“Great Historians Are Biological Freaks”: Siegfried Kracauer's Philosophy of History

Abstract This text examines Siegfried Kracauer's unfinished final book, the posthumously published History: The Last Things Before the Last (1969). While Kracauer's Weimar writings have long been celebrated, History, apart from a few key early texts, has only recently been given critical attention. Written in English in New York in the 1960s, the book lies at the intersection of film theory and historical philosophy. One of the key contributions of History, I argue, is that it offers a filmic technology of historical thought that might intervene in the emergent systems of temporal management and control that haunted the 1960s and continue to condition our experience of time to this day. Kracauer's name for his counter-technology is “the anteroom,” and its function is to aid utopian thought and practice, what he calls “the emergence of something new, something beyond the jurisdiction of nature.”