"You cannot limit yourself to one area of specialized craft. Instead, regardless of craft, you have to charge all forms of expression that lead to the community, to other people, with meaning." -- Alexander Kluge
Not to be confused with Alexandra Kluge, his sister and a film actress.
Alexander Kluge (born 14 February 1932) is an author and film director.
"As soon as you judge communication a little more rigorously, there is a possibility that the message will not be democratized. I have to say what I believe to be right. I have to spread out the statement among all the means of expression available to us at present.""Hidden in a long text, there are perhaps three lines that count.""I don't pay attention to target audiences and therefore I often hear that I am a ratings killer, somebody who fundamentally doesn't care whether one person is watching or an entire soccer stadium.""If they had Mozart today, they couldn't work with him, although he was a very adaptable man.""Similar to the telescope or the telephone, television enables us to see or hear things we never dreamed of. When you look at the details, a concrete scene between people is really something incredibly unlikely, something subtle that requires extended description.""The one thing about program television that's absolutely incompatible with any concept of art is that all decisions have to be made by program directors, whereas art is autonomous. It may be dependent, but it knows no superiors.""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.""When I think of the library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the textual level, possible."
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.
1962 Lebensläufe (Case Histories, also published earlier in English as Attendance List for a Funeral) ... this collection includes the story "Anita G.," which Kluge adapted into cinematic form as Yesterday Girl.
1964 Schlachtbeschreibung (The Battle)
1973 Lernprozesse mit tödlichem Ausgang (Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome) ... this work is one of Kluge's original contributions to the science-fiction genre.
1977 "Unheimlichkeit der Zeit" (New Histories: Notebooks 1—18: "The Uncanniness of Time") ... a collection of several hundred stories, some only one-page long, interspersed with documents, charts and images.
1984 Die Macht der Gefühle (The Power of Feelings)
2003 Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt. (The Devil's Blind Spot) ... this collection of 500 stories includes some earlier works; an abridged English-language version appeared in 2004.
2006 Tür an Tür mit einem anderen Leben. 350 neue Geschichten. ... a collection of 350 new stories.
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.
