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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-





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-





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





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.





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





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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