The German List
11 total works
Accompanied by the ghostly and wintry forest scenes captured in Gerhard Richter's photographs, these stories have an alarming density, one that gives way at unexpected moments to open vistas and narrative clarity. Within these pages, the lessons are perhaps not as comforting as in the old calendar stories, but the subversive moralities are always instructive and perfectly executed.
That calm was the work of Gerhard Richter, who had been granted control over Die Welt for that single day, taking over and imprinting all thirty pages of the newspaper with his personal stamp: images from quiet moments amid unquiet times, the demotion of politics from its primary position, the privileging of the private and personal over the public, and, above all, artful, moving contrasts between sharpness and softness. He had created an unprecedented work of mass art.
Among the many people to praise the work was writer Alexander Kluge, who instantly began writing stories to accompany Richter’s images. This book, the second collaboration between Kluge and Richter, brings their stories and images together, along with new words and artworks created specifically for this volume. The result, Dispatches from Moments of Calm, is a beautiful, meditative interval in the otherwise unremitting press of everyday life, a masterpiece by two acclaimed artists working at the height of their powers.
The Labyrinth of Tender Force collects 166 of Alexander Kluge’s love stories previously concealed among his vast library of more than 2,000 texts. “Basic stories” was what he once called them. Organized thematically, these stories take readers on a flight over the maps—the varied topography—of love. This flight ends on a high plateau, at the heart of the most beautiful romances and a cardinal text of modernity about the economy of relationships: Madame de La Fayette’s The Princess of Cleves.
The latest offering from one of the greatest living German writers, The Labyrinth of Tender Force masterfully explores the greatest peaks and the most dreadful crevasses of passionate love through an inspired combination of Kluge’s vignettes with drawings, photographs, and other archival material culled from diverse sources.
Alexander Kluge’s work has long grappled with the Third Reich and its aftermath, and the extermination of the Jews forms its gravitational center. Kluge is forever reminding us to keep our present catastrophes in perspective—“calibrated”—against this historical monstrosity. Kluge’s newest work is a book about bitter fates, both already known and yet to unfold. Above all, it is about the many kinds of organized machinery built to destroy people. These forty-eight stories of justice and injustice are dedicated to the memory of Fritz Bauer, a determined fighter for justice and district attorney of Hesse during the Auschwitz Trials. “The moment they come into existence, monstrous crimes have a unique ability,” Bauer once said, “to ensure their own repetition.” Kluge takes heed, and in these pages reminds us of the importance of keeping our powers of observation and memory razor sharp.
In Kong’s Finest Hour, Alexander Kluge explores anew the accessible spaces where Kong dwells within us and in our million-year-old past. The more than two hundred stories contained in this volume form a chronicle of connections that together survey these spaces using diverse perspectives. These include stories about the folds of Kong’s nose, the voice of the author’s mother, the poet Heinrich von Kleist and Jack the Ripper, the indestructability of the political, and the supercontinent Pangaea that once unified the earth. Dissolving theory into storytelling has been Kluge’s lifelong pursuit, and this magnificent collection tells stories of people as well of things.
First in a series of Kluge’s Chronicles forthcoming from Seagull Books, Kong’s Finest Hour will delight those familiar with his writing as well as introduce readers to the brilliance of one of Germany’s greatest living writers.
The Principles of Life on Black Friday – Chronicle of Emotions, Notebook 1
by Alexander Kluge
This volume concerns itself with the question of time, from the description of a brief fragment passing by in a matter of minutes to stories of the unexpected stock-market crash of 1929, a once-in-a-century event that Europeans call ‘Black Friday’ because Wall Street’s collapse reached the Old World one day later. Through this exploration of time, Kluge ponders some fundamental questions not altered by the passing of time: What can I trust? How can I protect myself? What should I be afraid of? Our age today has achieved a new kind of obscurity. We’ve encountered a pandemic. We’ve witnessed the Capitol riots. We see before us inflation, war, and a burning planet. We gaze at the world with suspense. What we need in our lives is orientation—just like ships that navigate the high seas. We might just find that in Kluge’s vignettes and stories.
The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul confronts the reader with questions of existential meaning, questions rendered all the more potent by the backdrop of the Coronavirus pandemic: How fragile are we as human beings? How fragile are our societies? What is a “self,” an “I,” a “community”? How are we to orient ourselves? And what, if any, role does commentary play? In a fashion that will be familiar to longtime admirers of Alexander Kluge, the book stretches both back in time to the medieval glossators of Bologna and forward into interstellar space with imagined travel to the moon Europa. Kluge’s characteristic brief, vignette-like prose passages are interspersed with images from his own film work and QR codes, forming a highly engaging, thoroughly contemporary read.
The circus has fascinated Alexander Kluge ever since he was a child, and his devotion to it has been preserved throughout his cinematic output and his most recent literary work. In the circus, he finds both the shadow image of work and the epitome of human excellence, from love to war to revolution. As surfaces onto which utopias are projected, these elaborate performances offer a tangible representation of developments within civilization, with its nearly infinite possibilities and sometimes inevitable crashes—from the excited roar of the crowd to death on the floor of the ring.
In Circus Commentary, Kluge’s montage of modernities moves back and forth through time and space, expressing his unique mix of fictional and non-fictional reports, histories, and stories through semantic fields, images, and film sequences inserted in the book via QR codes. We encounter a broad panorama of perplexed artists and sophisticated surgeons cavorting alongside fighter pilots, sans-culottes drunk with dreams of omnipotence, and, most importantly, animals—to whose superhuman performances, this book creates a lasting memorial.
“War is back again.” So begins Alexander Kluge’s latest book, prompted by a war of aggression that, though being waged in Europe, is of global importance. Blending simple stories with multimedia and reflecting on human responses and hope, the author does not aim to take sides nor make an appeal. Rather, he is concerned with what he calls “mole war,” the tenacious and often subterranean survival of war—what war makes of people and what life of its own it is capable of.
Kluge’s book is based on an iconic model, the primer, and named after a famous one: Bertolt Brecht’s. Here we find simple stories underpinned with montages, film stills, and sequences. The author was ten years old when—sitting at his school desk and with his finger on the map—he followed German tanks on their journey to Stalingrad. In the time between then and his ninety-first birthday in February 2023, this chronicler of emotions has studied the costumes of war again and again: War is mortal but does not die quickly. How can we respond to its demands?