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Alexander Kluge: An Introduction
Author(s): Andrew BowieSource: Cultural Critique , No. 4 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 111-118
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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Alexander Kluge: An Introduction
Andrew Bowie
Aexander Kluge tends to be known in the English-speaking world
only as the maker of"avant-garde" films that often create not a lit-
tle puzzlement among their viewers. The fact is, though, that he is con-
sidered by many in Germany to be both a major literary figure and a
major theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. His relative
obscurity elsewhere is perhaps best explained by the demands his
work makes on its readers, though as I hope to show and as is evident in
the speech translated here, there can be little excuse for not paying
substantial attention to his work. The sheer diversity of the areas in
which he is active makes him, now Sartre is dead, one of the few Euro-
pean intellectuals whose work suggests the futility of specialist divi-
sions in practice as well as in theory.
Kluge was born in Halberstadt, which is now in the GDR, in 1932.
In 1945 he was present in Halberstadt when it was bombed by the
Allies in a raid which led to a fire-storm. He moved with his mother to
Berlin in 1946, and in 1949 he began studying law, history, and church
music. T.W. Adorno introduced him to Fritz Lang in 1958, and he as-
sisted in the making of one of the latter's films. In the sixties Kluge be-
came involved in the Oberhausen group which laid the foundation for
the New German Cinema. He was one of those largely responsible for
the change of the German law on film subsidies and worked together with
Peter Glotz, a member of the Social Democratic Party and now a lead-
ing figure in that party, to get the government to subsidize films of ar-
111
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2 Andrew Bowie
tistic merit rather than commercial rubbish (something which the pres-
ent government in the Federal Republic is now, in the form of Herr
Zimmermann, trying to reverse). In 1962 he published his first col-
lection of stories, Lebensliiufe (Life Stories - in German the word also
means curricula vitae), and two years later the first version of his
account of the battle of Stalingrad, Schlachtbeschreibung (Description of a
Battle) appeared. His first major film, Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday's Girl
is the appropriate English title), won eight prizes at the Venice film
festival in 1966, the kind of success which he has not repeated, despite
the excellence of his subsequent films, perhaps because their radical-
ism is too much for most festival juries. Since then he has produced
several feature length films, such as Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin (Occa-
sional work of a Female Slave) (1975), Der starke Ferdinand (Ferdinand the
Strong) (1976), Die Patriotin (The Patriot) (1979), and most recently Die
Macht der Gefihle (The Power ofEmotion) (1983). Kluge was also the main
moving force behind three collective films made together with Schlon-
dorff, Fassbinder, and others: Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn)
(1978), a film looking at the German situation in the light ofMogadischu,
the murder of Schleyer, and the still unexplained deaths of members
of the Baader-Meinhof group of Stammhein prison; Der Kandidat
(1980), a film about FranzJosef Strauss when he was candidate for the
chancellorship; and Krieg und Frieden (War and Peace) (1982), perhaps
the profoundest and funniest anti-nuclear film there is, despite its
m ajor flaws.
Kluge's main literary works have been Lemprozesse mit tidlichem
Ausgang (Learning Processes with Fatal Results) (1973) and Neue Ge-
schichten: Hefte 1-18 "Unheimlichkeit der Zeit" (New Histories: Notebooks 1-18
"The Uncanniness of Time'") (1977), after the appearance of which he won
the Fontane prize for literature. Together with Oskar Negt (Professor
of Sociology at Hannover University), Kluge has written two major
theoretical works, Offentlichkeit und Erfahrung (The Public Sphere and Ex-
perience) (1972) and Geschichte und Eigensinn (History and Willful Meaning)
(1981). Kluge is in the process of producing a new film, the provisional
title of which is The Attack of the Present on the Rest of Time, and he has pro-
duced various collections of literary and theoretical work in conjunc-
tion with recent films. One does, though, have the impression that a
new phase of his productivity is about to begin.
In the face of this kind of diversity of material it is obviously some-
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Kluge: An Introduction 113
what dangerous to suggest any kind of "common denominator." If
one factor is common to all of Kluge's work it is precisely that factor
which is the negation of overall abstractions: montage. Kluge's work
constantly pushes the disparateness of the material involved to its lim-
its, yet at the same time it retains as its central category the notion of
Zusammenhang (context, connection, that which "hangs together").
This might seem a kind of aesthetic paradox: radical montage of
the kind that puzzles the viewers of Kluge's films, where a sequence of
disparate images from German history - a Caspar David Friedrich
painting, a print of the Brandenburg gate, soldiers on a snow-covered
road in Russia, etc. - is followed by a sequence (involving the knee [ ]
of a soldier who died in Stalingrad) that tries to put the record
straight, yet does not result in a coherent account of "German
History." Kluge's point is, of course, that German history is itself even
more destructive, chaotic, and dangerous than anything he could ever
put into a film. The potential connections that can be made between
even the most apparently unconnected aspects of the really disastrous
history of Germany might turn out to make a lot more sense than the
unifying images which still dominate the discourse of most historians.
This approach, which has its roots in aspects of Walter Benjamin's phi-
losophy of history, can be seen on all levels of Kluge's work.
This can perhaps best be illustrated by taking a specific example
which recurs in all the main areas of Kluge's production, that of the air
raid. The obvious initial point is that Kluge himself was very nearly the
victim of the raid on his home town. This fact does not play an overt
role in any of his films, fiction, or theory; it is, though, evidently a fun-
damental trauma which is mediated in multiple ways in an attempt to
come to terms with it. Kluge's concern is with the Jetztzeit (now-
time) that Benjamin sees as being the fundamental aspect of a materi-
alist view of historical time. As Benjamin says in the Passagenwerk;
"The history which showed things 'as they really were' was the
strongest narcotic of the [19th] century;" knowing "what it was like" is
little use to us now; just repeating a trauma is no way to overcpme it.
In Die Patriotin the air raid motif recurs in various ways: once in the
form of the opposition, discussed in the speech printed below, be-
tween "Strategy from Above," which is the perspective of technology
and power, seen in sequences that look at the machinery of the raid
and its effects from a distance, giving it that familiar sense of suspect
fascination, and "Strategy from Below," which portrays a woman div-
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4 Andrew Bowie
ing for cover as the bombs hit and praying for help that will never
come. In this form, of course, there is no strategy from below; it is al-
ready too late when the raid starts. For Kluge moder history consists
of little but strategy from above, as the economy of world governments
proves. "Strategy from Below" is a central concern of his work and of
the history we are still producing. Much of the problem has to do with
the inadequacy of our thinking about the products of history, with the
images we use to try to comprehend that which single individuals can-
not ever understand. Another sequence of Die Patriotin shows Ameri-
can bomber pilots; the commentary states: "These bomber pilots have
returned from their mission. They didn't learn anything definite about
Germany. They just expertly dismantled the country for eighteen
hours. Now they are going to their quarters to sleep." From within the
planes there is no way of experiencing the reality of one's activity; if
there were, the bombs would probably never have been dropped in
the first place.
The literary account of the air raid in Neue Geschichten uses the re-
sources of montage in a way which takes into account both the need
for some kind of documentation of the events (though many of the in-
cidents are almost certainly invented, such as the section entitled "Re-
lationship of the Events to a Piano Lesson") and the need to reveal the
fundamental inadequacy of documentation. The raid on Halberstadt
had no strategic significance at that stage of the war; the people that
bombed it were from Texas, and the raid only took place because of
the new forms of organization being developed by the bomber com-
mands at the end of the war: it made no "sense," either as strategy or
revenge. The text does not allow the reader to accept any received im-
ages of such history: it involves complex theoretical reflections derived
from Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment on how the
technology of the raid is able to subsume any ethical or emotional im-
pulses on the part of the people carrying it out. Perhaps most impor-
tantly, the account of the raid is only one part of a large book of highly
disparate stories that constantly remind one that the raid is still effec-
tively going on; moder nuclear strategy simply takes a step further the
logic of the pilots who do not see what they are really doing. One story,
for example, concerns the difficulties of a team of peace researchers in
finding methods of making people even think about the objective
threat with which they are faced.
One basic impulse of Kluge's work is essentially Brechtian: he
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6 Andrew Bowie
appear in the history of capital. In that history where, as Marx says,
"all that is solid melts into air," the traditional restrictions on labor
power are broken down; what is actually objectified is, however, only
one side of that history: far more potential is released which does not
fit into the categories of the new economy. It is this potential which in-
terests Negt and Kluge. The potential is seen dialectically. On the one
hand, it produces disasters: the authors construct a theory of"war as la-
bor" on the basis of the idea that the residual potential in the modem
work process cannot simply disappear. The frequent image, at the
outbreak of the First World War, of some kind of holiday suggests what
they mean. On the other hand, the authors see perspectives for libera-
tion on the basis of human attributes which so far in history have only
realized themselves in distorted forms. The capacity for cooperation
shown in the Nazi period need not simply lead to disaster. The book
deconstructs any rigid division between labor and any other human at-
tribute because the movement of history has made this a necessary
strategy. The force of this becomes immediately apparent when the
production of the species by women is counted as labor, or when "pri-
vate" issues of socialization are included in the category.
Geschichte und Eigensinn, like Kluge's other work, raises more prob-
lems than it solves. Read along with his other work it forms part of a
series of approaches to the major theoretical and aesthetic issues of our
time that constantly refuse to fit neatly into the divisions of intellec-
tual labor which still dominate the human sciences. The speech "The
Political as Intensity of Everyday Feelings" was given in the Akademie
der Kiinste in Berlin on the occasion of the award of the Fontane prize
and is a transcript, which explains the occasionally rather convoluted
nature of the formulation. The speech is a very condensed version of
Kluge's concerns but serves as a provocative introduction to his work.
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Kluge: An Introduction
Brief Bibliography
The most important Kluge texts are the following:
Lebensliiufe: Anwesenheitsliste fur eine Beerdigung (Life Stories: Attendance
Sheetfor a Funeral). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974.
(This is a collection of fictional life histories of German people. The
stories suggest why post-War German society has not learnt sufficiently
from the Nazi past - it also contains the famous and notorious story
"Ein Liebesversuch" ["A Love Experiment"], which narrates a barbarous
experiment in a concentration camp from the point of view of the
experimenters.)
Lernprozesse mit todlichem Ausgang (Learning Processes with Fatal Results).
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973.
(A collection of stories about individuals in contemporary society with
a "hunger for meaning" whose search for happiness within existing
social structures leads to disasters when their pursuit is added collec-
tively to that of others.)
Neue Geschichten: Hefte 1-18 "Unheimlichkeit der Zeit" (New Histories: Issues
1-18 "Uncanniness of Time"). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977.
(A collection of stories in the manner of Lernprozesse, with the account of
the air raid; many of the stories deal with matters that are theoretically
reflected in Geschichte und Eigensinn.)
Schlachtbeschreibung: Der organisatorische Aufbau eines Ungliicks (Description of
a Battle: The Organizational Edification of an Accident). Munich: Gold-
mann, 1978.
(The latest and to my mind best account of the battle of Stalingrad
using documents and fiction.)
Die Patriotin: Texte/Bilder 1-6 (The Patriot: Texts/Images 1-6). Frankfurt:
Zweitausendeins, 1979.
(A book that accompanies the film about a German history teacher
who feels German history is not positive enough to be taught in
schools. The book contains the script of the film and much other
theoretical and fictional material to do with questions of German
history.
117
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8 Andrew Bowie
Die Macht der Gefzhle (The Power of Emotion). Frankfurt: Zweitausen-
deins, 1979.
(A work, in the manner of the book Die Patriotin, which accompanies
the film The Power of Emotion, which is Kluge's most recent film. The film
and the book reflect upon the relationship of feelings to the threat of
war: "The sharpest challenge for feelings is war. It is, by the way, the
sharpest challenge for all projects of power, as long as it can prove that
no power can stop it; and so far in history no power could stop it. I
should like to tell stories of how feelings are not powerless.")
Offentlichkeit und Erfahrung (The Public Sphere and Experience). Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1972.
(The first theoretical book with Negt, with the subtitle "Towards the
analysis of the organization of the bourgeois and the proletarian
public sphere." The interest of the book is to "open up the analytical
categories of political economy down in the direction of the real
experiences of people," and it looks at how experience is constituted in
the public sphere of societies dominated by modern media.).
Geschichte und Eigensinn (History and Willful Meaning). Frankfurt: Zweit-
ausendeins, 1981.
On Kluge's films see Rainer Lewandowski, Die Filme von Alexander Kluge
(Hildesheim, New York: Olms Press, 1980); ed. Thomas B6hm-Christl,
Alexander Kluge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983); John Sanford, The New
German Cinema (London, New York: O. Wolff, 1980). On his fiction see
Andrew Bowie, "New Histories: Aspects of the Prose of Alexander
Kluge," Journal of European Studies XII (1982): 180-203. On the rela-
tionship of the theory of Geschichte und Eigensinn to post-structuralism
see Andrew Bowie, "Differing Subjects?" LTP 3 (1984): 46-55.
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