Alexander Kluge: An Introduction Andrew Bowie Cultural Critique, No. 4. (Autumn, 1986), pp. 111-118.

Alexander Kluge: An Introduction

Andrew Bowie

lexander Kluge tends to be known in the English-speaking world only as the maker of "avant-garde" films that often create not alittle puzzlement among their viewers. The fact is, though, that he is considered 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 European intellectuals whose work suggests the futility of specialist divisions 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 assisted in the making of one of the latter's films. In the sixties Kluge became 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 leading figure in that party, to get the government to subsidize films of ar-

1 12

Andrew Bowie

tistic merit rather than commercial rubbish (something which the present government in the Federal Republic is now, in the form of Herr Zimmermann, trying to reverse). In 1962 he published his first collection 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 $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 radicalism is too much for most festival juries. Since then he has produced several feature length films, such as Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin (Occasional work o f a Female Slave) ( 1 9 7 5 ) ,Der starke Ferdinand (Ferdinand the Strong) ( 1 9 7 6 ) ,Die Patriotin (The Patriot) ( 1 9 7 9 ) , and most recently Die Macht der Geflhle (The Power $Emotion) ( 1 9 8 3 ) . Kluge was also the main moving force behind three collective films made together with Schlondorff, Fassbinder, and others: Deutschland i m Herbst (Germany i n Autumn) (1978),afilm looking at the German situation in the light of Mogadischu, the murder of Schleyer, and the still unexplained deaths of members of the Baader-Meinhof group of Stammhein prison; Der Kandidat ( 1 9 8 0 ) , a film about Franz Josef Strauss when he was candidate for the chancellorship; and Krieg und Frieden (War and Peace) ( 1 9 8 2 ) , perhaps the profoundest and funniest anti-nuclear film there is, despite its major flaws. Kluge's main literary works have been Lernproresse mit todlichem Ausgang (Learning Processes with Fatal Results) ( 1 9 7 3 ) and Neue Geschichten: H e f e l - 1 8 "Unheimlichkeit der ZeitJJ (New Histon'es: Notebook 1-1 8 "The Uncanniness of TimeJ') ( 19 7 7 ) , 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, bffentlichkeit und Efahrung (The Public Sphere and Experience) ( 1 9 7 2 ) and Geschichte und Eigensinn (Histoly and Willful Meaning) ( 1 98 1 ) . Kluge is in the process of producing a new film, the provisional titleof which is The Attack ofthe Present on the Rest $Time, and he has produced various collections of literary and theoretical work in conjunction 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 limits, 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 [!I 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 philosophy 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 fundamental trauma which is mediated in multiple ways in an attempt to come to terms with it. Kluge's concern is with the Jetztzeit (nowtime) that Benjamin sees as being the fundamental aspect of a materialist 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 overcQme it. In D i e Patriotin the air raid motif recurs in various ways: once in the form of the opposition, discussed in the speech printed below, between "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-

1 14

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 already too late when the raid starts. For Kluge modern history consists of little but strategy from above, as the economy of world governments proves. "Strategy fiom 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 cannot ever understand. Another sequence of Die Patriotin shows Arnerican 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 resources of montage in a way which takes into account both the need for some kind of documentation of the events (though many of the incidents are almost certainly invented, such as the section entitled "Relationship 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 commands 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 images of such history: it involves complex theoretical reflections derived fiom Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment on how the technology of the raid is able to subsume any ethical or emotional impulses on the part of the people carrying it out. Perhaps most importantly, 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 effectively going on; modern 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

Kluge: An Introduction

1 15

wishes to make people astonished at that which has come to be regarded as normal. To write an account of Stalingrad which simply documents the defeat of the Sixth Army is not to ask the question of why 300,000 people could regard it as realistic and desirable to invade Russia in winter when history ought to have taught them that it had already once been proven impossible. The energy that goes into the astounding achievements that are the catastrophes of modern history has been the central issue of Negt and Kluge's recent theoretical work. A bombing raid involves a spectacular degree of organization of human labor, while the conviction that one could invade Russia is one born of the idea that the labor capacities of the people involved are sufficient to do what had seemed impossible. Geschichte und Eigensinn is an attempt to develop a theory which would be able to give better access to how such crazy events are produced by people who otherwise appear wholly normal. Negt and Kluge present the beginnings of what they call a "political economy of labor power." In the example of the bombing raid the authors use the Marxian distinction of living and dead labor in a way which suggests the significance of the question of labor for the wider theory. The bombs which fall on the people cowering in the cellar are accumulated dead labor from the history of gun-powder, flying, metalwork, military organization, etc. Therefore, "What falls is labor power. What is destroyed below is labor power as well. In the planes and the bombs there is more dead labor, thus a greater proportion of people's lives, than the proportions of dead and living labor sitting in the cellar." This situation is an allegory of the situation of living labor in the present. The systems of social reproduction are increasingly divorced from the life-world of the members of developed societies: dead labor dominates living labor. How in such a situation can an emancipatory perspective be developed? Negt and Kluge's response is to attempt a re-writing of the history and concept of labor. In a world where the dominant means of exchange do not even allow a massive number of people to be part of the productive process, and where the new technologies are obviating, presumably for the foreseeable future, many received forms of labor, the history of labor power begins to look different. By separating more radically than Marx does the notion of labor (the work that has so far been done in history) and labor power (the potential that was available at each stage of historical development), the authors try to reveal the repressed potential that does not

1 16

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 interests Negt and Kluge. The potential is seen dialectically. On the one hand, it produces disasters: the authors constructa theory of "war as labor" on the basis of the idea that the residual potential in the modern 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 liberation 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 deconstmcts any rigid division between labor and any other human attribute 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 "private" issues of socialization are included in the category. Geschichte und Eigensinn, like Kluge's other work, raises more problems 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 intellectual 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:

117

Lebenslaufi: Anwesenheitsliste fur eine Beerdigung (Life Stories: Attendance

Sheetfor a Funeral). Frankfurt: Suhrkarnp, 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.
(Acollection 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
f Time"). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977.
1-18 "Uncanniness o (Acollection of stories in the manner oflernprozesse, 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 (Descriptionof
a Battle: The Organizational Edftcation o f 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.)

118

Andrew Bowie

Die Macht der Gefuhle (The Power o f Emotion). Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 1979. (A work, in the manner of the book Die Patriotin, which accompanies the film The PowerofEmotion,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.") bjfentlichkeit und Efahrung (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: Zweitausendeins, 198 1. On Kluge's films see Rainer Lewandowski, Die Filme von Alexander Kluge (Hildesheim, New York: Olms Press, 1980);ed. Thomas Bohm-Christl, Alexander Kluge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983);John Sanford, The New German Cinema (London, New York: 0 . Wolff, 1980).On his fiction see Andrew Bowie, "New Histories: Aspects of the Prose of Alexander Kluge,'' Journal o f European Studies XI1 ( 1982): 180-203. On the relationship of the theory of Geschichte und Eigensinn to post-structuralism see Andrew Bowie, "Differing Subjects?" LTP 3 (1984):46-55.