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On February 8, 1889, Siegfried Kracauer was born in Frankfurt am Main, the son of a businessman, Adolf K. Kracauer and his wife, the for-mer Rosette Oppenheim; he died sev-enty-seven years later in New York City on November 26, 1966. For any normal biography, this bracketing of a life between two chronological points is a natural and unexamined beginning. For a biography of Kracauer, however, it constitutes a betrayal of the strongest taboo of his later life, a taboo he expressed in a series of letters deliberately set aside in his well-organized Nachlaß1to give any future biographer pause. These letters, written in the 1960swhen Kracauer was consumed by his final project on the philosophy of his-tory, were filed under the heading of “extra-territoriality.” In all of them, Kra-cauer vehemently opposed any effort to disclose his correct age, a campaign, as he surely must have known, which could only meet with temporary suc-cess.2 His reason for waging it, despite the certainty of ultimate failure, tran-scended the petty vanity of those who refuse to age gracefully. As he wrote to his friend Theodor W. Adorno in 1963: “It is not as if there is something for me in appearing young or younger; it is simply the horror of losing chronological anonymity through the fixating of a date and the unavoidable con-notations of such a fixation.”
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