City and Community in Siegfried Kracauer’s Weimar essays

Abstract

This article examines the evolution of Siegfried Kracauer’s reflection on Gemeinschaft during the Weimar Republic, situating it within broader debates on community, modernity, and urban life in 1920s Germany. It argues that Kracauer’s engagement with community cannot be reduced to authoritarian or völkisch interpretations, but unfolds through a com- plex analysis of loss, alienation, and collective experience in the modern metropolis. In his early writings, Kracauer depicts the big city as a space of existential alienation and spiritual homelessness, drawing critically on Georg Simmel’s figure of the stranger while reworking it through a religious existentialist lens. Although he rejects any restorative return to organic community, Kracauer insists on the enduring significance of what has been lost. This tension leads to the concept of a negative community, composed of isolated individuals bound by a shared experience of metaphysical waiting and later social disenchantment. During the sec- ond half of the 1920s, this framework becomes increasingly secularized and politicized as Kracauer turns toward mass society, public space, and the emergence of an urban Publikum. The article shows how he seeks to move beyond the opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft by reactivating Enlightenment ideals while critically addressing mass culture and democratic fragility in Weimar Germany.