I present Kracauer's original critical analysis of aesthetic modernity, and discuss the theoretical and aesthetic affinities between Kracauer and Walter Benjamin in their analyses of Paris during the second half of the Twentieth Century; the Second Empire as the original embodiment of mass society, with its cultural and entertaining industries; and, above all, the emergence of fascism and National Socialism. During his Parisian exile (1933-1941), Kracauer wrote a "social biography": Orpheus in Paris: Offenbach and the Paris of His Time (New York, 1938), an innovative work with many affinity points with Walter Benjamin's The Work of the Arcades, or Paris as the Capital of the XIXth Century.
Exile; exterritoriality; entertaining industry; Offenbach; Parisian Arcades; critique of historicism