(De)Mythologizing the German Middle Classes: Siegfried Kracauer, the Eugen Diederichs Publishing House and the Journal Die Tat in the Weimar Era

This article traces Siegfried Kracauer’s encounters with the neo-religious journal Die Tat and its publisher Eugen Diederichs in interwar Germany. Both Kracauer and Die Tat began the 1920s as participants in the post-war quest for spiritual renewal but ended the decade on opposing paths: Kracauer as a left-wing cultural critic and Die Tat as a vehicle of right-wing radicalization. Focusing on their shared preoccupation with the emerging urban middle classes, the study explores how a discourse once framed in religious terms was gradually displaced by social and political concerns. Kracauer interpreted the “transcendental homelessness” of modernity as the intellectual condition of the salaried masses, while Die Tat transformed similar anxieties into a völkisch-socialist mythology of the “middle.” Their divergent responses to the same crisis illuminate the ideological polarization of Weimar culture and the shifting boundaries between religion, politics, and social theory in Germany’s interwar public sphere.