KRACAUER AS AN ETHNOLOGIST OF CITIES: THE CASE OF STREETS IN BERLIN AND ELSEWHERE

Between the years 1925 and 1933, Siegfried Kracauer published a series of articles about cities in the German newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung. They were published in the book Streets in Berlin and Elsewhere in 1963. The work of this German philosopher and sociologist was defined by Gerard Raulet as an ethnology of the great metropolis, and Philippe Despoix called the same work a creation of urban miniatures. To describe the Berlin of the 20s and 30s, Kracauer makes use of a writing style that ranges from real physical descriptions to the creation of ruptures with the use of metaphors and dreamy atmospheres. The aim of this paper is to examine the literary devices used by Kracauer, contextualizing them in relation to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, made during the same period.