Throughout his life, Siegfried Kracauer contributed to many different fields of knowledge, disciplines, and genres. His writings range widely from motion-picture theory to cultural criticism, from autobiographical fiction to sociological observations on manifestations of modernity as diverse as operetta, advertising, the circus, and urban life. Accordingly, Kracauer, whose life itself was split between his native Europe and the United States, to which he fled from Nazism, is variously labeled as sociologist, motion-picture theorist, cultural critic, fellow traveler of the Frankfurt School, philosopher, journalist, and novelist. He has come under fire from contemporary motion-picture theorists, who describe his work on cinema as a naive apology for realism, while he has been praised as a central theorist of modernity (together with Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin) and a sharp observer of new ways of social existence produced by capitalism and the urban experience.

In the often-quoted autobiographical preface to his...