Salaried Masses

Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) was one of Germany's leading cultural commentators and essayists.Quintin Hoare is the director of the Bosnian Institute and has translated numerous works by Sartre, Antonio Gramsci, and other French authors. He lives in the United Kingdom.

Well before the current vogue of cultural studies, Siegfried Kracauer pioneered a method of ethnographic critique that allowed him to reveal his society's deepest secrets by decoding its surface manifestations. Perhaps its most stunning fruit was his classic study of the spiritual and material crisis of Weimar Republic's salaried employees, now happily available in English for the first time. It was this work that earned Kracauer the celebrated sobriquet 'a ragpicker at daybreak' from his friend Walter Benjamin, who may have been wrong about the revolutionary day he thought was dawning, but who correctly saw the value in sifting through the remains of the long night that came before and was, alas, to darken still further in the years to come.