. ... Vast hordes burst out of thousands of
movie theaters. They run and seep away in narrow, black fissures. This
old fat German holds his breath. What if the Flying Dutchman ap-
pears to him tonight? No police will protect him! His heart stops. The
American cleans his foggy glasses. The member of the komsomol
turns her head in suspicion: snow and crows everywhere, a horse sigh-
ing under the snow - what will be tomorrow? The Japanese giggles
hysterically. It has started. The earth trembles. ... They have left. They
have spread, with devastated senses and half dead. They feel being fol-
lowed. Somebody still throws splotches of light onto the wall. Some-
body sings in front of the window, in the chimney, in the faucet: 'Har-
ry, I'll always be yours.' Then these dreams will take the shape of the
cruel morning, the one of screws and types. Screw! Become a
Rockefeller! Type on the machine! Novarro will fall in love with you.
Your boss will fall in love with you. Will take you. Will infect you.
You'll lie down like Miss Elsie. Escorted to paradise by police. Angels
and worms. Type faster: 'In response to your... your... your...' This is
the big magic box that reigns the world. This is a great invention and
this is wasteland, cruel, fascinating monotony. This is film!"9
Ehrenburg's case study of movie attendance reads like the classic
example of Kracauer's "Cult of Diversion." He assembles the ele-
ments of late capitalist society - the factory and the handsome movie
hero, the typing pool and the swimming pool - as they surface from
the stream of consciousness of a typical genderless (i.e.,
interchangeably gendered) petty bourgeois subject: manipulation
reigns. Though completed in Paris, Ehrenburg's Dream Factory posits
Berlin as the prototype of the faceless modern metropolis. Berlin, ex-
plored one year earlier by Kracauer in an expedition that he called
more adventurous than entering theJungles of Africa, became subject
of his sociological study Die Angestellten (The Employees, 1929) on the
taylorization of the entertainment industry: "Berlin today is the
prominent place of a culture of employees, that means of a culture
made by employees for employees and considered by most employ-
ees as culture."'0 Kracauer's concept, as Ehrenburg's, proceeds from
a social space, the modern city. Berlin and Paris were, possibly, the
European cities where cinema established itself not only as a new me-
dium, but as the ultimate cultural experience. The cinema, consid-
ered in its totality, integrating economic, political and cultural aspects
in a radical interdependency never experienced before, became the

9. Ilja Ehrenburg, Die Traumfabrik (Berlin: Malik, 1931), p. 302ff.

10. Kracauer, Die Angestellten, p.15.

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152 Girls and Crisis

primary mirror of modern lifestyles in the mid-1920s. At the time of

Kracauer's writings, this most eclectic of all representational tech-
niques had established a place in the urban landscapes that could only
be compared to the cathedral. It was installed as a melting pot for an
alienated but fashionable city audience, a refuge from disturbing ex-
periences and a sensory training ground, in short: the locus, where
modern man was exercised in the appropriation and appreciation of
modernity.
It is this experience that radically enters the organization of the text
in Ehrenburg's finale. He creates an inferno of slogans, crude sensa-
tions, random identification and tranferences - the mimicry of an
evening at the movies that is closer to a nightmare. A Freudian uni-
verse indeed, in which the montage of propagandistic headlines in-
trudes; these are inserted as the voice of the savant (Ehrenburg him-
self), who raises his index finger in crude agitation and pseudo- Marx-
ist exorcism. The variety and intensity of sounds are remarkable, the
noise that a silent film is capable of originating in the spectator's head.
Sympathetically reviewing Ehrenburg's Dream Factory as a profound
description of the cinema, Kracauer departs from the former's evident
disapproval of mass culture by calling the book "an apocalyptic paint-
ing of the capitalist world."''" In linking diversion to the experience of
city life, Kracauer, for his part, offers a vision of the functioning of ide-
ology, that can help rediscover lost paths of sensibility. His essays are
crucial for an understanding of the tremendous impact that cinema
had in constructing the uniform, seemingly classless subject of con-
sumer society. These texts also render possible a rediscovery of the
city's power (again as place of the structural transformation of society,
but this time leading to the demolition of the bourgeois subject) and
of the promises and pleasures provided by film's flashing images.
Written by such prominent authors as BalIzs, Arnheim, Ehrenburg,
Brecht and Benjamin, they possibly also call to mind the participation
of the cinema in a utopian concept of mass culture: a connection that
relies more on the cinema's specific modes of perception than on the
film's aesthetic form.
If Kracauer's diverse contributions to an analytical, but still appre-
ciative understanding of modern culture needs to be located in a grid
constructed of political loyalities and the views of intellectual peers, it
is Walter Benjamin, who - not just in favoring the essay as the only
possible form of writing - is closest to the Kracauer of the 1920s and
1930s. Like Kracauer, Benjamin examines the phenomenon of diver-

11. Kracauer, Von Caligari bis Hitler, appendix, p. 531.

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 Sabine Hake 153

sion in the light of the relation between cinema and modern city. Th
concept of diversion was utilized by both authors in reflecting on Par
as the capital of the 19th century: by Kracauer in Orpheus in Paris: Offe
bach and the Paris of His Time (1937) and by Benjamin both in "Paris
Capital of the Nineteenth Century" and "Some Motifs in Baud
laire." Benjamin used the word 'shock' to describe both the worke
experience at the machine and that of the pedestrian in the crowd, as
he/she strolls the boulevards, visits loud bars and conforms to traffic
rules. The effects of 'shock' are also typical in film which flourish
precisely on the city's atmosphere and dangers. Benjamin writes
"Thus technology has subjected the human sensorium to a compl
kind of training. There came a day when a new and urgent stimuli wa
met by film. In a film, perception in the form of shocks was esta
lished as a formal principle. That which determines the rhythm o
production on a conveyer belt is the basis of the rhythm of reception
in the film."'2
Benjamin's Paris of the shopping arcades, boulevard society, iro
constructions and world exhibitions is - although approached from
another side - also captured in Kracauer's reconstruction ofJacqu
Offenbach's biography. Kracauer makes Offenbach's career a meta
phor for a specific society that moved him and was moved by him
society that is identified as the predecessor of modernity. Analyzi
the origins and decline of the operetta, he applied the same herm
neutic techniques that he had introduced in his analysis of the a
sumed correlation between shopgirls and film culture. Written in the
1930s, between the flight from Germany and his ultimate exile in th
United States, Orpheus in Paris is Kracauer's attempt to return to the
historical source of surface phenomena. This study argues that the au
dience actually pre-existed the technological emergence of cinem
The significant mood of Parisian society was not only traceable in the
figure of the flaneur, but in various other phenomena as we
flirtatiousness, gossip, window shopping, lithography, magazine
And boredom as the complementary side to diversion already pr
pared the Parisian society for the hilariously exaggerated parody
bourgeois society that lay at the core of Offenbach's best operett
Kracauer's description of that historical period and the examinati
of the social and cultural functions of the operetta thus amounts to t
status of a model as it was first conceptualized in his early texts on cin
ema.13

12. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 17
13. Not surprisingly, Adorno excoriated the harmony of subject and method

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154 Girls and Crisis

Walter Benjamin later elaborated the genesis of diversion in his of-

ten quoted essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction" (1934) by opposing the traditional object of art and
the new mass media. Reception in a state of distraction, which is in-
creasingly noticeable in all fields of art and is symptomatic of pro-
found changes in apperception, finds in film its true means of exer-
cise."'4The changed relation between art and the masses was intro-
duced by a qualitative changes in mechanical reproduction: film and
photography became the prototypes for the intrusion of the apparatus
into reality. The images are fragmented, just as life itself: "Thus for
contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is
incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers,
precisely because of the thorough-going permeation of reality with
mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equip-
ment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.''5" We
find in Benjamin, as in Kracauer, this motif of radicalization. Both see
the social importance of film as that of a medium for whose audience
the critical and receptive aspects coincide, thus its importance as a lo-
cus of collectivity.
Set against the style of his contemporaries, Kracauer's early essays
on film rely on a challenging set of aesthetic categories operating
around the central idea of production and consumption. The claim of
film criticism to liberate itself from the status of the industry's promo-
tion tool and to become a genuine genre of cultural criticism was first
stated in Kurt Pinthus' polemic "Quo vadis Kino?" (1913). But this
approach remained isolated until the late 1920s and the emergence of
materialist analyses (Ehrenburg, Balazs, Arnheim, Kracauer), while a
guild of highly eloquent theater critics (Kerr, Ihering, Polgar) was still
setting the tone. The majority of feature writers were and remained
men of literature and the theater, the omnipotentjudges of good taste,
installed by a waning class of Bildungsbiirger. Even in refusing to perpet-
uate the hackneyed dichotomy between film and theater, topic of in-
numerable discussions, most writers usually evaded the problem of
revealing a politically relevant standpoint by granting each medium
its specific qualities, but implying the superiority of the theater.
Karsten Witte, Kracauer's German editor, describes Kracauer's
method of criticism as 'production criticism', one that is sharply set

Orpheus in Paris, calling Kracauer's lightness a deceptive device for justifying his evident
pleasure in painting the picture of a frivolous society. See Theodor W. Adorno, in
Zeitschrfi fur Sozialforschung, Vol. 6, No. 3, p. 697.
14. Benjamin, p. 240.
15. Ibid., p. 234.

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 Sabine Hake 155

against a criticism based on taste. Starting from the assumption tha

the cinema represents the most advanced sector of the consciousness
industry, Kracauer reads any work, be it an art object or a commodity,
within its historical and aesthetic context. He defines the task of a film
critic as similar to the work of a surgeon (cf. Benjamin's comparison
between the camera's intrusion into reality and the surgical act). With-
in such a logic, the superficial products of entertainment are the pre-
ferred objects, since their meaning lies so close to the surface: "The
task of the effective film critic lies in analyzing those social intentions,
hidden in average film, and in pulling them out into the daylight
which they often eschew."'16 It is in his essays on Berlin that Kracauer
consistently applies his concept of diversion. It soon becomes a cen-
tral category in his writings, in the evaluation of the single film as well
as in a more sociologically oriented description of its audience. In re-
lation to the multiple connections the term creates, the crucial tex
"Kult der Zerstreuung" (Cult of Diversion, 1926) is surprisingly short.
A specific atmosphere defines life in Berlin in those days, "that one
day all of this will explode into pieces."" From this experience of the
city's destructive, but at the same time unifying quality, a direct road
leads to the sacred palaces of entertainment multiplying on the boule-
vards and to other replicas of Parisian splendor. The point of depar-
ture is the analysis of the emergence of a new type of movie theater
(Lichtspieltheater) that is not worth being called cinema (Kino), since it
surrrenders its inherent possibilities and betrays its new audience.
Those new places are designed by the same architects who build film
sets on the periphery of the city, at the UFA studios in Neu-
Babelsburg (e.g. Professor Poelzig, responsible for the clay orgy o
"The Golem" and the luxurious cinema "Kapitol-Palast"). While the
older theaters (Kientopp) are driven out to the suburban neighbor-
hoods with a more proletarian clientele, the modern film spectacle or-
ganizes itself and its audience. Kracauer relates two crucial develop-
ments: the socio-cultural sphere of the metropolis that is forming the
homogenous mass of isolated individuals, thus precipitating the de-
cline of bourgeois culture, and a new social group, the army of em-
ployees that is stating a legimitate demand for forms of entertainment
appropriate to and reflecting its living conditions. In The Employees
Kracauer very clearly defines the ideological dilemma of this new
class: "The majority of the employees differs from the worker's prole-
tariat in being intellectually homeless. For the time being they are un-

16. Kracauer, Kino, ed. Karsten Witte (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 10.
17. Kracauer, "Kult der Zerstreuung," in Das Ornament der Masse, p. 315.

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156 Girls and Crisis

able to join the comrades, and the house of bourgeois concepts and
feelings, which they had occupied, has collapsed, because, due to eco-
nomic developments, it has lost its foundations. They presently live
without a theory to turn to and without a goal to pose their questions.
Thus they live in fear to look up and ask questions till the end."'
Therefore the employees go to the movies, making the cinema, and
popular diversion in general, their refuge. In The Employees, originally
conceived as a newspaper series on the loves and lives of office-work-
ers, Kracauer implies an interchangeability between the spheres of
work and entertainment by calling the places of pleasure 'barracks of
pleasure' (Plisirkasernen) and equating the company (Betrieb) with the
entertainment industry (Vergniigungsbetrieb), both functioning accord-
ing to the same laws of consumption and exploitation. Kracauer
openly greets this decline of high culture - at least in its function as a
dominating model - and hopes for its substitution by an industrialized
mass-culture, whose audience "from the bank director down to the
sales assistant, from the diva to the typist are of one mind."'9 Thus the
possiblity of breaking up petrified social conditions is palpable and of-
fers, as well, the chance to terminate repressive anachronisms. Kracauer
reviles as philistines those who accuse the audience of diversion. Only in
following the urge towards extreme diversion may the audience come
close to the truth. Only in petpetuating the workday's empty tensions
through the superficiality of entertainment are they able to save the hon-
esty of their existence. Consciousness of one's own reality through the
purity of surfaces - this precisely is Kracauer's concept of diversion.
In "The Mass Ornament," diversion is developed from a reflection
on the Tiller-Girls, a popular dancing troop. Kracauer describes his ana-
lytical concept: "An analysis of the simple surface manifestations of an
epoch can contribute more to determining its place in the historical pro-
cess than judgments of the epoch about itself."20 From the assembly
line, the same aesthetic principle of serialization is at work. This notion
of the surface as the place of least petrifications and therefore the most
accessible to analysis, is in Kracauer's later texts extended to include
non-aesthetic phenomena. Mediated, integrated and read within a his-
torical process, the marginal phenomena become the places where new
revolutionary movements first appear. They thus define the pre-revolu-
tionary epochs in status nascendi.
"Out of the cinema crawled a shimmering, revue-type produc-

18. Kracauer, Die Angestellten, p. 23.

19. Kracauer, "Kult der Zerstreuung," p. 313.
20. Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," in New German Critique 5 Spring 1975, p. 67.

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 Sabine Hake 157

tion..."21 Diversion is not possible without a frame for its production.

Here Kracauer takes his cues from architecture, in which a specific form
of pleasure is inscribed. The cinema, as an architectural space for stag-
ing a socio-cultural scenario, became more than a mere show-case. Re-
fining its appearance, it developed into the dominating factor for the
films it demanded and exhibited. Originally the place of crude specta-
cle, the cinema in the 1920s returned to that realm of respectability tha
it had apparently attempted to supersede. For Kracauer, and in the con
text of his disgust for all forms of rapprochement between theater an
film, the beautified movie-palaces consequently can be seen as work
against the cinema's utopian destination. This retrogressive process
takes place through the production of cinema as the "Gesamtkunstwerk
der Effekte" and facilitates its recuperation by dominant ideology. In its
aesthetic style the modern type of cinema for the masses tends towards
the cultivated splendor of surfaces. Good taste reigns, the sacred rever
berates and transfigures the production's unified look. The other strate-
gy of appropriation, aside from the architectural frame, lies in the pro-
gramming practices modelled after American forms of exhibition. Thu
the film becomes part of a sequence of various effects: of light, orchestr
music, live-number girls and impresarios. As part of a totality of effects
film - for Kracauer an a priori progressive medium through its proximi
ty to reality - is domesticated; and with it all hopes for a proletarian an
avant-garde culture are destroyed. From the glass of champagne, th
symphonic sound of real violins to the glamorous evening-gowns an
the entrance of celebrities, this concept of cinema creates a fictitious uni
ty against the background of the dispersed and fragmented life of the
city.22
For Kracauer, the inveterate movie-goer is alienated from the
phenomenological world and seeks reunification with the world of ob-
jects in the darkness of the cinema. There is indeed a logical connection
between "Cult of Diversion" and the misinterpreted realism of Theory of
Film and it can be located in the latter's subtitle "The Redemption of
Physical Reality," since it explains the desire of an imaginary spectator:
"He misses 'life'. And he is attracted to cinema because it gives him the
illusion of vicariously partaking of life in its fullness."23 Both aspects of

21. Kracauer, "Kult der Zerstreuung," p. 314.

22. Kracauer, for instance, argues that the two-dimensionality of the screen and the
three-dimensionality of all other spectacles exclude each other: "The film demands out
of itself, that the world mirrored by it shall be the only one. Every three-dimension effect
should be eliminated; otherwise film fails as an illusion." in "Kult der Zerstreuung," p.
316.

23. Kracauer, Theory of Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 167.

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158 Girls and Crisis

diversion, regression and escapism, point toward woman, not just as a

metaphor, but as a visible new audience. Particularly in discussing the
emerging film culture in the 1920s, critics, including Kracauer, conde-
scendingly speak of women as the example of a lack of good taste, thus
reserving the progressive potential of diversion for man and the revolu-
tionary cause. Indeed, the utopian reading of mass culture and its spe-
cific modes of production, distribution and consumption, the central
hope in many media concepts of the 1920s (cf. Brecht's radio theory)
relies on a masculine brand of diversion. The cinema is mysteriously the
only medium that openly elicits the fear of the feminine. Thus, to speak
of diversion and to attribute it to a new and disquieting audience of
women is nothing less than an operation of displacement. However re-
pressed, fractured, deformed or disguised, the audience of the 1920s is
imagined by most critics as a female one (of women and/or of an audi-
ence made female by its forms of perception).24 This maneuver of dis-
placement corresponds to actual social change. It is indeed the city
where women break out of the traditional system of families, of course
only to integrate themselves into the army of cheap industrial labor and
to form the immediately devaluated profession of secretaries. "Girls
und Krise" (Girls and Crisis), this is how Kracauer apostrophizes the
connection between the popularity of girls' dancing troops, girls' fash-
ion and girlishness. The role of the girl was the price woman had to pay
for her demysticifation (caused by her participation in the work pro-
cess). It is possibly best described in the formal similarity of the convey-
er-belt and choreography: "... and when they [the dancers] did the same
over and over again, without ever interrupting their line, one was able to
envision an endless chain of cars gliding out of the factory halls into the
world."25 And commenting on contemporary genres, Kracauer once
implied that the popularity of the false-identity-plot among female
employees was due to their own lack of identity.
The cinema as a place of escapism becomes, in its most derogatory re-
lation to the female tearduct, the receptacle of all the aborted dreams of
female socialization. At the same time, as being one of the first public
places for a genuine female audience (perhaps a vulgarized salon of the
industrial age) the cinema, in its formative years, also embraced a utopi-
an potential: to be the place for the feminine and a place for women.26

24. Cf. Curt Morek, Sittengeschichte des Kinos or Rudolf Harms, Philosophie des Films
25. Kracauer, "Girls und Krise," in Frankfurter Allgemeing 27.5.1931.
26. In order to embrace the ambivalent aspects of woman's presence in the cinema,
Judith Mayne chooses to characterize woman as the alienated spectator in the Brechtian
sense of the exile as ultimate dialectician. cf.Judith Mayne, "The Woman at the Keyhole:
Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism, in New German Ciique 24/25 Fall/Winter, 1981/2, p. 40.

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 Sabine Hake 159

With these ramifications in mind, the term Zerstreuung could well be

understood as the simultaneous repression of the feminine and its re-
turn. Kracauer and his remarks must be seen in this context. The at-
tempts of apparent complicity with modem forms of pleasure, no mat-
ter how alluring and revealing they are, need always to be measured
against the individual's self-interest, in the case of Kracauer that of an in-
tellectual whose position is questioned by the phenomena he is so eager
to study. In all his essays Kracauer evaded the impact of an audience of
women by pushing it aside through an act of disqualification, as "little
shopgirls." Thus he managed to save his cherished ideal of diversion
and intensification for the purer realms of theory. Inconsistencies in the
analysis of the culture of employees were reduced to the problem of
women's deficits.
Read as an isolated text, "The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies"
sounds like the melancholic remarks of a cultivated bourgeois who at-
tributed the embarassing level of film production to the emergence of a
huge, specifically female audience. Kracauer's misogynist tendencies
are immediately perceivable in little stylistic ploys that unmask this out-
cry against pulp and kitsch. The series about the little shopgirls starts out
with a perfectly acceptable observation: "Society is much too powerful
to allow films other than the agreeable one. Film has to reflect society,
whether it wants it or not."27 In order to illustrate this, Kracauer reaches
down into the world of maids and shopgirls, who love, choose their
wardrobe and commit suicide. "Film story and life story usually corre-
spond to each other because typists model themselves after the exam-
ples from the screen; perhaps the most hypocritical examples are stolen
from life."28 Kracauer then defines film as society's daydream that re-
veals its secret mechanisms, the sillier and less realistic its plots are. With
the premise of defining a limited number of typical motifs, an approach
recurrent in From Caligari to Hitler, he narrates eight typical plots and the
predictable female response. Each part starts with a caption that vaguely
recalls a genre - "Nation in Arms," a war film, "The Modem Harun al
Rashid," a sentimental love story - then he gives a synopsis, barely dis-
guised in its cynicism, and concludes each time with a final judgment,
repeated in an almost identical sentence structure. (Examples of the
girls' reactions to the war film: "The little shopgirls have a hard time re-
sisting the glamor of marches and uniforms;"29 and to the love story: "If

27. Kracauer, "Die kleinen Ladenmadchen gehen ins Kino," in Das Ornament der
Masse, p. 299.
28. Ibid., p. 280.
29. Ibid., p. 287.

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160 Girls and Crisis

the little shopgirls are approached by a strange gentleman this night,

they probably think he is one of the famous millionaires."30)
To evaluate Kracauer's equation between cinema's downfall and fe-
male taste traditionally limited to pre-aesthetic areas like diary, corre-
spondence, arts and crafts, it might be useful to turn to one of the first
sociological studies on the cinema. Already in 1914, the sociologist
Emilie Altenloh conceived a questionnaire to collect data on the class-,
age-, and gender-specific factors of movie attendance. She was the first
writer to describe the historical emergence of women as a new audience.
Although the cinema had become respectable by the time of Kracauer's
writings, his complaints are already anticipated in Altenloh's observa-
tions which are interspersed with equally sexist cliches of women as be-
ing more emotional and less intellectual. Altenloh's Soziologie des Kinos
(Sociology of Cinema) proceeds from a similar notion of diversion as the
central agency, subsuming all aspects of taste and social behavior. She
argues that both the cinema and its audience are the typical products of
a period in which bourgeois ideals of concentration and contemplation
are no longer valid as adequate gestures of aesthetic appreciation. Bore-
dom reigns, and the resulting restlessness has to be quieted with strong
stimulants: "Something has to be there to satisfy these different needs,
the desire to be distracted, to recover from the daily demands on mod-
em people, to relieve boredom and the hunger for sensation, and if the
cinema had not been invented, something else would have been in-
vented in its place."3' Altenloh also refers to other forms of popular en-
tertainment, thus discussing the cinema in the proximity of circus,
vaudeville, cafe-life rather than in opposition to the theater. Aside from
class distinctions, Altenloh's questionnnaire allows her to establish in-
trinsic correspondence between women and the specific qualities of cin-
ematic pleasure that are not always void of depreciation of her own sex:
"The female sex, of which is said that it perceives impressions purely
and emotionally in its wholeness, must be particularly prone to cine-
matic representation. Compared with that, it seems to be almost diffi-
cult for intellectual people to reenact in detail those unconnected se-
quels of events."32 The cinema, according to this early study, appeals to
people that drift along, motivated by impulses of the moment. These
people are: children and adolescents, social outsiders, in growing num-
bers employees, and finally, across all ages and classes, women. Al-
though Altenloh still focuses on the proletarian woman and her need to

30. Ibid., p. 291.

31. Emilie Altenloh, Zur Soziologie des Kinos (Jena: Diederichs, 1914), p. 93.
32. Ibid., p. 91.

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 Sabine Hake 161

escape from the harsh reality, she already conceptualizes the new type of
woman that is defined as a full-time consumer, integrating, unlike men
across class boundaries, the cinematic experience into a general form of
consumption. After a morning of shopping on the new boulevards with
their display windows and outdoor cafes (epitomized by streets like
Kurfiirstendamm), she attends the afternoon matinees of the shimmer-
ing movie palaces Kracauer refers to in "Cult of Diversion." There the
cinema also becomes advisor and trendsetter for the world of fashion,
manners and home design. This affluent version of the cinematic expe-
rience, embodied by the upper middle class woman but aspired to by
everyone in modern commodity society, provides the setting for a sen-
sual economy which Kracauer criticizes in his analysis of the picture pal-
aces' spatial and ritual designs.
A reading of Altenloh's observations and interviews, however, could
clarify some of the problems that accompany the implications of the
term Zerstreuung, in particular in relation to its 'Doppelgdnger,' namely
boredom. Whereas Altenloh's critical assessment of the movie theater's
attraction centers around a diversion that is desired but not achieved,
the empirical part is filled with confession of boredom as the actual
main motive for movie attendance. The working-class women ("They
go to the movies out of boredom, not out of real interest ..."33) seek es-
cape from reality, whereas the female employees seek strong stimulants
to fight a perennial boredom that is typical of their profession. Married
couples primarily go to the movies on the woman's initiative, who wants
to escape the dullness of her home. The social groups that are the least
attracted to the cinema are, according to Altenloh's study, those work-
ing in pre-industrial professions (farmers, workmen) or with strong
group affiliation (church, party). Despite the initial conceptualization of
cinema as a medium granting diversion, the actual result of Altenloh's
study points, on the contrary, to its permanent denial. In its place, bore-
dom becomes the main impulse to return to the movie theater despite
better knowledge. This is of particular importance in opposition to
Kracauer, who struggles in his essay on boredom to preserve the term's
aristocratic notions. Heide Schluipmann took up this line of thought in a
critical reading of Kracauer's early writings, thus also returning to
Altenloh's implications and showing them in a different light. She ar-
gues "The relation between film and the end of bourgeois culture is not
so much captured in the term Zerstreuung, in which, after all, capitalism
protects itself from its loss of metaphysical elevation. It is much more
captured in what are interruptions of the production process: in a

33. Ibid., p. 78.

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162 Girls and Crisis

boredom that protests against the organization, as leisure in waiting."''34

In this context, the attempt to promote diversion as a radical concept
forfeits its progressive impact, as hoped for by Kracauer with changing
implications in his later writings. The countermovement can already be
traced in the earliest essays and leads, finally, to the didactic dismissal of
diversion. Already in a little remark in "Langeweile" (Boredom)
Kracauer advocated, along similar theoretical lines, radical boredom as
a means of self-assurance, conceived as the remedy against the cultural
crisis and as a luxury for those who still can afford it. On the one hand,
there is the motif of intensification, while on the other hand, one can de-
tect an undercurrent of aristocratic ennui and hostility towards the ba-
nality of film, radio and advertisement. Kracauer belittles the distrac-
tions of the city, which serve only to soothe its distressed inhabitants. In
this antithetical side of argumentation, Kracauer accuses all modern
media of inducing a social amnesia and reducing existence to a perma-
nent flow of shallow sensations. He complains: "One forgets oneself in
staring" and the cinema is almost accorded the powers of a vampire:
"The dark hole revives itself with the pretense of a life that belongs to no-
body and consumes everybody.""3 In opposition to this tendency,
Kracauer sets a scenario of happiness that may be regained through pro-
fessionally practiced boredom, the diversion of kings. A new paradise:
"Boredom becomes the only activity that is proper, because it remains
the sole guarantee for being in possession of an existence."36 Frieda
Grafe, in another context, suspects a similar hidden conservativism in
Kracauer's interpretation of the ornament: "But the subtext of his criti-
cism implies that he, even in the cinema, insists on the individual's old
traditional place in the center. Decorative, ornamental for him means
empty, without depth, a surface pretending plentitude."37 What is only
suggested in "Boredom" appears more often, when his writings tend
more and more to degenerate into moralistic judgments of taste. The
progressively formulated concept of diversion now turns against itself.
Kracauer begins to despise entertainment films, dismissing them pre-
cisely for their value as entertainment. In a review of a musical comedy,
for instance, he protests the expenditure of the means of production
and establishes an aesthetic and socially valiant norm of input and out-
put: "It [diversion] does not demand to be treated carefully, but wants to
express its superficiality through its style as well... "38 Discussing the

34. Heide Schltipmann, "Kinosucht" in Frauen und Film 33 October 82, p. 50.
35. Kracauer, "Langeweile," in Das Ornament der Masse, p. 322.
36. Ibid., p. 324.
37. Frieda Grafe, "Fiir Fritz Lang," in Fritz Lang (Miinchen: Hanser, 1976), p. 37.
38. Kracauer, Von Caligari bis Hitler, appendix, p. 502.

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 Sabine Hake 163

general film production of 1931, Kracauer criticizes the waste of ide

and capital for the production of dream images and escapist fanta
which only distract from the historically objective political pressure
Confronted with the political reaction, Kracauer returns to tradition
standards : differentiation into the serious and the light, between hi
and low culture, again diversion versus contemplation. "Over is t
time ofjazz, the girlie-show, the high-life in hotel lobbies; all that is ov
The entire culture of diversion created systematically by the film ind
try was only possible as long as the masses could be intoxicated.""39
In "Film von heute" (Film of Today) Kracauer presents his new
categories. The entertainment film, unmasked as a means of stultific
tion, is defined as an agency for distracting the audience from the pol
cal and social reality. In this regard, it performs the same ideolog
tasks as the propaganda film which, after all, does not conceal its mo
tives. Kracauer argues now: "Diversion is pleasant and possibly useful
but it turns into a leitmotif and represses all true instruction, it sacrif
its good intentions. By cheering up the somber soul, it only obfuscat
and the relaxation, provided for the audience, leads, at the same time,
blindness."40
The concept of diversion, as it appears and changes throughout
Kracauer's writings, explains many loose ends and a certain inconsistency
that is typical for his argumentative style in general. It can be interpreted as
the writer's own heterogeneous and often contradictory commitments. In
his renunciation of diversion he takes, after all, also a more political po-
sition, criticizing not the streamlined styling of the new films but their
lack of substance as the dominating characteristic of production.
Kracauer's scattered remarks on diversion and its connection to a fe-
male audience remain ambivalent, not brought to a close. Obviously,
the change in the political climate is, although here not explicitly men-
tioned, an influence. There is a moment of utopia, most present in
"Cult of Diversion," before conservative concepts gain the upper hand.
A reading of Kracauer's contributions also has to take into account its
complex references to Weimar Germany. Thus diversion oscillates be-
tween a progressive demystification and a regressive incantation of the
threatening aspects of decline and, thus, is always in danger of being
dominated by idealistic concepts of law versus order, immersion versus
distraction. Kracauer's belief in a radicalization through diversion ig-
nores precisely the regressive aspects; in so doing he also represses the
sensual side of the cinema (as preserved in the term scopophilia). Again,

39. Ibid., p. 518.

40. Ibid., p. 532.

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164 Girls and Crisis

the position of the feminine proves to be fatal; not only to the prospects
of the theory itself, but to the possibility of changing society. Since their
integration into the economy of capitalist rationality had not yet been
perfected, women, in Kracauer's conception, simply appear more stu-
pid. These are the ruins of a distorted emotionality left behind by the
strategies of self-assertion in bourgeois society. Thus the tale of the little
shopgirls closes with a truly happy ending: "Love is stronger than mon-
ey, when money needs to buy sympathies. The little shopgirls were
scared. Now they sigh with relief."41 Such is the emotionality attributed
to women that, in fact, unveils the unredeemed promise of a society
based on human relations.
With postmodernism as the theory of ubiquituous detachment,
Kracauer's elaborations on diversion could help in establishing a histo-
ry of cinema rather than film, since the cinema resuscitates our aware-
ness of persisting social needs. The spectator in the cinema is not alone.

41. Kracauer, "Die Kleinen Ladenmdidchen... ," p. 294.

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