Kluge was born in Halberstadt, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany.

After growing up during World War II, he studied history, law and music at the University of Marburg Germany, and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. He received his doctorate in law in 1956.

While studying in Frankfurt, Kluge befriended the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who was teaching at the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School. Kluge served as a legal counsel for the Institute, and began writing his earliest stories during this period. At Adorno's suggestion, he also began to investigate filmmaking, and in 1958, Adorno introduced him to German filmmaker Fritz Lang, for whom Kluge worked as an assistant on the making of "The Tiger of Eschnapur".

Kluge directed his first film in 1960, Brutalität im Stein (Brutality in Stone), a twelve-minute, black and white, lyrical montage work which, against the German commercial (Papa's Kino) cinematic amnesia of the prior decade, inaugurated an exploration of the Nazi past. The film premièred in 1961 at what would become the showcase for the new generation of German filmmakers, the Westdeutsche Kurzfilmtage (now known as the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen) in Oberhausen, Germany.

Kluge was one of twenty-six signatories to the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962, which marked the launch of the New German Cinema. That same year, with filmmakers Edgar Reitz and Detlev Schleiermacher, Kluge established the Ulm Institut für Filmgestaltung, to promote the critical and aesthetic practices of Young German Film and the New German Cinema.

In 1965 he was a member of the jury at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival.

He has gone on to direct a number of films which have an inherent critique of commercial cinema and television through the creation of a counter-public sphere and their deployment of experimental forms, including montage. They include Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl) (1966), an adaptation of Kluge's story "Anita G."; Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos ( Perplexed) (1968); and The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (1985).

"We don't perceive a contradiction between writing books, making films or producing a television program. These days you can't choose how you want to express yourself anymore."

:...Alexander Kluge

Kluge is also one of the major German fiction writers of the late-20th century and an important social critic. His fictional works, which tend toward the short story form, are significant for their formal experimentation and insistently critical thematics. Constituting a form of analytical fiction, they utilize techniques of narrative disruption, mixed genres, interpolation of non-literary texts and documents, and perspectival shifts. The texts frequently employ a flat, ironic tone. One frequent effect approximates what Viktor Shklovsky and the Russian formalists identified as defamiliarization or ostranenie. Kluge has used several of the stories as the bases for his films.

Kluge's major works of social criticism include Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung. Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit, co-written with Oskar Negt and originally published in 1972, and "Geschichte und Eigensinn", also co-authored with Negt. "Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung" has been translated into English as Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere and "Geschichte und Eigensinn" is currently being translated into English and will appear in an edition published by MIT Press in the future.

"Public Sphere and Experience" revisits and expands Jürgen Habermas's notion of the public sphere (which he articulated in his book "Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere") and calls for the development of a new "proletarian public sphere" grounded in the life experience of the working class. "Geschichte und Eigensinn" continues this project and tries to rethink the very nature of proletarian experience and develops a theory of "living labour" grounded in the work of Karl Marx.

He has also published numerous texts on literary, film and television criticism.

His awards include the Italian Literature Prize Isola d'Elba (1967), and almost every major German-language literary prize, including the Heinrich von Kleist Prize (1985), the Heinrich-Böll-Preis (1993) and the Schiller Memorial Prize (2001).

Kluge received the Hanns-Joachim-Friedrich Prize for TV Journalism (2001).

He has also received the Georg-Büchner-Preis (2003), Germany's highest literary award.

These two volumes together contain the central works of Kluge's and Oskar Negt's collaborative philosophy as well as Kluge's literary work. Some new material was published in each edition.

• 2000 Chronik der Gefühle (Chronicle of Feeling) ... a two-volume edition (Basisgeschichten and Lebensläufe) including the works Schlachtbeschreibung, Lernprozesse mit tödlichen Ausgang, Lebensläufe and Neue Geschichten. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
• 2001 Der unterschätzte Mensch (The Undervalued Man) ... a two-volume edition including Suchbegriffe (26 conversations and interviews first published in a book format), Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung, Die Maßverhältnisse des Politischen (a completely updated and revised edition Oskar Negt's and Alexander Kluge's critique of Realpolitik), and Geschichte und Eigensinn. Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins.

His sister, Alexandra Kluge, is a film actress.