Siegfried Kracauer - Os Empregados

Published in 1930, deemed seditious and burned in 1933 in the "autos-da-fé" of the Third Reich, this work by Kracauer probes the daily life and political importance of a new social type at the beginning of the 20th century: employees. In a style that oscillates between literary essay and sociological study, it gives vivid voice to small salespeople and typists, shopkeepers and bankers, portraying their working conditions, frustrated aspirations, and a false class consciousness. Kracauer thus denounces an illusory bourgeois identity, coveted by this new group, and the fictitious social ascension of employees in relation to the workers, whose terrible material conditions they share. With obstinate irony, the author describes a world that conceals its degradation and anticipates, between the lines, the silent collaboration of this new middle class, anesthetized and deluded, in the rise of evil.