Siegfried Kracauer

Siegfried Kracauer was born on February 8, 1889, in Frankfurt am Main to a Jewish family. Kracauer studied architecture from 1907 to 1913, eventually obtaining a doctorate in engineering in 1914 and working as an architect in Osnarbrück, 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). With the rise of the Nazis in Germany in 1933, Kracauer migrated to Paris. In March 1941, thanks to the French ambassador Henri Hoppenot and his wife, Hélène Hoppenot, he emigrated to the United States. He worked in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City from 1941 to 1943. In the last years of his life Kracauer worked as a sociologist for different institutes, amongst them in New York as a director of research for applied social sciences at Columbia University. He is notable for arguing that realism is the most important function of cinema.