The year is 1990, and the German playwright Heiner Müller is on TV. He is discussing his seven-and-a-half-hour adaptation of Hamlet, which premiered a year earlier at the Deutsches Theater in what was then still East Berlin. The interviewer, whose whitish hair occasionally flashes in the corner of the screen, presses Müller to explain why he considered Hamlet “the most relevant play in the GDR at the time.” Puffing on a cigar, Müller recalls a set visit from District Secretary Günter Schabowski, best known for announcing the relaxation of travel restrictions that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The visit did not go well: After a prolonged discussion with the actors, Schabowski left the theater enraged, denouncing, presumably, the theater’s aesthetic and political nonconformity—a scene that Müller took as a sign of the chaos to come. East Germany, Müller realized, was on the cusp of an interregnum much like Hamlet’s: caught between a ghost and a usurper, Stalin and Deutsche Bank. Would those seeking a new beginning be able to manage anything better than, as Müller puts it, Hamlet’s “flight into blind praxis”?
Here the interviewer interjects, asking Müller to say more about Schabowski. Somewhat thrown off his train of thought, Müller pauses briefly before characterizing the District Secretary as “a late-Roman type, a provincial Caracalla.” But that isn’t quite what the interviewer had in mind; he asks Müller to sketch Schabowski’s physical appearance. Obligingly, Müller describes the sagging skin of the man’s lower jaw, lightly tugging at his own cheeks in imitation. At last the interviewer seems to be satisfied. “Like an American senator,” he concludes.
Alexander Kluge’s ability to detect an illuminating detail was one of his special talents, not only as an interviewer, but also as a fiction writer, filmmaker, critical theorist, and TV programmer. Kluge, who died in March at the age of 94, saw the most disorienting historical upheavals of his time through the prism of these fragmentary perceptions and observations: The entire cold war slackens in the jowls of an East German party spokesman. Across media and genres, Kluge’s work embraces the partiality of these factoids and scattered anecdotes, combining and recombining them in ever-shifting constellations. Hence the many scavengers who populate his narratives, like the protagonist of his 1979 film The Patriotic Woman (Die Patriotin), a history teacher who spends her time rummaging through heaps of detritus from prior epochs but fails to combine any of it into a lesson for her students. Kluge himself was one of those marginal collectors who, as Walter Benjamin said of the ragpickers, are the kindred spirits of Baudelaire, selecting their prized possessions from among the debris of modern life.
Despite his reputation as a towering figure of the German left, Kluge was less visible than other major artists and philosophers of his generation, preferring instead to undertake his collecting off-screen, as it were. Unlike Jürgen Habermas, who also died in March, he never achieved the status of an international “public intellectual,” even though he, like Habermas, seems to have won every award in Germany. His major theoretical texts—beginning with 1968’s Public Sphere and Experience, a rejoinder to Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere from the perspective of a proletarian counterpublic—were coauthored with the philosopher Oskar Negt, and one sometimes has the feeling that Kluge’s role, especially in their later History and Obstinacy, was that of an artistic manager, arranging the arguments and sprucing the text with vignettes and images. Likewise in his filmmaking: Though Kluge made plenty of his own films, he spent much of his time making it possible for others to make films—developing financial strategies, drafting manifestos, lobbying, and organizing omnibus films like 1977’s Germany in Autumn, one of the defining achievements of New German Cinema. This same collaborative impulse also animated the work of his austerely titled production company, Development Company for Television Program (DCTP), which to this day continues to produce experimental TV programming and interviews like the one described above.
Kluge was born in 1932 in Halberstadt, a medieval city that was destroyed by US bombers toward the end of World War II. The bombing of his hometown was a signal event in his life, but it would be a long time before he returned to it in writing. A year after the war ended, Kluge left Halberstadt for Berlin and soon found himself studying history, church music, and law at the University of Marburg. Law stuck, and he continued his studies at the University of Frankfurt, where he wrote a dissertation on the history of university self-government under the advisory of the repatriated doyen of critical theory, Theodor Adorno. Kluge briefly served as legal counsel for the Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research, but he grew increasingly disillusioned with law as he began experimenting with literature and film.
Observing his pupil’s drifting interests, Adorno put Kluge in touch with a friend from his time in Los Angeles, Fritz Lang, whom the philosopher referred to as his “kitsch brother.” It proved to be a fateful connection, though a somewhat surprising one for anyone familiar with Adorno’s infamous disdain for the “culture industry.” (Kluge later ventriloquized Adorno as declaring: “I enjoy going to the movies; the only thing that bothers me is the picture on the screen.”) At the recommendation of his teacher, Kluge began working on the set of Lang’s 1959 orientalist drama, The Tiger of Eschnapur, where he witnessed firsthand the pressures of the studio system and reveled in the director’s knack for mise-en-scène. Later, Kluge would have one of the narrators of his book Cinema Stories report that, for the eye-patched Lang, “it was not really crucial for his directing that he could see what was going on, he had already seen enough in his life.”
The stories that Kluge wrote during this period of tutelage were collected and published in 1962 as Lebensläufe, first translated into English as Attendance List for a Funeral, later republished as Case Histories, and rereleased last year under the far more accurate title Lifespan Narratives (Lebenslauf being the German equivalent of “curriculum vitae”). The collection inaugurated a lifelong fictional practice that has no equivalent in contemporary literature. Somewhere between a fait divers and a grisly fairy tale à la the Brothers Grimm (themselves collectors), the typical Kluge short story is sometimes barely recognizable as fiction. The text swims around film stills, musical scores, photographs, drawings, and satellite images. Its language jumps from mock-bureaucratic to histrionic dialogue, studded with disturbingly comical phrases (“prophylactically abused”). Many of the stories read like case studies of human society conducted by an alien visitor, and much of their charm is in the obscure criteria by which these case studies are chosen.
At risk of over-specifying Kluge’s influences, one wants to say that it is this sui generis quality of his writing that justifies him in calling himself, however wryly, a poetic servant of the Frankfurt School. Adorno, for one, was not used to having poetic servants; he basically forbade it, arguing that a work of art sacrifices its political power the moment it declares its political allegiance. It is thus among the more striking aspects of Kluge’s biography that, while in many ways remaining faithful to Adorno’s polemic against politically motivated art, he also hewed close to Adorno’s target, namely the pedagogical, “epic” theater of Bertolt Brecht. That Kluge had imbibed a healthy dose of Brechtian didacticism is evident in his experiments with what he calls Lernprozesse, or “learning processes,” which suggests something like a prose counterpart to Brecht’s Lehrstücke, the playwright’s short, pedagogical theater pieces produced in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The term Lernprozesse appears most prominently in the title of Kluge’s 1973 novella Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome, an exploration of a catastrophic “Black War” that destroys earth in a futuristic 2012. The novella models the concept actively, encouraging the reader to reconstruct its fragmentary contents in parallel to the post-apocalyptic reconstruction that those fragments depict. This outward-facing, functional side of Kluge’s work has as its obverse the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy that he could not but have absorbed from Adorno. As soon as a work like Learning Processes seems to be demonstrating some point that Kluge might have made in a theoretical text coauthored with Negt (say, the arbitrariness of law), a new fragment interrupts its train of thought and reminds us that this is a work of fiction, turning up some quasi-mythical story about the “astral crimes” committed against interplanetary workers.
Nowhere is this double-sided methodology clearer than in Kluge’s many writings about military catastrophe, particularly aerial warfare. (A theme that remains abominably relevant; the opening vignette in Cinema Stories, a description of a makeshift outdoor cinema in bombed-out southern Beirut, could easily be set in the present.) The peculiar analytic style with which he approaches the motif of bombing had already begun to take shape in his first novel, 1964’s Schlachtbeschreibung, or Description of a Battle (often translated as The Battle). A mosaic of stories and facts about the Battle of Stalingrad, the book details the infernal mix of effort and stupidity that makes such atrocities possible. Many years later, in 2008’s Air Raid, Kluge undertook a similar analysis of the bombing of his hometown. It is, however, a staunchly impersonal book; Kluge himself appears nowhere in its pages, though the Halberstadt of his childhood lies there in ruins.
Such catalogues of catastrophic elements are so extensive that W. G. Sebald, writing about The Battle, faulted Kluge for making the event seem like it “had to happen in the end.” What bothers Sebald about Kluge’s reconstruction of Stalingrad is not simply that it is excessively dry or encyclopedic—an epithet that, as Ryan Ruby notes, both Kluge’s and Sebald’s writing have solicited. More troubling, for Sebald, is that these disastrous elements are simply dropped at the feet of the reader, as if with a sigh of fatality. Maybe so, but what matters for the survivors of Halberstadt is that the catastrophe did occur and requires, as Kluge put it in a different context, a “living response.” Kluge only cares to catalogue his facts and circumstances insofar as they are met with this living response, the clumsy and creaturely way that people orient themselves and chart new paths through the rubble.
Kluge’s tendency to exhaust his materials led him to pursue the same themes across multiple genres and media. One of the original stories from Lebensläufe, “Anita G.,” formed the basis for Kluge’s first feature-length film, Abschied von Gestern (Taking Leave of Yesterday, released as Yesterday Girl in the US), which won the Silver Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival. The film, a disjointed picture of the life of an equally disjointed East German émigré (played by Kluge’s sister, Alexandra) on the run from the West German authorities, was one of the most significant realizations of the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto, signed by Kluge, Edgar Reitz, and twenty-four other young West German filmmakers. Announcing what would become New German Cinema’s filiation with the nouvelle vague across the Rhine, the manifesto ends by proclaiming: “The old film is dead. We believe in the new one.”
Kluge was born slightly too early to play any serious role in the student movement of the 1960s. Still, he and the Oberhausen signatories, explicitly opposing themselves to the cinema of Nazism, soon found kindred spirits in a slightly younger cohort of filmmaking ’68ers, including Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Fassbinder’s work in particular would come to embody the disobedient cinema imagined by the Oberhausen Manifesto in the politically volatile “red decade” (1967–1977) that followed. Though Kluge’s films of the ’70s dealt with many of the same themes as Fassbinder’s intricately staged studies of marginal lives—those of the lumpen, the downtrodden and outcast—they already showed signs of a somewhat more analytic approach.
The two filmmakers’ styles are dramatically juxtaposed in Germany in Autumn, an anthology of short films inspired by the dramatic events surrounding the deaths of the imprisoned Red Army Faction members in 1977. Kluge’s opening scene presents the funeral of Hanns Martin Scheyer, the former SS officer and businessman whom the RAF kidnapped and tried to exchange for their imprisoned comrades. Filming the scene at a distance, Kluge undercuts the pomp and circumstance of the funeral, highlighting the Esso flags that loom behind the venue (later, he does the same with feather flags emblazoned with the Mercedes-Benz logo). Kluge’s image of the official state reaction to the German Autumn is immediately followed by Fassbinder’s deeply personal segment, presented from the perspective of an RAF sympathizer. Playing himself, Fassbinder nervously paces the apartment, fights with his partner, buys cocaine, flushes it down the toilet in a fit of paranoia, and tries to convince his mother (his actual mother) that her support for the state’s repressive campaign against the RAF leads to the same fascism she witnessed and claims to oppose. Kluge’s composition, full of bitter ironies, amplifies the dramatic force of Fassbinder’s contribution, but it also underscores Kluge’s divergent, increasingly idiosyncratic approach to his milieu’s preferred themes.
By the end of the decade, Kluge had developed a visual language that was almost Godardian, distinguishing him from his fellow New German Cinema auteurs. Like Godard, Kluge carried forward the rebellious spirit of his early work into more expansive, essayistic modes. Perhaps even more than his French counterpart, however, Kluge crafted his films out of disparate materials that hang together loosely at best. The film scholar Miriam Hansen compares Kluge’s curatorial films to the variety shows screened in nickelodeons. Anyone who has seen a Kluge film will recognize the kernel of truth in this otherwise scandalous comparison between his cerebral montages and the raucous, vaudevillian programs that were the standard nickelodeon fare. Leaping from one topic to another, from a time-lapse of an office building voiced over with a treatise on emotion to a relatively “classical” dramatic scene, Kluge works through rather than against distraction, addressing a public whose desires, interests, and attention spans were rapidly shifting.
Kluge soon brought his idiosyncratic style to a medium traditionally hostile to experimentation: TV. Though his turn to TV marked a departure from his earlier auteurism, it was fully in accord with his interest in creating alternative public spheres. Kluge’s move to the airwaves was only made possible by drastic changes in the legal and economic status of televisual broadcasting in West Germany in the early 1980s. Long opposed by the SPD-led governments, who feared private media would become a platform for conservative messaging, private television legislation was pushed through across West Germany following the 1982 election of Helmut Kohl and return to power of the CDU, effectively legalizing private broadcasting. One of the first private television channels, SAT1, was created by a consortium of large media corporations, including Axel Springer and Holtzbrinck Publishing, the latter of which came to prominence under Nazism. These right-leaning stakeholders saw SAT1 as more of a financial endeavor than an ideological one; consequently, the channel began by airing a market-oriented free-for-all of cartoons, music videos, and reruns of American shows. Taking advantage of this new televisual marketplace, Kluge and his business partner Eberhard Ebner, a newspaper owner from Ulm, managed to acquire a one percent stake in the channel, which granted them the rights to one percent of the programming.
To fill the weekly quota, Kluge began producing The Filmmakers’ Hour (Stunde der Filmemacher) in 1985. Soon after, in 1987, Kluge founded his aforementioned production company in collaboration with Der Spiegel and the Japanese advertising agency Dentsu; DCTP soon came to an agreement with both SAT1 and RTL-plus, allowing Kluge’s programming to air on two of the largest private television channels in West Germany. By the 1990s, there were times when a channel surfer, perhaps startled by the abrasive industrial techno opening sequence of Kluge’s show 10 vor 11, might have clicked away, only to land on another even more puzzling Kluge production. Kluge didn’t mind that his shows occasionally aired at the same time; on the contrary, he saw it as an opportunity for channel flippers to participate in the production process by creating montages of their own.
The pace of TV production presented new challenges. Whereas Kluge once had the luxury of producing a film every one or two years, he suddenly found himself responsible for filling an hour of TV per week. To expedite production, he often incorporated work from his friends, including Ula Stoeckl and Günter Gaus, and he began interviewing a range of public figures and intellectuals. Particularly compelling are his interviews with fictional historical characters, often performed with a dry wit by the actor Peter Berling. In one segment, Berling plays Graduate Engineer Alphons Pförtl, a Nazi-era “firefighting expert” and veteran of the Africa Corps, who discusses the difficulty of making evacuation plans for modern skyscrapers. In another, Berling plays an astronaut, improbably named Paul Newman, whom Kluge asks to explain the logistics of “sexual intercourse in weightless conditions.” Kluge’s delight in these collaborative imaginings is often audible in his questions asked from off-screen, his laughter barely contained.
More often, Kluge interviewed real people—artists, economists, historians, philosophers. With the literary critic Karl Heinz Bohrer, he discussed the invention of the guillotine. With Bill Clinton’s economic advisor Joseph Stiglitz, he discussed capitalism as a living organism. With the philosopher Beatrice Longuenesse, he got to the bottom of whether it is morally permissible to lie. As a question asker, Kluge was limber, always introducing unexpected complications to the surprise and sometimes the frustration of his conversation partners. To Godard, he asked, “Are the ears older than the eyes?” To the sociologist Dirk Baecker, he asked, “Is the brain a manager?” When this personal whimsy was introduced into the traditional TV interview format it could seem as if some benevolent child-dictator had taken over the broadcast.
Kluge’s turn to TV was seen by his peers as a “Faustian bargain,” as Thomas Elsaesser put it, for philosophical reasons as much as for his unavoidable association with Germany’s corporate monoliths. The rise of cable and satellite, as well as further privatization measures introduced under Kohl, made it easier than ever to create new stations and to target programming toward particular demographic groups. National and regional programming, for instance, was supplemented by local news stations, allowing advertisers to market their products to more specific audiences. Kluge’s was a bargain with these new frontiers of commodification as well as a mass medium that had a particular gravity in Germany, it being well known to Kluge and his collaborators that the first public TV broadcasts had taken place under Nazism. It was his insistence on the possibility of reappropriating technologies of control, of using them to renew the shared space of sensibility, that distinguished Kluge most sharply from his former teacher Adorno.
The success of that reappropriation is difficult to judge now, at a time when Kluge’s original TV broadcasts can only be digitally remediated by computers or otherwise rescreened. Part of the charm of TV is that it creates encounters with images “in the wild,” as it were. The TV broadcast grants a certain ephemerality to the image: Anything might appear on the screen at any time, all receding into nothing. It is there when you want to turn it on; it goes on without you. In the flow of their first broadcasts, Kluge’s hallucinatory remixes of archival footage, interviews, text, and cine-essays must have had an odd dissonance with the TV screen itself, a screen that typically only displayed what was made to be forgotten, appealing always to the lowest common denominator or the maximally capturable market share.
Near the end of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, the novel’s protagonist turns on a TV only to see the face of his deceased boss, who addresses him directly, assigning him tasks from beyond the grave. This comically dystopian image is inverted in what might be called Kluge’s “utopia of television,” to adapt a concept Kluge had been hailing since his first essay on cinema, 1964’s “Die Utopie Film.” Kluge’s aim with this slogan was to develop a new media practice capable of bringing about a new individual. “The underlying issue,” he wrote in 1979, “is the struggle between a concept of the individual as a mere buyer, a consumer of the entertainment industry, and an opposing view of the individual as the controller of his or her reality, sensuality, and life experience, one who therefore depends upon a variety of factors that allow for, but are not exclusively concerned with, entertainment.”
Kluge’s TV venture, occupying its designated niche in the cultural market, was evidently not enough to bring about the utopia of television. But, as Kluge himself often noted, utopia may appear most clearly at the moment of its passing: when we remember that the TV screen might have hailed something other than patriots, consumers, workers. Although Kluge’s TV work may not be his most well-known or artistically valorized, it is the most relevant part of his oeuvre today, when the ubiquitous streams of images are so personalized, so powerfully amplified by market-researched presentation and algorithmic targeting, as to make the ghostly TV address in Ubik look benign.
Kluge foresaw the current state of image saturation and specialization from a practical standpoint as much as an intellectual one. Overseeing a production company weighted with financial as well as artistic concerns, he couldn’t help but observe that the ongoing transformation of the economic underpinnings of mass media was bringing about an equally profound transformation of the collective sensorium. As early as the 1970s, Kluge argued that the subordination of TV programming to the laws of supply and demand was leading to what he called the “speculative phase of the New Media.” “Speculative phases lead directly to speculative crises: elimination bouts, cut-throat competition, overproduction, obstruction of outlets, bankruptcies—in all, an enormous sacrifice of capital, which today’s integrated industry would surely not permit.” Just to stay afloat, Kluge noted (fifty years ago), media corporations began testing the limits of human attention, to the point that “it is now as difficult to increase people’s time budgets as it is to increase property in the center of the city.”
Amid this rapidly changing media environment, Kluge maintained a steadfast belief in the continuing vitality of the print medium and the adaptability of literary writing, to which his prodigious prose output attests. Many of his stories were compiled around the turn of the century in the two-volume Chronik der Gefühle (Chronicle of Emotions), but he quickly outstripped the collection with new batches of themed stories on opera, love, war, politics—all appearing under typically Klugean titles such as The Labyrinth of Tender Force and Anyone Who Utters a Consoling Word Is a Traitor. To these editions he has added photo-essay collaborations with Gerhard Richter, with whom he released a book about the month of December, and Ben Lerner, who joined him in creating the literary dialogue Snows of Venice (which also features photographs by Richter). With Lerner in particular, he carried out a search for what he called “gardens of cooperation in the information jungle,” for the exploration of which good old-fashioned print-based literature would remain indispensable.
The new media environment called not only for new techniques of estrangement but also, Kluge maintained, a return to bygone experiments. He took up this call most radically in 2008’s News from Ideological Antiquity, a nearly ten-hour exploration of the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s unrealized adaptions of Marx’s Capital and Joyce’s Ulysses. Stylistically, the project is a culmination of Kluge’s TV work, richly layering and interspersing segments of musical performances, sped-up footage of automobile factory floors, excerpts from silent films, plenty of Kluge’s pet themes (King Kong among them), dramatic readings of Marx and Eisenstein, interviews (including a few “fictional” ones), and—the trademark of his TV programming—PowerPoint-like text in a garish mixture of fonts. To film capital, Kluge suggests, is to film just about everything but its caricatures: dollar bills, rotund men in three-piece suits with monocles, Wall Street (no matter how often the quoted text scrolls ticker-tape-like across the bottom of the screen). Marx himself makes sporadic appearances. Only the second of the film’s three parts (“All Objects are Enchanted People”) explicitly presents itself as an explication of Capital, and even then, only of the first chapter. While other chapters and topics (the division of labor, machinery) are announced by titled subsections, no dramatizations of the critique of political economy are in store. In fact, although Marx and Eisenstein set up the film’s major questions, it is Joyce who is key, as Kluge attests in an interview with his cowriter Negt: It is the novelist rather than the filmmaker or the philosopher, Kluge tells us, who squeezed all the world, the world of capital, into a single day as lived by two ordinary Irishmen.
The very title News from Ideological Antiquity is an apt condensation of Kluge’s sense of historical redemption. As Christopher Pavsek writes, Kluge was “a partisan of an ‘arriere-garde’”; his efforts were aimed at carrying forward “all the lost utopian aspirations of past political and aesthetic projects, all the wishes and hopes that history has left unrealized.” Rummaging through those lost intentions, Kluge made it possible to speak, without any trace of nostalgia or fatalism, about what might have been. As he and Negt put it in History and Obstinacy, the dead are ever reminding us of their unfulfilled dreams, as if to say: “We did not want it to turn out that way.” It is a sad refrain, but a song all the same.
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