Kluge's Auswege

Abstract

If Alexander Kluge's prose and films are populated with figures looking for escape, his programmatic statements on the media are no less concerned with how various narrative strategies provide more or less possibility for a way out from dominant discursive practices. This idea of Auswege—at the level of both the experience as well as the representation and the conceptualization of historical events—is at the core of Kluge's multi-media project and is the focus of this article. Auswege describe processes of representation/depiction that serve as the reader's point of departure to re-imagine the present, and potentially, offer a Rettung from the repetition of catastrophe. The article traces the evolution of this concept in examples of Kluge's work from the 1970s (Luftangriff auf Halberstadt and Verschrottung durch Arbeit) and in prose texts composed in the context of the end of the GDR and the unification of Germany in 1989/90 (Verfallserscheinungen der Macht).

Keywords:

• Chronik der Gefühle
• GDR
• Alexander Kluge
• media
• public sphere
• Wende

Notes

Kluge's Adorno Prize speech, “Die Aktualität Adornos,” is available on his Web site: see <http://www.kluge-alexander.de/zur-person/reden/2009-adorno-preis.html>.

In their commentary accompanying an interview with Kluge, Christian Schulte and Rainer Stollmann attribute the maxim, “Es gibt immer einen Ausweg,” to Lenin as a stylization of the rejection of the concept of destiny (Schicksal).

The seismographer/cartographer distinction is drawn from statements in speeches Kluge made on the occasion of his being awarded the Schiller Prize (2001) and the Büchner Prize (2003) (see “Wir haben nichts Besseres” and “Rede”).

In a recent article, Malkmus compares Kluge's early and more recent work particularly in the evolution of the author's use of images in the disruption of historical continuities. Malkmus examines the shift, for example, from “images used to illustrate, interrupt, and undermine the narrative to a more integral interrelation which emphasizes mutual illustration, interruption, and deconstruction” and the creation of “complex text-images patterns of interrelation and mutual framing” (251).

In response to Hage's question concerning any hesitation he may have felt at depicting the bombing of Halberstadt as an episode of German victimization, Kluge claims that he could not have written Luftangriff without Verschrottung, and that both prose texts are intricately linked. In linking the two texts, Kluge does not suggest that the crimes or suffering of any of the actors is in any way comparable nor that the events are causally connected, but that their telling creates the condition of possibility of telling other stories (see Hage 204–05).

In his book, Steinaecker presents the Heimkehr poster printed at the beginning of Luftangriff as a condensed version of the complex, intermedial representational strategies of Kluge's own text, with its negotiation of text and image, reality and fantasy, abstract and concrete, fact and feeling (211–13). On Kluge's reference to Heimkehr, see also Eshel. For an analysis of the self-reflexive nature of Heimkehr in its use of images and tropes that recall the persecutions of the Jewish and Polish under National Socialism, see Moltke.

Although hardly presenting his reader with a predigested “package,” Sebald nevertheless leaves significantly less space for this form of “participation,” I think. In his book, Steinaecker also draws comparisons between Kluge and Sebald, highlighting especially Kluge's “discontinuity” as opposed to Sebald's “aestheticization” as elements that contribute to the production of a more or less active participation on the part of the reader (323).

Einheitsrealismus is a term Kluge has employed, for example, in his acceptance speech for the Kleist prize in 1985. Kleist's rejection of “Einheitsrealismus” is a central formulation in Kluge's identification of his own writing project with Kleist's work (Fontane 41). As fully self-contained and unified, the narratives of Einheitsrealismus leave little to no room for Auswege.

“Sitz der Seele” has been reprinted most recently in Das Labyrinth der Zärtlichen Kraft (416–17) as well as in translation in The Devil's Blind Spot (97–98).

Grünewald's article on Kluge's television interviews on Islam and terrorism shows how, in the post-9/11 era, Kluge's interviewing style suggests that simple critiques of, or counterstatements to, the negative image of Islam in the mass media are not sufficient. In other words, to present a different image of Islam requires adopting new formal strategies that do not accord with the rational structure imposed by generic expectations and assumptions. As Grünewald shows, not merely the content but “the presentation of the ideas itself needs to resist mainstream aesthetic television conventions” (325). Grünewald details the ways in which Kluge offers an alternative form of presentation through discursive and stylistic means by emphasizing instances of authorship, disrupting processes of television realism and violating conventions of the genre, and thereby avoiding dichotomies that only serve to reinstate ideological arguments.

Sontag makes a similar argument in her last book on photography, Regarding the Pain of Others, when she writes:

Strictly speaking there is no such thing as collective memory—part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction. All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings. (85–86)

This critique of the image is consonant with Flusser's analysis of photographic practices that are less about documenting the past and more about modeling “the future behavior of their addressees. Yet, they are not only models of behavior, but also models of perception and experience” (129–30). The addressees of photographs get it wrong when they consider a photograph an end point of history, which means that they assume that linear history moves in the direction of the photograph when it is taken. In Flusser's conceptualization of the media system, the photograph functions as the starting point of a program to be developed in the future. In this way, “the programmers become a cultural elite of technocrats, media operators, and opinion makers who manipulate an unconscious society” (Flusser 130). Kluge's protest of reality in his so-called realistic method is consonant with the critical relation to media (text, as well as mechanical and electronic recording) elaborated by Flusser.

Kluge has claimed that his favorite image in Chronik der Zeit shows a blind truck driver at the wheel with his nine-year-old son next to him navigating him through the streets. At the level of content, the image presents an Ausweg from unemployment during desperate economic times. This Ausweg is concentrated here in the act of narration (see Fontane 77; and Verdeckte 59).