Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time

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 soc...