Among the hugely varied achievements of Siegfried Kracauer, it is his sociocultural studies that particularly stand out today. After studying architecture, he became editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1922 and in the following years published his two much-revered studies Das Ornament der Masse (The Mass Ornament) in 1927 and Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses) in 1930, in which he began his examinations of the interactions of art and society.

A few weeks after Hitler was named Chancellor of the Reich, Kracauer, who came from a lower middle-class Jewish family, fled to Paris. In 1941, he and his wife managed to emigrate to the USA at the very last moment. After the War he published two works there: From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Theory of Film (1960), which built on the numerous feature articles he wrote in the Weimar Republic era and which established Kracauer’s reputation as the intellectual father of film sociology. Taking a similar view to Lotte H. Eisner in her 1952 study L’Écran démoniaque (The Haunted Screen), he saw a latent mirroring of the state of society in the paranoid social models and the fantastical tyrannical figures of German expressionist film and therefore an indirect advance notification of fascism.