Alexander Kluge - 21st Century Archivist or From Halberstadt to Mars
Martin Chalmers
"In this age we writers of texts are the guardians of the last residues of grammar, the grammar of time, i.e. the difference between present, future, and past, guardians of difference." (Alexander Kluge, 1985)
Since the 1960s probably the most influential writers within German literature have been the Austrian Thomas Bernhard and Alexander Kluge. (The work of the most distinctive new voice to emerge in the 1990s, W.G. Sebald, is evidently marked by his reading of these two apparently antithetical figures, even if he is always very much his own man.) However, while most of Bernhard's prose has been translated into English and many other languages and has even had an impact on some English-language writers, Kluge's books are almost unknown in Britain and the United States. Occasional translations have been buried in journals or small American publishing houses. If Kluge's name is recognised at all, it is as a leading member of the generation of young film-makers who put Germany back on the map of world cinema, and perhaps for what remains his best-known film, Yesterday Girl (1965). This was adapted from one of his own short stories, an early example of that re-working of material which has become one of the distinctive features of his work.
Chronik der Gefühle. Basisgeschichten (Chronicle of Emotions/Feelings. Stories at the Base) published this autumn by Suhrkamp, is Kluge's first major collection of stories since Neue Geschichten. Hefte 1 - 18, (New Stories. Folders 1 - 18) of 1977. Kluge has certainly not been living in retirement meanwhile. He may not have produced a feature-length film since the mid-1980s, but he did for many years fill a weekly TV slot with a radical commentary on the arts, culture and society. He has produced a stream of shorter and longer reflections (sometimes in book form) on the media, literature and history, themselves often in the form of stories. There is, indeed, no firm dividing line between the volumes of texts Kluge calls 'stories' and, for example, the 1200-page work of theory Geschichte und Eigensinn (History and Obstinacy), co-written with Oskar Negt, which appeared in 1981.
All of Kluge's texts, including his film and TV work, explore the same themes, notably, for example, the history and materiality of subjective consciousness and its relationship to the extension and compression of time in certain historical moments. In a brilliant group of stories on the collapse of East Germany a narrator remarks - and there a hundred variations on this: 'in the last days before Christmas Eve, time on the territory of the GDR melted away'.
But what of the forms that Kluge chooses to work with? Stories is to a degree a misleading term. Some of his (sub) texts are certainly recognisable as such, even where they use documentary material, though this itself is sometimes invented, there are also interviews, sometimes genuine, sometimes fake; there are anecdotes, a liberal use of illustrations, including photographs, whose documentary value is also invariably uncertain. Kluge's books present themselves as a montage of these elements, constantly interrupted by abrupt, cinematic cuts.
What is Kluge's purpose in working in this way? As a student of Adorno, as a careful reader of Brecht and Benjamin (and Arno Schmidt) Kluge conceives his books as digressive, forever incomplete, constantly reworked, fluid (flowing into one another). Discontinuity, fluidity, is asserted as preferable to the homogenising - trivialising - narratives of conventional novels.
Chronik der Gefühle consists of seven books containing more than 230 stories, fragments, interviews amounting to almost 1,000 pages. Most of the material is new. One long section (V) is largely identical with Schlachtbeschreibung (Description of a Battle), first published in 1964, which is 'about' the Battle of Stalingrad. The following section (VI), Lernprozesse mit tödlichem Ausgang (Learning Processes with Fatal Outcomes) expands one story from a volume of short stories of the same title to short book length. Four German officers, who escaped the Stalingrad pocket by walking east, achieve a form of immortality. They become leading figures in capitalism's race through space in a state of permanent civil war, leapfrogging from one galaxy to the next in the search for raw materials, cheap labour and the maximisation of profit. In the 'end' the four survivors are again as alone as they were in the deserts of Central Asia, in orbit round a ball of gas in a sector of blue and red giant suns.
Stalingrad, the end of the GDR, quotidian incidents from desperate middle-class lives in contemporary western Germany, this is some of the very best of Kluge's work. It matches earlier stories like The Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8th April, 1945, which examines the deadly dialectic of production and destruction in capitalism or, in a different perspective, how 'strategy from above' affects those on the receiving end, one of whom was the teenage Alexander Kluge. One chilling group of stories records a (fictional) visit by the philosopher Heidegger to the Crimea. Observing a punishment shooting in a village, the philosopher-narrator notes: 'Officers had to go to the wounded, immobilise (ruhigstellen) them with shots in the head.'
Kluge's concern is first of all with German experience, with the possibilities of learning from German history. And as we have seen, even outer space is not safe, whether in the shape of a plan to save something of the GDR on the moons of Mars or the starship troopers from Stalingrad in Learning Processes with Fatal Outcomes.
In Alexander Kluge's texts it is impossible to separate out theoretical and encyclopaedic impulses and concerns from a 'pure' storytelling aspect. The disruption, the irritation of his method is inseparable from the unsettling stimulation his prose provokes. The reader who is prepared to accept the disturbance of his or her familiar expectations will find in Chronik der Gefühle a book packed with ideas, which has considerable humour, albeit of a rather black, absurdist hue. It is one of the most important works of German literature to be published for some time.
Martin Chalmers' translation of The Diaries of Victor Klemperer was published recently by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Translation rights available from
Suhrkamp Verlag
You may also be interested in an extract in English from Kluge's 'The Gap Left By the Devil', courtesy of litrix.de
Alexander Kluge, Chronik der Gefühle
Suhrkamp Verlag, ISBN 3-518-41202-7
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