Siegfried Kracauer's Urban Writings Reissued in French

Les Belles Lettres has reissued 'Rues de Berlin (et d'ailleurs)', a collection of feuilletons by Siegfried Kracauer, originally published in the interwar period. The volume showcases Kracauer's precise and evocative language as he explores everyday urban spaces—passages, bars, employment agencies, amusement parks—and mundane objects like pianos, typewriters, suspenders, and umbrellas. His writing anticipates Roland Barthes' semiology, as seen in 'Montagnes russes', a sketch of a Coney Island-style fairground in New York. The collection spans cities from Berlin to Marseille, where he describes the Old Port's sea as 'a liquid square' and its spongy cellars teeming with human fauna under a pure sky. Kracauer, born in Frankfurt in 1889, lived in exile in France from 1933 to 1941 before moving to the United States, where he died in 1966. The translation by Michel Vignard captures the haunting quality of these urban prose poems, reminiscent of Eugène Atget's photographs of Paris. The book includes reflections on Berlin's 'inner Siberia of passages' and Marseille's Platonic contrasts. Kracauer, author of 'From Caligari to Hitler' and 'The Salaried Masses', remains a contemporary voice despite his 19th-century birth.