The mass ornament: Weimar essays

This book is a celebration of masses -their tastes, amusements, and everyday lives. Taking up the master themes of modernity, such as isolation and alienation, mass culture and urban experience, and the relation between the group and the individual, kracauer explores a kaleidoscope of topics: shoping arcades, the cinema, bestsellers and their readers, photography, dance, hotel lobbies, Kafka, the Bible, and boredom. For kracauer, the most revelatory facets of modern metropolitan life lie on the surface, in the ephemeral and the marginal. This volume presents the full scope of his gifts as one of the most wide-ranging and penetrating interprets of modern life.