Siegfried Kracauer's Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time
brilliantly reconfigures the biography form into a remarkable work of
social and cultural history. In a book that has frequently been compared
with Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Kracauer uses the life and
work of Offenbach to assemble a penetrating portrayal of Second Empire
Paris.
By examining the superficiality and mystification of collective
experience, Kracauer provides the reader with a revelatory "physiognomy"
of social reality itself. Offenbach's immensely popular operettas have
long been seen as part of the larger historical amnesia and escapism in
the aftermath of 1848. But Kracauer insists that Offenbach's productions
have to be understood as more than simply glittering distractions.
The fantasy realms of his operettas, occurring amid the urban renewal of
Baron Haussmann and the fanfare of Universal Expositions, were on the
one hand fully continuous with the unreality of Napoleon III's imperial
masquerade, but on the other made a mockery of the pomp and pretenses
surrounding the apparatuses of power. His music "originated in an epoch
in which social reality had been banished by the Emperor's orders, and
for many years it flourished in the gap that was left."
Offenbach's dreamworlds were embedded with a layer of utopian content
that can be seen as an indictment of the fraudulence and corruption of
the times. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in
modern critical and cultural studies. This edition includes Kracauer's
preface to the original German edition, translated into English for the
first time, and a critical foreword by Gertrud Koch.
