Ansgar Martins (PhD candidate, Goethe University in Frankfurt), focuses on Siegfried Kracauer's rather less well-known reflections on the philosophy and history of religion(s). The heart piece of his theological thought was the notion that (divine) truth could no longer be grasped directly but only negatively through the criticism of the profane world. 

Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) presented his philosophy as a conduit facilitating a transition from the religious search for “meaning” to a critical philosophy of culture. The titles of his final two monographs referred expressly to this mediated form of theology: Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960) and History: The Last Things Before the Last (published posthumously in 1969). For Kracauer, the historical universe on which the camera lens and the historian focus was merely the “anteroom”, the ultimaty reality before the actual ultimate reality. My reconstruction is structured around three key parameters: firstly, the forms of political messianism prevalent in the period between the two world wars; secondly, modes of identity construction prevalent among twentieth-century German Jewish intellectuals; and, thirdly, broader issues pertaining to the transformation of religion and religions in the modern and postmodern world. Kracauer’s position evolved in the context of often polemical debates with various thinkers ranging from the early Frankfurt School to various New York intellectuals. What seems to emerge from this engagement is an insistence on “theology” as a means of allowing human beings to feel at home in the physical “reality” that surrounds them and a messianic vision that was, at all times, entirely inextricable from his political concerns.