Alexander Kluge: «We have to rip the wood out of the halls in order to build rafts»

In the First Person

António Guerreiro

Alexander Kluge has been an exceptional figure in German culture since the nineteen sixties. As a writer, film maker and essayist, he has provided a critical conscience not only in relation to Germany, compelling it to confront the traumas of its history, but also in relation to many aspects of the mutilation of life in the world in which we live.

Alexander Kluge, Paris, 2018
© Photo: Sandra Rocha

As a major figure of German culture since the 1960s, Alexander Kluge would have to be introduced under a multitude of names: a writer, a filmmaker, a director and a producer of cultural television programmes, an essayist, the author of books of social theory born out of the intellectual circle of sociological and philosophical research that he was a part of – the Frankfurt School. It was within that circle that he kept the intellectual proximity and friendship with Adorno that crucially distinguishes his work. A book from 1972, written with Oscar Negt under the long title of Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung. Zur Organizationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit (translated into English as Public sphere and experience. Analysis of the bourgeois and proletarian public sphere), promises a bleak discourse: with a taste of the dialectic so exquisitely cultivated by Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critical theory, it bears the evident seal of the theoretical environment from which it arose. But the Frankfurt School legacy, which Alexander Kluge always openly acknowledged, was drawn together in his work with enormous intelligence, far from the crystallizations of epigonism. The uniqueness of his work, the many dimensions of which can hardly be grasped by the canonical forms of genres, lies beyond the plurality of disciplinary and artistic fields that he has experimented with. His literary work includes narrative fiction, theory, criticism, ‘memorialistic’ writing, historical note-making and everything that a writer, a reader, a spectator and a critical observer of society, endowed with refined analytical instruments, is able to summon up. The result is an assemblage in the form of a monumental set of fragments that gradually constitute thematic constellations and invite the reader to follow sinuous, non-linear paths inside this edifice of many entrances and many exits, one that is virtually endless in itself. Similarly, his films (feature films, short films and, more recently, micro films) were made on the margins and against the standards of the film industry. His first experience in cinema was as an intern alongside Fritz Lang (to whom he was recommended by Adorno). But he would soon emancipate himself, with great conviction, from that initiation, when he directed his first short films in the early 60s. In 1962, he co-signed the famous Oberhausen Manifesto, a collective document demanding the renewal of German cinema. The renewal took place and Alexander Kluge greatly contributed to it by imposing a style of narrative fragmentation (as a filmmaker, he never wished to be the creator of cinematographic stories), inserting archive images, overlapping words and images, and employing processes that utterly disregarded the codes of cinematic fiction. He would say – and rightly so – that he is an iconoclast (adding, however: ‘a moderate iconoclast’). And when he took a long break from cinema to start his own production company and concentrate on the audiovisual for television (by providing private channels with cultural programmes which, by law, they were required to broadcast), he also revealed himself as an innovator who managed to subvert the existing television codes and concepts. The filmed dialogues (meanwhile transcribed and published in book form) with another eminent writer of German contemporary literature, his friend Heiner Müller, were hugely successful and remain exemplary works. Into these works of dialogue and cooperation (highly distinctive words in his theoretical vocabulary), he has also integrated, in various ways and on several occasions, German artists who are his contemporaries: Gerhard Richter, Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer.

The passage to literature came early, and it would be incorrect to say that Kluge has continued to follow the paths of cinema by other means. He always claimed that there is an irreducible difference between the art of images and the art of words and that he did not transition from one to the other as if he were following a continuous and direct pathway. The thousands of pages of his literary writings are made up of the widest range of subject matter in the world: history, politics, culture, contemporary literature and literature of every other period (Latin literature, and especially Ovid, holds an important place in his pantheon and his textual workshop); everything is part of that monumental symphony in several volumes called Chronicle of Feelings. Accepting the responsibility to confront himself with the German ghost of the post-war world, Alexander Kluge took on the work of the analyst and of the archaeologist who digs up what lies submerged. Almost by himself, he began the task of coming to terms with the German past. And not only the most recent past: he thought he should tell Germany’s unfortunate history, remaining true to his conviction: ‘Even at its root, German history is a laboratory of misfortune.’ But German history is not a demarcated territory within the chronicle that accompanies the course of life or of the endless stories that the history of Europe has been made up of, from Greek Antiquity to this day. Alexander Kluge sees himself as a contemporary of Ovid and makes out the Russian poet Mandelstam to be one as well. His entire oeuvre consists of the creation of chronologies that differ from those of a calendar or a linear conception of history. He establishes paradoxical synchronies and turns Marx into a contemporary of Joyce, thus taking up a film project by Eisenstein that resulted in that unique, immense film, a 570 minute long film-fleuve entitled News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Capital (2008). To continue the work of the great authors who preceded him and produce abridgements of the great novels of Western literature: this is the task that Kluge has taken on with a critical stance towards the time in which we live, leading him to diagnose an ‘inquiétance’ of time. This odd word appears in the subtitle of the French translation of Book II of Chronicle of Feelings: ‘Inquiétance du temps’. And in Paris, where he arrived at the end of September to present this book, which had just been published in France (a publication which is not merely a translation, but rather a reconstruction of his literary oeuvre), he kept repeating the word ‘inquiétance’ with great enthusiasm (even though he always spoke in German), as if it were a concept. It was precisely on that occasion, in Paris, that this interview took place.

Stills from Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos [Artists in The Big Top: Perplexed], 1968 (details)

ANTÓNIO GUERREIRO One of your books, composed of texts and images, is a mixture of fiction and documentary about the air raid that destroyed your hometown, Halberstadt, in 1945. The tragedy of German and European history of that century thus makes its entrance into the centre of your work.

ALEXANDER KLUGE The matter of that book is relevant in these days. If we look at Syria, we will find the same thing today. There is warfare by air. The military aircraft hover above and attack the people below. And it’s as if people belong to a different class, to another world. They are parallel worlds that keep bombing each other.

AG But do you think it’s a similar tragedy?

AK It is worse today because the automatism of modern weapons is more sophisticated. Today’s bombs and drones attack from large distances, which makes them more dangerous. And the houses are made of more sturdy concrete, they’re no longer made of brick, they’re less traditional. It’s a new century. Dreadful.

AG You have called the 20th century the ‘dark century’. It is not easy to think that one can possibly exceed such a scale…

AK Indeed, there is no dark darker than dark itself. What we can do is talk about a negative, the -1. Because, in the meantime, an escalation took place. What the new century shows us is the loss of reality. In the 20th century we have tragedies, but we also have ground under our feet, we know who the enemy is. In the meantime, that has become unclear. Reality is now spongy. And that uncertainty about what is real is what I call the ‘inquiétance’ of time [even though he speaks in German, Alexander Kluge quotes the subtitle of the French translation, saying ‘inquiétance’ instead of the original, Unheimlichkeit der Zeit]. Reality lies, it shows itself as a chameleon. That’s the challenge it presents to poetry, if it wants to represent it.

"What the new century shows us is the loss of reality. In the 20th century we have tragedies, but we also have ground under our feet, we know who the enemy is. In the meantime, that has become unclear."

AG You have a very pessimistic view of history.

AK Tonight there will be a stage reading of one of my texts called The Knowledge of Emergency Exits is the Best Theatre in the World. When a theatre burns, there’s always an emergency exit. To be simply pessimistic is nothing. We can’t afford the luxury of pessimism. Around 1900 one could be pessimistic, it was fashionable. But when the Titanic sinks and we’re inside it, we can’t afford pessimism. If we don’t have rescue boats, we have to rip the wood out of the halls in order to build rafts.

AG Walter Benjamin spoke of ‘organizing pessimism’. Is your idea close to that?

AK But he also said that there are no times of decadence. He described the angel of history based on a painting by Paul Klee [shows the painting, reproduced in a book in English that has just been published in Germany, with The Snows of Venice – a collective book with texts by Alexander Kluge and the American poet Ben Lerner alongside images of Gerhard Richter and Thomas Demand]. But there is another painting of Klee that is very important to me – Stachel, der Clown; it represents not a melancholic angel, but a pragmatic one. The two at once are my banner. This last one has a shovel to dig, he’s an archaeologist.

AG I don’t see exactly how both drawings are articulated or how they oppose or complement one another.

AK The second is also by Klee, it is also an angel, but he’s a comedian. One of them, the angel of history, is placed at the top of the circus tent and the other is below, on the ground, and has tools, he’s an operative. The first is a prophet. The two of them together are twins.

AG A prophet looking back...

AK One looking back and the other looking ahead, they both form a bifrontal face, like Janus. One is practical and works with his hands, and the other works with his head.

AG Therefore, not one Klee angel, the one that Benjamin called the angel of history, but rather two angels are the configuration of your conception of history...

AK I am a faithful servant of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Benjamin has a very young friend, he’s a small piece of me. And Adorno stands at his side. When they’re with me, they get along better.

AG Are you alluding to the fact that they haven’t always been on the best terms with each other, that there were philosophical disagreements between them?

AK There are radical differences between them. And there are also differences in tone. It’s two different tunes, two different orchestras. As for me, I think with my skin, I think with my head, I think with the diaphragm, I think with all the senses. Those are differences.

AG But are you faithful to those two dimensions? Do you integrate the difference between Benjamin and Adorno?

AK Always. They’re in a civil war, and I’m the one who reconciles them. But, by the way, it must be said that literature does something different than theory. Literature is also theory, and there is a poetic force of theory. But literature argues from the particular. We are advocates of the particular, not of the general, of detail and not of the general.

AG We could quote Adorno: ‘The whole is the lie.’

AK Exactly, and in each narrative we can express it accurately. What I do is also theory. Words are not horses with saddles, they are free, but when they find themselves within a philosophical discourse, they are no longer free. I, for example, can depart from errors in order to construct a narrative, but the philosopher cannot. I feel the need to do it, otherwise I’m Socratic. I need Dada and a logical and rational mind in equal amounts. But philosophy does not know Dada. Even Benjamin pretends to appreciate Dada and the Dadaists, but as soon as he begins to write, Dada disappears. Klee’s Prickle, the Clown is a kind of Dada within the Bauhaus.

AG If one tries to define the genre to which the writing of Chronicle of Feelings belongs, we can identify you with the very modern and the very German tradition of the Denkbild, the ‘image of thought’, in which there is a mixture of the theoretical and of the narrative.

AK The Denkbild is the most important dialectical form of expression. It is the intensified dialectic, it condenses dialectic. It is what poetry can do, given that it has no obligation to be discursive. It can form labyrinths. To remain in an imprecise state, the precision of indecision – that’s literature. There is a continuity from Ovid to the present, from the Rabbis in Babylon to this day. The great frigates of philosophy are beautiful. Cicero, Plato, Aristotle, the Arab philosophers, the University of Paris, Abelard, Kant, Horkheimer, Adorno, are beautiful. All of them are the great battleships. Literature is the small boats, the submarines looking for the mines. We are the boats of the Battle of Salamis, many small boats. And Darius, the King of the Persians, had the big boats.

AG The allegorical form is a constant feature of your speech...

AK Yes, yes. The Denkbilder have a part, on the bottom side, that is allegorical, emblematic, metaphorical. And they have an upper part that is crystalline, accurate, precise, systematic. Things can be reversed, that’s what poetry does.

"Today we live under a flood of images. I’m an iconoclast, but a moderate iconoclast, I go back to one-minute films."

AG By cultivating the brief form of the Denkbilder, you don’t seem to grant any privilege whatsoever to the form of the novel, which is nowadays the hegemonic form of literary narrative.

AK The novel is important to me. But, in a constellation, a novel can become brief. If I have a hundred novels, and every single one of them has a gravitational force, this force makes them abbreviate each other. Anna Karenina is one of my favourite novels, but after Ossip Mandelstam, who wrote Tristia and was at the Black Sea, just like Ovid, to whom he is heir, Tolstoy remains exactly as good as before, but he is another heavenly body in the gravitational force of 1937 Russia. The gravitational force has shortened him, like a star that changes its shape as it approaches a black hole. It increases its speed, becomes smaller, has the power of ten suns, despite the fact that its size is no larger than a football field. I’m not saying I know how to accomplish it, but my ideal is to count constellations of novels, and in order to do that, you need to concentrate them. Let me give you an example. There is a story in this book, an Anna Karenina of 1915, who would never fall in love with a crazy knight like Vronsky. In my story, in my novel, Anna Karenina’s son has a terrible infection, a fever, and his mother can’t leave him by himself. Her husband arrives and realizes that. The knight, who managed to break both the horses’ backbone and Anna Karenina’s heart, is forgotten. This is a son’s victory. The one who wins is the one who needs his mother’s love the most. This child wins against tragedy. And now Anna Karenina is finally saved. I’ll tell you another novel: Madame Butterfly, an opera. When that beautiful woman, like all sopranos, commits suicide, her son is adopted and arrives in Boston. In 1943, he is the commander of the USA Air Force and bombs Tokyo, causing the city to burn. And he sets fire to the wooden house, the bungalow where he was conceived. This is also a novel, it’s the sequel to the opera, beyond the Fifth Act. If I now were to resume and continue the greatest novel I know, Homer’s Iliad, I would take the character of Aeneas, who has the misfortune of Troy under his feet. He arrives in Cartago and kills Dido and founds Rome. And Rome occupies and burns Corinth. Rossini’s opera. And now the Greeks themselves go through what they have done to the Trojans. Here’s the circle of vengeance. It is a short story, I can tell it because there’s the Iliad. In order for the stories and the novels not to end, one has to recount beyond the end of the novel. The Magic Mountain ends in 1914 and Franz Castorp goes to the Great War. I use this method because great literature already exists. I mustn’t repeat Musil, even though he is one of my idols. The second volume of The Man without Qualities is as bulky as this one [shows the second volume of Chronicle of Feelings], and it is also made of fragments. I love the fragments. So I put this volume next to Musil.

[...]

*Translated by Bruno Duarte