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Abstract
In his 1997 lectures in Zürich, later published as On the Natural History of Destruction (2003), W.G. Sebald indicted German-language literature with failure to adequately remember, represent, or reconcile the atrocities and violence of World War II. Drawing on Elaine Scarry's work on the body, Sebald locates the corporeal as crucial for his sought-after literary-historical aesthetic, and he thereby hypothesizes that Alexander Kluge's essay “The Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8 April 1945” verges on a poetics capable of rescuing experience and cognition from the fate destined by conservative, overly simplified narratives. But the location and content of experience as Kluge theorizes it is only spelled out in his and Oskar Negt's Geschichte und Eigensinn. Only therein do the two authors outline how a matrix of the body, trauma, alienation, and temporality constitute the possibility of rescuing the ruins of the past for the present, that itself can explicate Kluge's montage in his “Halberstadt” essay.
Notes
Translation amended to align with the original Klugean line “öffentlich lesbare Chiffre.”
Negt and Kluge 97 (subsequent references to Geschichte und Eigensinn will be cited parenthetically in the text as GE). Unless otherwise noted, all emphases are in the original and all translations are my own.
Hell's “The Angel's Enigmatic Eyes” presents a closer analysis of how in Sebald's text the gaze of Benjamin's angel confronts the “aesthetic representation of catastrophic history” (362). Similar to the current investigation, Hell sets her sights on Sebald's call for a “synoptic and artificial view” as a corrective to the failed literary remembrance and representation of World War II. However, whereas Hell persuasively argues how Sebald's own writing mimes the angel's gaze to yoke the triad of history, politics, and aesthetics, I focus on how Kluge's texts, the source of the montage-citation, are particularly representative of Sebald's sought-after aesthetic, historical, and corporeal literature.
Negt and Kluge's 1,245-page work is fragmented structurally and textually, but most importantly, the authors call Geschichte und Eigensinn a fragment that can only be completed by the user (1245).
Adorno argues relatedly for making visible ignored possibilities in his discussion of articulation in Ästhetische Theorie (219).
Sebald 19–20. Scarry also allows for the physical body—as a stand-in for verbal issues (knowledge, language)—to be “the road to the goal” of war (74, emphasis in original). Whether as an end itself or a means to an end, injuring is not viewed as accidental by Scarry. I have been unable to find any critical—or even parenthetical—engagement with Sebald's use of Scarry.
For a detailed analysis of Negt and Kluge's theory of labor, particularly in relation to aesthetic production, see Langston, “Work.”
As if she had Sebald and Kluge in mind, Scarry locates montage as crucial for any understanding of war's fundamental aspects (see Scarry 62).
Texts in which Kluge has a hand are never merely texts, but rather a montage of various voices, images, speaking points, and feigned documentary. If Kluge's work demonstrates anything, then it shows that rigid binaries (e.g., of theory and fiction) impinge on any potential working through of history for the present. Kluge addresses this directly in Die Patriotin when he speaks of the inseparability of his fictional character Gabi Teichert, literature, and theory: “It is impossible without her, it is also impossible without theory” (343). Even distinctions between authorship are on thin ice, as Kluge's work with Negt speaks predominately through a “we” but subtly slips into distinctions between the two in footnotes and when referencing source material (GE 930n42, 1245) and cedes authorship entirely to a third (GE 1202–07).
See Adorno, Negative Dialektik 74–78, 114–16, 202–04.
In his analysis of Sebald's “multifocal evocation of the recent German past” (73), Eshel relatedly argues how Sebald's oeuvre presents a potential solution in its thematization of “time's artificiality, its non-occurrence, [and] the simultaneity of all its modalities” (81).
Kluge, Neue Geschichten. Hefte 1–18 >Unheimlicheit der Zeit< (subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text as NG). Here, the translated title, New Histories, misses the double meaning of the German word Geschichte as both history and story (narrative). This double meaning fits with the assaying of historical narratives afoot in Kluge's works.
Negative Dialektik 74–78.
See GE 376. Just as they retooled Adorno's conception of trauma, Negt and Kluge transform this originally Adornian concept of non-identity into a positive moment that signals an opportunity to turn history around (see GE 375–413, 509–515, 769; Patriotin 342–416)
Kluge's texts differentiate themselves from the literary forms and traditions that both he and Sebald disparage in the text's (and Kluge's own) imperative that they be conjoined with other forms and locations of knowledge.
Here, Kluge's view of theory as praxis follows Adorno in Ästhetische Theorie (392). For more on the public sphere (of production), see Hansen, “Unstable.” For more on extratextual labor, see Langston, “Work.”
Jetztzeit can also be understood as the conjuncture of past and future, fitting for the surrealist Kluge. For more, see Roberts 16. See also Langston, Visions 23–55 (“Deaths and Reconfigurations: Avant-Garde Time after Fascism”) and 195–228 (“Alexander Kluge's Impossible Film”).
Kluge addresses the “fakeness” of the documentary “interviews” in the Halberstadt essay in particular in his interview with Hage (206–08).
That people in Halberstadt suffer from physical-psychological amnesia echoes Sebald's study. He writes, “Obviously, in the shock of what these people had experienced, their ability to remember was partly suspended, or else, in compensation, it worked to an arbitrary pattern” (ND 24).
Here it is clear that Halberstadt's citizens are in need of some Benjamanian memory work, namely “excavation and remembrance,” that probes the various layers of the physical mind as the “medium of the experienced” (see Benjamin, “Denkbilder,” Kleine Prosa 400–01). Benjamin continues with what seems to be a practical solution for the citizens of Halberstadt: “Whoever strives to approach their own buried past must act like a man who excavates.” Also cited in Hansen, “Alexander” 68.
For a closer analysis of this particular film poster and its image in Kluge's Halberstadt essay, see Anderson. See also Stefanie Harris's contribution in this issue of Germanic Review.
Sebald argues that there is an ideological base for removing the bodies. This problem of a lacking marker created a perverse pride that the Germans felt at the sight of their reconstruction. For Sebald, this pride represents “a gesture sketched to banish memory” (25, 33–68). Bodies are removed, and memory is destroyed or made unreliable, but the pride exhibited in the rebuilding of a new whole body (body as polis) creates a pride on the removal of the markers of war.
See Scarry 60–81. Sebald also addresses these exact three modes of omission (11–13, 24–31, 34–40).
As addressed below, earlier organization from below (at the latest since “1918” [GE 59]) is what would have been required to prevent the calamity. This only becomes apparent, however, belatedly.
Although beyond the scope of the current investigation, it may be possible to differentiate Gerda's (or Frau Schrader's) application of cellular knowledge from its application by Nazis in the woman's ability to reproduce. Madloch's experiments could be cast as an effort to use heteronormative scientific methodology (à la early reproductive paradigms that cast the female's egg as passive or Watson and Crick's misogynistic DNA-research methodology) to usurp the cellular divisions that constitute development into a fetus, the latter a biological event that can transform social relations (i.e., orientations of varied proximity or Nähe). Whether it is possible to read the women's biological abilities as part of a “gestative cell” of a cognitive-corporeal counterpublic sphere—that has been beaten back by laws' impact on women's bodies—cannot be addressed here (see above or GE 957).
The air raid over Halberstadt has countless parallel moments, but these equivalents, Kluge concludes, were dealt with in the same manner. Kluge addresses this directly in “Air Raid on Halberstadt” in the section “Strategy from Above” and in the interviews with the bomber pilots (55–106; see also NG 143–46 and 609–12; GE 97, 203, 787–89, 810, and 1122).
Hansen, “Alexander” 176.
Bosse, while examining Kluge's literaralization of history, also writes that precisely Kluge's montage of the body “that makes it possible to develop an image of the events” (191).
GE 102 (ctd. by Roberts 25).