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Siegfried Kracauer (February 8, 1889, Frankfurt am Main–November 26, 1966, New York) was a German...

Siegfried Kracauer (February 8, 1889, Frankfurt am Main–November 26, 1966, New York) was a German-Jewish writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist. Born to a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Kracauer studied architecture from 1907 to 1913, eventually obtaining a doctorate in engineering in 1914 and working as an architect in Osnabrück, Munich, and Berlin until 1920. From 1922 to 1933 he worked as the leading film and literature editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung (a leading Frankfurt newspaper) as its correspondent in Berlin, where he worked alongside Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, among others. Between 1923 and 1925, he wrote an essay entitled Der Detektiv-Roman (The Detective Novel), in which he concerned himself with phenomena from everyday life in modern society. Kracauer continued this trend over the next few years, building up theoretical methods of analyzing circuses, photography, films, advertising, tourism, city layout, and dance, which he published in 1927 with the work Ornament der Masse (published in English as The Mass Ornament). In 1930, Kracauer published Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses), a critical look at the lifestyle and culture of the