I have followed Alexander Kluge's films, his writings, theories and food for thought intensively since the mid-1970s. He was one of the great universal and lateral thinkers between art, literature, film, philosophy, science, history and politics. His death opens a huge gap, if not an abyss. And that in these times!

My favorite movie was always The Patriot (1979), I've certainly seen it twenty times. Cult! Strangely enough, the equally cumbersome and poetic film, with Hannelore Hoger in the lead role, is rarely mentioned or shown today. Because it is about Germany. Back then shared. today Thinking about it can easily get you sidelined. Really? One of the intertitles states: THE CLOSER YOU LOOK AT A WORD, THE FARTHER IT LOOKS BACK: GERMANY. How could there be or have been misunderstandings? And that a decade before the fall of the wall? The words clever exemplify the critical self-reflection that he wanted to initiate in us, the 1968 and post-68 generations. I, then a teacher training student, remember the scene with history teacher Gabi Teichert, who researches and digs for the source material for German history, who personally goes to the Bonn Bundestag to question members of parliament: “Don't you also think that the source material for the history books in the Federal Republic of Germany must be changed? “So the story? How should you change them? One of Kluge's typical ideas that led to mental hiccups. You had to digest that first. Because back then, in the 1970s, we left-wing intellectuals in old West Berlin and in West Germany were all thinking about the revolutionary change in history forward. Of course, history cannot be changed retrospectively, but looking at it can. With this trick, the word and visual artist Kluge succeeded almost incidentally in installing a Nietzschean, i.e. perspective view of history and also of the concept of truth. Because didn't we think that what was written in the history books of the Gabi Teichert generation was “truth”? It was just one of many. Like today. There have been many more in the post-factual age, but there is no one left to sort them for us, like Alexander Kluge.

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He was a great individual, like Nietzsche, but he also had allies and co-thinkers such as scientists, writers, and artists. The start was made by Oskar Negt (1934-2024), with whom he in 1972 Publicity and experience wrote and wrote the tremendous mammoth work in 1981 History and self-will presented. In the former, the organization of the bourgeois and proletarian public sphere was analysed by Negt and Kluge examining the connections between social experiences and structures of public spheres, it was then, more pragmatically, a “book of use.” “We are interested,” wrote the authors, “what does material-altering work in a world in which it is obvious that disasters occur. These are the historical working capacity: Born from separation processes and armed with self-will that defends itself against separations.”¹. On the other hand, Kluge chose the category of connection throughout his life. Against Negt's political-sociological, purist view, Kluge became aware of personal, real human experiences in order to enable a new, autonomous public sphere. This required insight into the connections, ultimately the old Faustian question of what holds the world together on the inside. But Kluge wanted the “sensuality of connection.”². He was driven by a tremendous interest in knowledge and by a passion for communication that is unparalleled at a time when everyone is next to themselves. He cleverly knew how to turn the capitalist category of “self-interest” from head to toe: He challenged his audience, reading and seeing, to pick out from the big picture of history the things, messages, examples and experiences that have to do with their own life. His films and books were offers of inner insights, calls for individual resistance, emancipation assistance from a late enlightenment who wants to help out of immaturity. But there was no longer a consistent narrative thread, just collages and fragments, which nevertheless had a lot to offer and remained in the memory. He did not want a “reader” from A to Z, but wanted a selective dive, in a sense by jumping head into the cold water, with permanent repeatability in individual reception: “There is no book more than the opportunity to behave independently” (ibid.). That also required courage, but you could learn that from him as a reader, and you could become addicted to it just like swimming once you got used to cold water.

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Later, there were other allies who joined Kluge or that he found: the writer Ferdinand von Schirach or the artists Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. They all embodied what he was looking for: the sensuality of connection. Because Kluge had long since experienced that language alone was not enough. He was not only a collector of stories, but also of pictures, newspaper and advertising photos, which he processed into image-text collages and interspersed into his films and books, sometimes confusing and irritating, seemingly incoherent. Work of discovery, ordering and structuring came to the reader, whom Kluge wanted to empower him to become independent, as did Nietzsche his audience.

Like Nietzsche, Alexander Kluge was a word and image artist. Both spoke in metaphors and fragments whose meaning one had to evoke or which one had to recompose. Both made use of the full range of literary and visual options. At Kluge, the media and the confident use of photo and film were added. Like Nietzsche, he understood how to use words to create images in front of our inner eye and Vice Versa To put pictures into words that actually contained the ineffable and outrageous, showed the incomprehensible, such as episodes of the Second World War that Kluge, born in Halberstadt, had witnessed and repeatedly recalled from memory, called upon, presented in his short stories and films and established as lessons. In the movie The Patriot Kluge does this with the help of the artificial figure “The Knee” from Christian Morgenstern's poem A knee goes alone around the world, which personifies Kluge and makes him a participating observer of the events of the World War, allows him to fight against the “quarrelsome brain.” In this way, he succeeded in describing or filming the incommensurable as that “depiction of the unrepresentable” (Jean-François Lyotard). He had internalized and authentically transformed the pathetic “never again” worn out in post-war Germany as his own life experience, but exaggerated linguistically and visually and impressively made comprehensible for the next generation.

Kluge was an excellent philosophical and scientific thinker and author, but he was also a talented storyteller and storyteller. “Whoever laughs at fairy tales was never in need,” says the screenplay for patriot, and he masterfully understood how to extract emancipatory and utopian content and potential from the traditions of myths, legends and fairy tales collected since time immemorial, to blend into his films as subtitles or to intersperse subheadings in his treatises. The fairy tale of stubborn child The Brothers Grimm is one such example. Disobedience is punished and leads to death, but self-will still emerges from the grave, as the dead child keeps sticking his hand out of the ground. Grimm's fairy tales — for Kluge an example of the trench in German history: “They dug and dug and found the fairy tales. Its content: How a people worked on their wishes for over 800 years”³.

I always liked to listen to Kluge when I was able to see him “live” or during interviews on television (he was never in the picture himself). Once I dared to call him myself, it was in the early 80s. Back then, there was a strange atmosphere of fear and hopelessness in all discourses in the old Federal Republic; there was a vital and not just virtual peace movement against the impending US medium-haul deployment in Europe. What could art do about it? That was the big question. Could it change political consciousness or even reality? I was just curating an exhibition of politically critical art in Berlin and wanted to invite Alexander Kluge to a panel discussion, but he said both dryly and politely: “I am a lawyer and unfortunately have no time to come to Berlin.” But he sent me a portrait of himself, signed, which I kept. Of course, this did not show him as a lawyer, but as an author. He had many roles and was present at countless events and forums. So he could hide behind one or the other when needed.

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On December 6, 2016, I saw Kluge “live” again at the Babelsberg Film University, where he gave a presentation on DADA and then received a prize from the students. It was an experience to listen to him — brilliant speaker with the voice of a storyteller that he was — but it was also funny with the rocking horse on stage and other bits and bobs that were standing around there. Students then showed a film about Nietzsche with a character hitting another on the head with a hammer, accompanied by weird music. The whole thing as a stick figure aesthetic against the backdrop of the Nietzsche museum room in Sils Maria, where not only So Zarathustra spoke But so did the idea of eternal return. The film was entirely in the style of clever, black and white, fragmentary subheadings filling with screen. That's when the hammer came into the picture. It was Nietzsche and Kluge's symbolic tool. How could you have better clarified what Nietzsche into On the genealogy of morality With his saying he meant: “[N] ur that doesn't stop Woe zu tun“Remains in memory”? Kluge quotes him more completely, in typical discomfort, as early as 1979 in a draft text The Patriot: “'It was never without blood, torture, sacrifices when people felt it necessary to remember! Ah, reason, seriousness, control over affects, this whole gloomy thing that means thinking, all these privileges and showpieces of man: how expensive have they paid off! How much blood and horror is at the root of all good things. '” — Our beautiful Germany, adds Kluge, “is a 'tremendous collection' of such 'good things.' They are the commodity that history deals with, that good thing in people that continues incessantly.”⁴.

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All images used in the article are photographs taken by the author during the mentioned presentation on 6/12/2016 in Babelsberg.

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Barbara Straka, born 1954 in Berlin, studied art education/German literature and art history/philosophy in West Berlin. As a curator and art mediator, she has initiated exhibitions and major projects of contemporary art in Germany and abroad since 1980. She was director of the 'Haus am Waldsee Berlin — Place of International Contemporary Art, 'President of the Lower Saxony Art University HBK Braunschweig and consultant for cultural and creative industries and international affairs at the Berlin Senate. She is the author and editor of numerous publications on art after 1945 (www.creartext.de).

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Literature

Kluge, Alexander: The patriot. Texts/images 1 — 6. Berlin 1979.

Kluge, Alexander & Oscar Negt: History and self-will. Historical organization of work assets — Germany as a production public — Contextual violence. Berlin 1981.

Höhne, Petra & Michael Kötz: The sensuality of context. On Alexander Kluge's film work. Cologne 1981.

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Footnotes

1: Kluge & Negt, History and self-will, P. 5.

2: Petra Höhne & Michael Kötz, The sensuality of context.

3: The Patriot, ibid., p. 123.

4: Alexander Kluge, The patriot. Texts/images 1 — 6, P. 26.