THE INTERTWINING OF MEMORY AND HISTORY

IN ALEXANDER KLUGE’S FILMS

Amresh Sinha
Modern memory is first of all archival. It relies entirely on the specificity
of the trace, the materiality of the vestige, the concreteness of the recording,
the visibility of the image.
—Pierre Nora

History is what hurts.

—Fredric Jameson

1. Benjamin, Walter, “Unpacking
My Library: A Talk About Book
Collecting,” Illuminations, (67).
2. Benjamin, “The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” Illuminations,
(239).
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I. Introduction
O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! . . . For inside him there are
spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector—and I mean
a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate rela-
tionship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who
lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building
stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.1
For Walter Benjamin, housing a collection does not bring archived objects to life.
Instead it is the collector who comes alive inside the archive, where he is destined to
disappear, like the legendary Chinese painter who disappears inside his painting.2
Something similar might be said of Alexander Kluge, a remarkably erudite filmmaker,
whose works in literature, film, politics, culture, and pedagogy can be characterized
as archives. “Obsolescent” and archival objects have a distinct place in Kluge’s
images: the iron constructions, factory buildings, early photos, objects that have
become extinct, early dresses, old film-footage, old restaurants, interiors of enslaved
and enslaving objects. His films, in Peter Lutz’s opinion, “are structured almost like
an anthology: a grouping of shorter, more autonomous segments of documentary and
fictional material” (77).
In Germany, Kluge is regarded both as a major filmmaker and as a major social
theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. His films centre upon the question
of memory and history. For Kluge, the memory of any given situation is multiform,
and the situation in space and time of its many forms is the result of perspectives in
the present. To put this in another way, memory has a history, or, more precisely,
histories. This does not mean that the relationship between history and memory is,
or should be, balanced or stable. In Kluge’s work, the tension or outright conflict
between history and memory is both necessary and productive. Thus my emphasis
with regard to Kluge’s films is to locate a break in the ancient bond of identity, a break
in the equilibrium of memory and history. The basis of Kluge’s critical formulation
of what is lacking in German history is the intertwining of memory with history,
archive, documentary, and fiction and its subsequent regression to the problem of
identity. This “lack” must be thought of in terms of what it is to have a positive identity
of the German people.
I hope to establish the critical significance of “experience” (Erfahrung) in Kluge’s
filmography. Kluge’s critical project refuses to identify the cause of German history,
and in fact Kluge opposes a linear model of historiography that presents contemporary
history as a relation to the past, preferring instead a model of history as a collective
experience that has been handed down through the generations by traditional means.
Like Benjamin, Kluge prefers the “storyteller” to the “chronicler.” Nevertheless, it
remains an open question whether he succeeds in rupturing the fatal consequences of
Germany’s traumatic history by redefining memory’s relation to its own history.

3. See also Miriam Hansen’s
footnote in “Cooperative Auteur
Cinema and Oppositional Public
Sphere: Alexander Kluge’s
contributions to Germany in
Autumn,” (37, n. 4).
II. The Oberhausen Manifesto
At the Oberhausen Festival in 1962 twenty-six filmmakers, writers, and artists, headed
by Kluge, protested Government economic and cultural policies that ignored the
problems encountered by the West German filmmakers. The manifesto this coalition
produced marks the inception of the New German Cinema. Kluge explained the
concept of Autoren Kino in the Oberhausen Manifesto as “freedom from the conven-
tions of the industry and from commercial interference from the establishment.”
Lobbyists for Young German Film fought for structures that would allow individual
autonomy, seeking to liberate directors from “economic and dramaturgical rules
and established forms of aesthetics,” so they might produce “personal testimonies,
structures of ideas, chains of associations, reflections of feelings” ( Johnston, 72).
“The old cinema is dead,” proclaimed the Oberhausen Manifesto, “We believe in
the new.” The new German film was to be free of industry conventions, free of
influence from commercial partners, and free of the control of interested parties.
The principle behind the manifesto was that the filmmaker should have autonomy
in giving shape to his idea without having to take legal or financial risks. He was
to retain control over the direction and the entire production process, including the
unrestricted commercial exploitation of his film.
The demands of Oberhausen Manifesto are similar to those in the 1968 article on
Les états generaux du cinéma français in the Cahiers du cinéma. Critics and filmmakers
in France and Germany alike were concerned about filmmaking being dominated
by economic interest. According to the article in the Cahiers, “film remains a
commodity. . . . Film-making as understood by the generation of directors meant
liberation from prescribed subject-matter and forms of dissemination and thus
also the liberation of the public from the strangle-hold of a disastrous system of
concentration of economic power characterized by the tendency to misuse film as a
commodity and by state Censorship geared to preserving status quo” ( Johnston,
69).3 The role of the concept of Autor was as important in German film academics
and training as it was in France. At the Ulm film school, founded by Kluge and
Edgar Reitz, students were encouraged not to become “specialists” stuck in the
“culinary” thinking of the film industry, but to be Autoren instead, “who would differ
from specialists in having a greater responsibility” and in conceiving film as a “general
medium of expression of intelligence and human experience” ( Johnston, 72–73).

4. The problem is largely
addressed in Wim Wenders’s Im
Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road,
1976), which specifically deals
with the colonizing of the
German “subconscious” by the
American films.
5. Adorno and Horkheimer
emphatically criticized how
Culture Industry “denigrate the
heterogeneity of experience and
offer it up in ready-made
schemes” in Dialectic of
Enlightenment: “Film, radio and
magazines make up a system
which is uniform as a whole and
in every part.” Describing the
modus operandi of the “culture
industry,” they suggest that
“automobiles, bombs, and
movies keep the whole thing
together until their leveling
elements shows its strength in
the very wrong which it
furthered. It has made the
technology of the culture
industry no more than the
achievement of standardization
and mass production. . . .” (120).
See also Rentschler, 34–35.
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But the similarities between the New German and new French Cinemas should
not be overstressed. The French politiques des auteurs developed along a very different
line and called for an appreciation of visual properties and formal beauties.
Auteurists like Andrew Sarris “would ‘look at a film as the expression of a director’s
vision’” and an “auteur-structuralist” like Peter Wollen preferred to “‘decipher, not a
coherent message or world-view, but a structure which underlines the film and
shapes it,’” while the Cahiers approach was concerned with the distinctiveness and
instant recognizability of individual works ( Johnston, 70).For Kluge, in contrast,
the politics of spectatorship, and the experience of the spectator, play a vital role.
In “On Film and Public Sphere,” Kluge declares: “For the auteur there is no way back
to ready-made film (Konfektionfilm). Nor can auteur cinema remain in its present
state. . . . Cinema is a program that is a relationship of production—if for no other
reason than that this relationship exists in the experiences of the spectators which
constantly recreate the cinema’s experimental horizon” (1981/82, 207). The spectator
is a conscious entrepreneur, whose experience has a role constituting the alternative
Autoren film that is equal to the alternative politics and economics of the film’s
production. The general cinema lacks historical depth and excludes the spectator,
who has been subjugated to the conceptual imperialism of Hollywood objects, from
the role of conscious entrepreneur. For Kluge, the real cinema takes shape in the
viewer’s head, and the viewer’s imagination animates the screen with his own
experience. In other words, Autor cinema mediates between the formal structure of
the experience of its producer (in terms of the historical reality of the production
process), and the imagination of the spectator, whose reception depends on his
expectations and experience. Autor cinema no longer aims at distorting or colonizing
the experience of the spectator, which the Hollywood imperialistic films have done
so far.4 The Autoren stressed “the primacy of thematic originality, the film as the vector
of ideas” ( Johnston, 71). Most of the new German filmmakers contend that Hollywood
films try to persuade the audience to give up their own experience and follow the
more organized experience of the film.5 In Kluge’s words, “If the film is active, the
spectator becomes passive” (Dawson, 54).

6. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire,” Illuminations, (157).
III. Memory and History in the Public Sphere
The concept of experience (Erfahrung) is central to the discourse of collective memory
for both Benjamin and Kluge. Benjamin points out in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”
that the rise of “big-scale industrialism” brought about a change in the structure of
experience.6 “The standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses” had entered
a historical phase that clearly marked its discontinuity from the so-called calm of
history in which Hegel’s Spirit was “triumphantly self-absorbed.” History’s self-
content was far from adequate to perceive the changes that the new phenomenon of
“inhospitable” industrialism had brought about, whose spontaneous nature could
not be apprehended by deliberate philosophical introspection. Despite philosophy’s
attempt to internalize the external, visible, infrastructural changes taking place in
the appearance of an industrial society by strictly historical and epistemological
methods and by emphasizing essence over appearance, the “real” or “true” experience
was no longer available to insight. The true experience was bound to a sight in
the distant future that captured its “after-image,” like the dimmed image fixed for an
instant in our retina after the closure of eyes upon seeing a lighted bulb.

7. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,”
Reflections, (83–109).
8. John O’Kane in his fine article
on the treatment of fairy tales in
Kluge’s films attributes this
sentence to Novalis. “History,
Performance, Counter-Cinema:
A Study of ‘Die Patriotin,’” (12).
9. Klaus Eder/Alexander Kluge,
Ulmer Dramaturgien:
Reibungsverluste (48). Adorno
writes: “Every visit to the
cinema leaves me, against all my
vigilance, stupider and worse.”
Adorno, Minima Moralia:
Reflections from Damaged Life,
(25).
10. Eisler, Hans, and Adorno,
Composing for the Films (73).
Despite their pervasive critique
of Eisenstein’s notion of
synaesthesia—in particular as
realized in his cooperation with
Prokofiev on Alexander Nevsky—
Eisler and Adorno explicitly
resort to his concept of montage
but more radically extend it to
the antithetical relationship of
sound and image track.
11. Benjamin, “The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” Illuminations,
(234).
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For Benjamin experience has “fallen” in value, and so has the art of storytelling.7
Likewise, in Kluge’s films, we find the foregrounding of the social function of the
storyteller. History appears as a collection of folk and fairy tales that itself reframes
the original genre. That is, with time, history itself must become a fairy tale, becoming
once again what it was in the beginning.8 How does one explore the possibility of
reading Kluge’s ongoing interventionist politics within contemporary Germany as a
politics for finding new raw material for re-writing the otherwise disastrous history
of Germany? For Kluge, cinema forms the connection (Zusammenhang) between
memory and history, because his films can be viewed as a type of historiography that
offers multiple testimonies rather than a single story or the univocal authority of
history itself.
Kluge endorses (though only to a certain degree) Adorno’s mistrust of visual
immediacy (“I love to go to the movies; the only thing that bothers me is the image
on the screen”9) when he stresses the function of montage as a “morphology of
relations” that “exists in the experience of the spectator” for “more-than-ten-thousand-
years,” to which the “invention of film-strip, projector and screen only provided a
technological response” (Kluge, 1981/82, 209). This also explains the particular
proximity of film to the spectator and its affinity to experience. The radical practice
of montage, juxtaposing the heterogeneous elements of the cinematic material,
translating their inherently antithetical character into expression, thus “raises them to
the level of consciousness,” in Adorno’s and Eisler’s words, “and takes over the function
of theory.”10 Indeed, montage is a defining characteristic of Kluge’s films, serving to
“negate the affirmative appeal of the image” as “natural” and opposing a superficial
realism with a “radical naturalism.” Adorno had commented in Minima Moralia that
if the film were to give itself up to the blind representation of everyday life, following
the precepts of, say Zola, as would indeed be practicable with moving photography
and sound recording, the result would be a construction alien to the visual habits
of the audience, diffuse, unarticulated outwards. Radical naturalism, to which the
technique of film lends itself, would dissolve all surface coherence of meaning and
finish up as the antithesis of familiar realism. The film would turn into associative
stream of images, deriving its form from their pure, immanent construction.
Kluge’s montage achieves this negation through polyphonic sequences, the inter-
weaving of the archival or documentary and the fictional, the use of commentary
and titles, the avoidance of narrative continuity, “the use of the camera as an analytical
device,” and the reliance on association as a vehicle of meaning (Fiedler, 203).
For Kluge, the structural affinity between film and the stream of consciousness
establishes a utopian tradition of cinema in people’s minds, which is reminiscent
of Benjamin’s assertion that the artistic function of film is to make visible the
“equipment-free aspect of reality.”11 Adorno’s contention that cinema, “the techno-
logical medium par excellence, is thus intimately related to the beauty of nature,”
(Adorno, 1981/82, 209) seems to echo Benjamin’s ironic vision of film as “the blue
flower in the land of technology.”
 IV. Brutalität in Stein
Kluge’s first film with Peter Schamoni, Brutalität in Stein (Brutality in Stone, 1963), is,
in Theodore Fiedler’s account, “a short innovative documentary on the Nazi period
whose simultaneous evocation and deconstruction of the ‘aura’ of the Nazi architecture
transforms Benjamin’s basic concept into filmic practice” (Fiedler, 198). In Brutalität
in Stein, the first encounter between archive and history takes place through a caption:

Alle Bauwerke, die uns die Geschichte hinterlassen hat, zeugen vom Geiste
ihrer Erbauer und ihrer Zeit auch dann noch, wenn sie längst nich meher inhren
ursprünglichen zwecken dienen.
All the monuments bequeathed to us by history give witness to the spirit
of their times even when they no longer serve their original purpose.

12. The citations from Brutalität
in Stein are taken from the
intertitles and subtitles of the
film.
Die Verlassenen Bauten der nationalsozialistischen Partei lassen als steineme Zeugen
die Erinnerung an jene Epoche lebendig werden, die in die furchtbarste Katastrophe
deutschen Geschichte mündete.12
These abandoned monuments of the Nazi party recall in stone a time which ended
in the most terrible catastrophe of German history.

13. Kluge’s preoccupation with
the phenomenon of yesterday
reaches its apotheosis in his
later feature film, Abshied von
gestern, where he reiterates
Reinhard Baumgart’s claims
that “we are separated from
yesterday not by an abyss but a
change situation.” Kluge, Abshied
von gestern: Protokoll, (7).
| 338
We are introduced to the catastrophic site of German history, the “monumental,”
the archaeological ruins of the Nuremberg architecture, in a long wide-angle shot.
The camera pans left and zooms in to a close-up of a shattered piece of wall.
Another caption appears: “Die Ewigkeit von Gestern” (“The eternity of yesterday”).13
The images of the ruins are accompanied by the sound of the marching drums. Over
the loud din of the drums, over the long shot of the monuments, Kluge’s voiceover
informs us that it is the “site of Nuremberg rallies.” The third shot is composed of
another long shot of the ruins of walls and stairs and the music has now distinctly
turned into a “ritualized” pageant marching sound. As the drums continue to beat, a
frenzied collective drone of the crowd is distinctly superimposed on the soundtrack
while the camera lingers upon the ravaged sites of the abandoned monuments. Over
the cheering crowd we hear the sound of Hitler’s voice—“only the simplest mind
believes that the essence of a revolution lies in destruction alone”—as we are witness
to the complex and multi-layered montage sequences of the monument in its present
decay. The speech continues: “We saw it as expansion in gigantic terms.”

14. The symphony of Brahms
appeared for a very brief
moment in the first montage
sequence of the grounds of the
Nuremberg rally.
After Hitler’s screaming speech, which ends with the words, “ganzliche ausbau”
(gigantic construction), we are witness to a flurry of a montage sequence: A series of
swish pans (reminiscent of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane) reveal structures of the
monument from the right and then from the left. They are then joined by a shot from
the center. The theme of left, right, and center is visually established in a rhythmic
pattern of montage as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The visual rhythmic pattern
of presenting the monument in its present decay provides a counterpoint to the
sound of Hitler’s speech and the “thunderous applause” of his followers at the rally.
We are then introduced to a heterogeneous collection of shots of the monuments:
long shots of ravaged walls, grounds, corridors, and columns (six shots) over the
non-diegetic music. Kluge’s voice again informs the spectator: “Thunderous applause
erupted after the Führer’s speech. The rally closed with a symphony of Brahms.”14
The commentary continues as the camera keeps tracking on the stairs in a close up
that reveals the ruins of the once majestic steps: “And Alfred Rosenberg spoke the
closing words.” Three programmatic dissolves of the tracking shots of the steps
—dissolves from left to right and right to left, joined by another dissolve in which the
steps appear in the center of the frame—constitute the central thematic of the film.
 | 340

The voice is heard again, again the primacy of memory given to the presence of
the absent, the dead themselves. We hear Hitler’s voice, “Sieg Heil”; the crowd
responding: “Sieg Heill”; thunderous applause. The camera slowly tilts up to reveal
a large door on top of the steps. It slowly starts to zoom-in to the large closed door,
and then a brilliant dissolve from a low angle shot of the long corridor whose dark
ceilings match the dark closed doors. With the dissolve the camera tracks through the
corridor, and for the first time, through the commentary an excerpt from the memoirs
of the Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, is introduced: “The first transports,
all due for extermination, arrived in spring, 1942. At first they went quietly into the
chambers where they were to be ‘disinfected.’ Then some became suspicious and
spoke of ‘exterminating.’ The immediate result was panic. The others quickly herded
into chambers and doors were bolted.” The image here is of the camera tracking
through the corridor and arriving at a closed door as the words “and the doors were
bolted” are heard. The image appears to be a reversal of the closed door that we
initially saw from the outside: Sieg Heil; and now we get an inside perspective in
the form of a memoir through a voice, on behalf of Rudolf Höss, providing us with
an inner track.

15. Hansen, Miriam, “The
Stubborn Discourse: History
and Story Telling,” Die Schrift
an der Wand: Alexander Kluge:
Rohstoffe and Materialien, ed.
Christian Schulte (129).
The entire scenario is constructed, Theodore Fiedler comments, “on the principle
of contrastive montage, a strategy that maximizes the shock effect on perception that
Benjamin saw as intrinsic to all film” (198). The contrast with the introduction of the
contrapuntal sound creates an ambiguous tension with the visual field and forces the
spectator to use associative forms of memory to explore the historical consciousness
of the past in its present context. Fiedler recognizes the importance and the signifi-
cance of the complex and multiple facets of the film whose structure is deliberately
organized in a “disjunctive manner,” in order to avoid a complete internalization
or mastery of either the archival materials represented in the film, such as fixed
frames of historical photographs, newsreel clips, spoken texts, and titles, or a logical
rationale that neatly explains in clear and coherent terms “the immense destruction
ideology helped bring about.” Both Fiedler and Miriam Hansen have noted how
Kluge’s films attempt to negate “a widespread tendency among West Germans in the
1950s to ‘forget’” or “repress”15 the discourse of memory of the “Nazi period without
having come to terms with it.”

16. Benjamin, Reflections,
“A Berlin Chronicle,” 25–26.
A similar text by Benjamin
appears in “Ausgraben und
Erinnern,” Denkbilder (110).
See also Comay, Rebecca,
“Benjamin’s Endgame,”
Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy:
Destruction and Experience,
(256).
| 342
In Fiedler’s account “the remainder of the film [Brutalität in Stein] is clearly
intended to subvert such an attitude, to engage its viewers in a multifaceted, critically
mediated reconstruction of their collectively experienced past”; and thus it paves the
way for the necessity to introduce new epistemological categories and relationships
to the analytical content of filmic representation (198–199). This also demonstrates the
abiding interest Kluge has in the relation of contemporary reality to the continuum
of German history. The question of identity is primarily a problem of constructing
one’s own identity in relation to what remains a problem in the absence of a positive
German history. The best example is his treatment of Gabi Teichert, a history
teacher from Hessen, played by Hennelore Hoger in Die Patriotin (The Patriot, 1979),
who goes digging in a blue-lit wintry landscape “in search of the foundations of
German history.” The image of an artist digging deep into the narrative surface of a
nation to recover the vestiges of national identity is borrowed from Walter Benjamin.
“Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past
but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in
which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must
conduct himself like a man digging. . . . He must not be afraid to return again and
again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as he turns
over soil” (emphasis mine).16 The discourse of the identity of German history is
introduced at the very beginning of the film because of the catastrophic move by the
state legislatures towards eliminating the subject of history from Hessen’s curricula
for schools. This situation demanded a personal intervention that placed Kluge in a
unique situation as a filmmaker. He made his fictional character Gabi Teichert attend
the Social Democratic Party Congress in Hamburg in the fall of 1977, while he
documented her in newsreel-type footage as she conducted individual and group
meetings with the members, some very famous in the West German politics, asking
them how to improve the material of teaching of German history in school. “I am a
history teacher. I have come here because I would like to work with you to change
history. What do you think of that?”(Kluge, 1978, 75). The staging of fiction with
documentary—the graininess of the print and inadequate lighting, two well-known
tropes of documentary, are held fast in the long sequence, which lasts for almost
twelve minutes—is a clear illustration of Kluge’s strategy of “antagonistic” film making.
Critiquing the overdetermination of documentary as a genre of realism and deploring
the “repression” of imagination in both reality and art, Kluge states: “I think the
testimony of fiction is better than the testimony of non-fiction. Fiction is mimetic,
imitative, because it’s hiding behind non-fiction; and I think these are two sides of the
same thing. Which is why I always try to mix these two things—not simply for the
sake of mixing them, but rather to create in any film the maximum possible tensions
between fiction and non-fiction” (Dawson, 54).
 V. Die Patriotin
Earlier, in a shot of Teichert putting on make-up in front of a mirror, Kluge’s warm
and “gentle” voice informs us in intimate terms about the dilemmas she faces as a
historian and as an amateur archaeologist.17 He tells us that “Gabi Teichert was sure
that the raw materials for history on the advanced level were difficult. It’s hard to
present German history in a patriotic version” (Kluge, 1978, 59).
Teichert is described by Kluge as a “patriot.” She, he tells in his “auteurial voice,”18
“takes an interest in all of Germany’s dead. Because no one is simply dead, when
he dies.”19 Kluge here evokes his memorial address to Heiner Müller at his funeral in
17. “Kluge’s voice has a very
1996: “It is an error, that the Dead are Dead” (Kluge, 1998a, 5–11). He quotes Müller
distinctive warmth and at his funeral for “wishing” for an impossible funeral, for an impossible mourning, but
intelligence. He is often ironic,
but in a gentle rather than
also for laughing with a Dadaist glee at the complete chaos, the absurdity, as in Felix
sarcastic way. He creates an Guattari’s funeral at the Père-Lachaise cemetry in Paris, as in a Buster Keaton movie:
omniscient narrator, but also a
personal one, who does not
“‘All successful funerals must fail’” (1998a, 6). We are reminded also of a Corporal
preach or compel, but rather Wieland, who fell north of Stalingrad on January 28, 1943, and of his “rambling
almost whispers to the
audience.” Lutz, Alexander
knee,” heard over a painting of trees and three owls perched on them.20 We find
Kluge, (85). ourselves fervently berated by the “protesting” knee. Speaking antagonistically, it
18. According to Timothy admonishes us, though in a gentle voice: “You just can’t write us off: the wishes, legs,
Corrigan, “this auteurial voice
is a voice of continual
joints, ribs, skins, and if only I remain the knee, then I have to talk. I must talk, talk,
differentiation in which it talk, even if my life is unusual, as part of an entire man, who is a part of a people, that
becomes more a predicate
and a ‘porous’ agent than an
is part of history, of animals, nature, gardens, trees, etc., etc. Get used to it: I am the
authorizing expression.” one who is speaking here. I have a right to; I demand nothing. Neither that you believe
“The Commerce of Auteurism:
a Voice without Authority,”
me, nor that what I say make sense. But I must speak. If some one has a right, he
(57). For a conflicting point of doesn’t demand it. He fights for it” (Kluge, 1978, 55).
view regarding the “discursive
authority” of Kluge’s voiceover,”
It was in Geschichte und Eigensinn that Kluge, and Oskar Negt first developed the
see B. Ruby Rich, “She Says, idea of the relationship of the body with the notion of identity. “The body is seen as
he says: the power of the
narrator in modernist film
concretely as that through which all human experience is filtered, processed, and
politics,” Discourse, No. 6 (Fall pursued; it is at once personal and social. Never privy to a fixed, permanent identity,
1983): 31–47.
it can some times be the battleground for the conflicting social antagonisms”
19. Kluge, Die Patriotin
Texte/Bilder 1–6, (50). I have
(Adelson, 61). The fragmented identity of the knee is mediated through the body politic
used the subtitles (translation of “wishes, legs, joints, ribs, skin,” and thus the body is introduced to the discourse
in my opinion) of the film
Die Patriotin throughout my
of nature and history, or more specifically, in Adorno’s sense, to the discourse of
main text. natural history, that is, to nonidentity. It also removes the question of identity from
20. The image of the knee is the ontological premise of the nature of history or vice-versa. The knee performs, via
taken from Christian
Morgenstern’s poem, Das Knee.
its soliloquy, a self-acknowledgement of speaking neither from a fixed determination
Kluge attributes the conceptual- of being, that is, from the centre of the subject (“neither that you believe me”) nor
ization of this allegorical
representation of the knee to his
from a position of meaning, of coherence and articulation (“nor that what I say make
long-time collaborating editor, sense”). “As a German knee I am naturally interested, above all, in German History:
Beate Melinka-Jellinghaus.
See also Stuart Liebman, “On
kings, peasants, flowers, trees, farms, meadows, plants. . . . I must clear up at once a
New German Cinema, Art fundamental error: that we dead are just dead. We’re full of protest and energy.
Enlightenment, and the Public
Sphere: An Interview With
We march through history and examine it. How can we escape history? History which
Alexander Kluge,” (52). will kill us all?”

21. See also Kracauer’s The Mass
Ornament, (75–86) and
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” (239–241).
| 344
As a German knee, or better, as a patriotic German knee, its subject of interest
coincides with that of Gabi Teichert: they both have a common project in German
history. Through the embodied and disembodied figures of Teichert and Wieland’s
knee, respectively, Kluge resists the totalization of the concepts of nature and history
as autonomous, individual categories of the different branches of philosophy and
science. He rejects the attempt to define history as the nature of history and nature
as history of nature. Instead of subsuming nature within history or vice versa,
the concept of natural history must be rethought in a dialectical way which would
“overcome” the dichotomy of the natural and the historical from the perspective
of both natural and mathematical sciences. There is yet a meeting ground between
history and nature where they can still mediate without being dissolved by the
reduction of one into the other. After all, if mediation were taken away from Kluge,
i.e., Zusammenhang, his entire critical apparatus would fall apart.
According to Fiedler,
The Patriot, Gabi Teichert’s seemingly random excavations may be absurdly comic
on their face, but they are also a fitting analogue of Kluge’s approach to his subject.
For in unearthing German history for his viewers, Kluge—also working in the dark,
as it were—appears to draw at random on a disparate array of sources: paintings,
landscapes, and cityscapes, comic books, musical works, photographs, illustrations,
interviews, dramatized scenes, literary texts, proverbs. If, as a consequence, the film’s
viewers sometimes experience confusion, they have paradoxically gained some
understanding of what is at issue. As Kluge comments on a shot of Gabi Teichert
near the film’s end: “Most of the time Gabi Teichert is more confused than not.
That’s a matter of the overall context.” (222)
Confusion is a state, a tactical state, a state of distraction that both Benjamin and
Kracauer privileged over the sedate bourgeois model of spectatorship, that not only
represents the characters in Kluge’s films and writings, but also often accompanies the
audiences who too are found bewildered and discombobulated after the screenings of
his films.21 According to Johnston, it was reported in Stern that “Kluge and many
of the others admitted that he and his colleagues had often produced Autor films for
the museum and had neglected the cinema at the corner of the street” (78). It appears,
in all probability, that Kluge took the high road, consistent with his high modernist
stance, of steering clear of the masses’ rather lugubrious taste (“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,” he proclaimed in a recent interview [1998b]). In Kluge’s defense, one can
most certainly argue that for the theorist it is better to be confused than to be cocksure
in the matters of cultural and historical discourse. But before we ascribe to Kluge
incoherence, disjunction and fragmentation as elements of a full-fledged postmodern
aesthetic practice, we need to explore further the dialectical nature of Kluge’s work,
and ask whether his practice can really be considered compatible with the canonical
tenets of postmodernism.

22. See Adelson, Leslia, A.,
“Contemporary Critical
Consciousness,” (57–68).
23. Kluge’s films follow quite
closely, what Bordwell calls, the
“literarization” of Brechtain
dramaturgy of theater—“the use
of episodic structure [Die Macht
der Gefühle has 26 episodes all
together], voice-over
commentary, and inserted
caption—as a tactic for bringing
out diegetic aspect which
Aristotelian conceptions of
theater had effaced.” Narration
in the Fiction Film (17).
24. For a comparative reading
of Deutschland im Herbst and
Die Patriotin, see Hansen’s
“Cooperative Auteur Cinema
and Oppositional Public
Sphere,” (36–56).
Is this simply a matter of reinvigorating the old traditional form of narrativization
by bringing it into contact with the new discursive forms of the “new subjectivity”
(Neue Subjektivität)?22 The ubiquitous phantasmagoria of archival materials from the
history of silent cinema in Kluge’s films (for instance, the scenes from D. W. Griffith’s
Intolerance and Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache [1924] in Die Macht der
Gefühle (1983) [The Power of Emotion]) does not merely historicize and contextualize.
The originality or purity of these materials is tampered with or contaminated by
the mechanism of representation that borrows its techniques, such as the frequent
use of iris in and out, fast and slow motion, lap-dissolves, intertitles, etc., from
the resources of those silent films themselves. The estrangement or distanciation thus
produced by this sort of intertextuality (Kluge’s aesthetic designs are more or
less operations held within the grand syntagm of Brecht’s theatrical principles) is
augmented in the representation of scenes from these early films when they are seen
though a pair of opera glasses; in these moments, the unfulfilled wishes and desires
of one form are brought into violent juxtaposition with those of the other.23
Now let us return to Kluge’s “utopian quest” for the rewriting of German history
in a “patriotic” version, which not only rehearses “the overall context” of his political
and philosophical interventions in the history of German cinema, but also generates
a thematic or logocentric pathos that surmounts all his theoretical and pragmatic
concerns. It begins with the figure of Gabi Teichert, the indomitable history teacher
from the province of Hessen, first in Duetschland in Herbst (1978) and subsequently in
Die Patriotin (1979). Both films are responses to the political circumstances of 1977
in Germany with the slaying of the ex-Nazi and the Chairman of Mercedes Benz,
Hans Richter Schleyer, the so-called “suicide” of the RAF members, Baader, Meinhoff,
and Gudrun Esslin in Stammheim prison, and the attack on Mogadishu airport.24 As
it becomes an allegorical saga for the redemptive project of mourning for all of the
dead in Germany, Gabi Teichert’s search for positive materials for history lessons finds
itself in an acrimonious relationship with the recent German past.
Gabi Teichert’s utopian quest for a ‘patriotic’ version of German history beyond
textbooks and centralized curricula is the core fiction around which Kluge
arranges the heterogeneous materials he transmits to his viewers. Schematically
drawn, the figure of Gabi Teichert allows Kluge to move freely between present
and past, between real and symbolic settings. . . . Introduced via poet Christian
Morgenstern’s antiwar ‘gallows song’ ‘Das Knie,’ the macabre fiction of Corporal
Wieland’s disembodied knee speaking for the dead of the Reich with a sense of
humorous desperation raises concerns central to the film and Kluge’s conception of
history: the physical and emotional reality of individual human beings both as
the victims of history and as potential subjects, the contingent nature of historical
developments, and the persistence of unfulfilled wishes as well as destructive
traditions in a given culture.” (Fiedler, 222–223)
 | 346

Kluge’s point is that German history is itself even more destructive, chaotic and
dangerous than anything he could ever put into a film. As Andrew Bowie puts it,
“the potential connections that can be made between even the most apparently
unconnected aspects of the really disastrous history of Germany might turn out to
make a lot more sense than the unifying images which still dominate the discourse
of most historians. This approach, which has its roots in aspects of Walter Benjamin’s
philosophy of history can be seen on all levels of Kluge’s work.” (Bowie, 113) As a
matter of fact, Kluge’s concern with Benjamin’s Jetztzeit recurs in most of his works
through the images of air raids. The frequency with which air raid imagery occurs in
Kluge’s literary and filmic work is due to the fact that he was himself nearly a victim
of raids on his home town Halberstadt.25 Though this trauma is never personalized
in either his films or his theoretical writings, its impact on his reasoning is mediated
through various subjective factors. On the occasion of the award of the Fontane
Prize for literature, which Kluge received in 1979, he addressed the problem in his
speech as follows:

25. Alexander Kluge was thirteen
years old and almost became a
victim of the Allied bombing of
his hometown Halberstadt, then
in GDR, on August 9, 1945.
Fontane . . . didn’t know the bombing raids that many Berliners can still feel in
their bones. In that situation, if one puts it graphically, there are always two strate-
gies—a strategy from above and a strategy from below. Clausewitz wrote a certain
amount about “strategy from above,” which is the strategy the bomber command
has, and the bomber command has got the means for it as well. Strategy from
below would be what the woman with two children down in a cellar could do to
oppose the bombing. We must make it clear to ourselves that, if this relationship
of person/bomb in the emergency is the model of how our modern world intends
to deal with people and if we don’t want to deceive ourselves in times of peace
or apparent peace about the fact that this is precisely the point of the emergency,
then we must ask ourselves whether there are reasons which make us satisfied
with meager means of a strategy from below in the emergency. The problem is
that the woman in the bomb-cellar in 1944, for example, has no means at all to
defend herself at the moment. She might perhaps have had means in 1928 if she
organized with others “before” the development which then moves towards Papen,
Schleicher, and Hitler. So the question of organization is located in 1928, and the
requisite consciousness is located in 1944.” (1986, 127)
For Kluge, modern history consists of these images of strategies from above, which
is the “perspective of technology and power” (Bowie, 113). In the same speech Kluge
further argues, “the fact that we in our country are always shocked at the wrong
moments and are not shocked at right ones . . . is a consequence of our considering
politics as a specialized area which others look after for us and not as a degree of
intensity of our feelings” (1986, 126). In his collection of short stories, Neue Geschichten,
Kluge often “uses the resources of montage in a way which takes into account both
the need for some kind of documentation of the events . . . and the need to reveal the
fundamental inadequacy of documentation.” (Bowie, 114) What emerge from his
text are the two dialectically related notions of history and abstraction. History and
abstraction share an antagonism toward the experience of the individual subject.

We deal with our surroundings in an ‘unsensuous’ way, exactly as we do with the

real relations in history. And we deal with lyric poetry in a ‘sensuous’ way with our
direct sense for what is near. The two fall apart. The big decisions in history are not
made in the realm of what we experience close at hand. The real big disasters take
place in the distance which we cannot experience, for which we don’t have the
appropriate telescope (or microscope) in our senses. The two don’t come together.
In this sense man is not a social, not a political being. And experience shows that
when he rebels he generally even smashes the few sensuous tools which link him
to the social whole. (Kluge, 1986, 122)

Kluge is looking for a way out from the “ambiguity” and “radicalism of realism.”
Since the limited individual experience does not provide the way out, it is necessary to
look for those ways out in connection with the collectivity by “organizing collective
social experience.” In Geschichte und Eigensinn, Kluge and Negt “emphasize that the
public sphere can be understood as organizing human experience,” as a “historically
developing form of the mediation between the cultural organization of human
qualities and senses on the one hand and developing capitalist production on the
other.” (Knödler-Bunte, 53) And in that sense they oppose Habermas, whose The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was widely popular during the protest
movement in Germany.Their basic criticism of Habermas is that Habermas’s idea of
the bourgeois public sphere does not include the proletarian public sphere, which
is inherently opposed to the former. Rather he treats it as no more than a “repressed
variant of a plebeian public sphere.” For Habermas, the public sphere of the bour-
geoisie has disintegrated into the rival politics of power groups and has therefore
become an “object of manipulation” (Knödler-Bunte, 54). He relates this condition
directly to the state of late capitalism as a “refeudalization of the public sphere”
(Knödler-Bunte, 54). Against this, Kluge and Negt discuss the function of the public
sphere in the context of a Marxist analysis. In fact, Kluge has always defined
“public sphere” in oppositional terms. He intends a type of public sphere that changes
and expands, and increases the possibilities for public articulations of experience.
In order to achieve this, says Kluge, “we must very resolutely take a stance regarding
the right to intimacy, to private ownership of experience” (1986, 211).
 | 348

VI. Conclusion
Kluge’s films are an ongoing dialogue with the identity of German history, located
between the reality of everyday experience and its ever-present antagonism with
German history. His historiography rejects the narrative thread of the conventional
cinema of Hollywood, which follows the official project of logical continuity; he
reveals the inadequacy of such projects to confront the “peculiarities” of a history,
especially of German history. In what could be a statement of Kluge’s own project,
Gabi Teichert remarks in Die Patriotin, “what else is the history of a country but the
vastest narrative surface of all? Not one story but many stories.” These stories in
his films are not consistent or continuous; they are a vertiginous collage of many
fragmented and disrupted stories which are linked together in free association.
Kluge’s films do not reconstruct the past: they deal with history from the perspective
of the present.
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