Mass Ornament

Among the many essays that Siegfried Kracauer, a close friend of Benjamin and Adorno and the most talented "student" of Simmel and Lukacs, wrote in the Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper in the 1920s and early 30s, is a selection that he himself wrote in 1963.

Kracauer, who thinks that we can grasp the spirit of a period not by looking at the judgments it makes about itself, but by examining its superficial, temporary and marginal phenomena, traces this conscious epistemological choice in the essays collected in this book. Isolation, alienation, boredom, city culture, the relationship between the individual and the group, etc. through shopping malls, travel, dancing girls, photography, best-selling books, hotel lobbies, biographies and cinema. It deals with basic themes specific to modernity such as. In his articles on Scheler, Simmel, Benjamin and Kafka, he analyzes these thinkers and writers while also presenting his own philosophical position.

"There is nothing that the reader of today's best-selling books, driven by the instinct of survival, desires more than for annoying questions to be buried in the depths of silence," says Kracauer, and confronts the reader with exactly such disturbing questions in these magnificent essays.



Number of Pages: 304

Year of Printing: 2011


Language: Turkish
Publisher: Metis Publishing

First Printing Year: 2011

Number of Pages: 304

Language Turkish