Alexander Kluge

In a world full of devils, the giant ape Kong defends what he loves the most. But who and what is this undomesticated animal? Might it reside within us? As we tread confidently, is this where the earth opens up beneath us? 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.

In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, author and film director Alexander Kluge and celebrated visual artist Gerhard Richter have composed December, a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept photographs for the darkest month of the year.In stories drawn from modern history and the contemporary moment, from mythology, and even from meteorology, Kluge toys as readily with time and space as he does with his characters. In the narrative entry for December 1931, Adolf Hitler avoids a car crash by inches. In another, we relive Greek financial crises. There are stories where time accelerates, and others in which it seems to slow to the pace of falling snow. In Kluge’s work, power seems only to erode and decay, never grow, and circumstances always seem to elude human control. When a German commander outside Moscow in December of 1941 remarks, “We don’t need weapons to fight the Russians but a weapon to fight the weather,” the futility of his struggle is painfully present. 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.Praise for Alexander Kluge“More than a few of Kluge's many books are essential, brilliant achievements. None are without great interest.”—Susan Sontag “Alexander Kluge, that most enlightened of writers.”—W.G. Sebald

In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, author and film director Alexander Kluge and celebrated visual artist Gerhard Richter have composed December, a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept photographs for the darkest month of the year.

A layered and lyrical collaboration between two great artists—Anselm Kiefer and Alexander Kluge—that explores what it means to remain faithful amid the shifting forces of power, love, truth, and money. What holds us together in times of uncertainty? For decades, artist Anselm Kiefer and filmmaker-writer Alexander Kluge have explored this question—both as friends and collaborators. This latest volume is a bold and poetic exchange of images and texts in which they delve into the idea of reliability and its relationship to the four great forces that shape our lives: power, love, truth, and money. Moving across history, myth, and the present day, Kiefer and Kluge ask: What is time? In a world of endless change, how do we hold on to what endures? Inspired by Hölderlin’s call “to remain faithful under shifting circumstances,” they use art to keep memory alive, invite the past into the present, and welcome the future before it arrives. Layered, provocative, and profoundly human, this new collaboration is a powerful meditation on what connects us—and what makes us endure.

As past and future blur, this work from Alexander Kluge reveals the emotional and intellectual currents that drive human survival. A kaleidoscopic journey through history and the vast landscape of human emotion, The Long March of Basic Trust presents Alexander Kluge at his most expansive and incisive. Moving seamlessly across time and space, Kluge weaves a tapestry of lived and imagined experience, interrogating the forces that shape our resilience in the face of catastrophe. From the wreckage of World War II to the deep time of geology, his singular prose dissolves boundaries between the real and the speculative. Blurring the lines between fiction and philosophy, Kluge builds an intricate world enriched by hybrid images and his latest experiment: the “virtual camera,” a cinematic eye that captures the interplay of memory and invention. Now in his tenth decade, Kluge continues his lifelong pursuit of uncovering the patterns that connect us and the basic trust that allows us to go on. Both intellectually provocative and deeply humane, this latest installment in his Chronicle of Emotions is a testament to his unmatched ability to fuse thought and feeling into an electrifying literary form.

A poignant exploration of post–World War II life, blending fictional and non-fictional stories that challenge traditions and reflect on the enduring impact of historical disruptions. Lifespan Narratives has to do with stories, fictitious and not, which present a sad chronicle and question tradition from several different perspectives. Originally comprising Alexander Kluge’s first book, these stories were written between the years 1958 and 1962, in which he emphasizes the importance of continuously questioning our past. He underscores the necessity of recounting lifespan narratives even from today’s viewpoint, proposing that “life in a time of disruption” should be viewed as a constant experiential substance, transcending any single era. In Lifespan Narratives, readers are invited to explore the enduring impact of historical disruptions through Kluge’s masterful storytelling, which remains as relevant today as it was in the years following the Second World War. For this edition, the English translation of a selection of stories by Leila Vennewitz has been expanded by Alexander Booth in conjunction with the author.

A profound exploration of the enduring impact of war in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “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?

Alexander Kluge explores the madcap, multifaceted world of the circus through a global geopolitical lens. 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.

A highly engaging exploration of existential questions, written in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. 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.

A reissue of Alexander Kluge's kaleidoscopic view of a historically important day and its effects on many people’s lives. April 30, 1945, marked an end of sorts in the Third Reich. The last business day before a national holiday and then a series of transfers of power, April 30 was a day filled with contradictions and bewildering events that would forever define global history. It was on this day that while the Red Army occupied Berlin, Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker, and, in San Francisco, the United Nations was being founded. Alexander Kluge’s latest book, 30 April 1945, covers this single historic day and unravels its passing hours across the different theaters of the Second World War. Translated by Wieland Hoban, the book delves into the events happening around the world on one fateful day, including the life of a small German town occupied by American forces and the story of two SS officers stranded on the forsaken Kerguelen Islands in the South Indian Sea. Kluge is a master storyteller, and as he unfolds these disparate tales, one unavoidable question surfaces: What is the appropriate reaction to the total upheaval of the status quo? Presented here with an afterword by Reinhard Jirgl, translated by Iain Galbraith, 30 April 1945 is a riveting collection of lives turned upside down by the deadliest war in history. The collective experiences Kluge paints here are jarring, poignant, and imbued with meaning. Seventy years later, we can still see our own reflections on the upheaval of a single day in 1945.

An exploration by an artist and writer duo of a fundamental constant in the history of humankind: rage, and its impact on the world. Rage and obstinacy are close relatives—and fundamental categories in the work of both Georg Baselitz and Alexander Kluge. In World-Changing Rage, these two accomplished German creators explore links and fractures between two cultures through two media: ink and watercolor on paper, and the written word. The long history of humankind is also a history of rage, fury, and wrath. In this book, Baselitz and Kluge explore the dynamism of rage and its potential to rapidly grow and erupt into blazing protests, revolution, and war. The authors also reflect the melancholy archetype of the Western hero (and his deconstruction) against the very different heroic ethos of the Japanese antipodes. More powerful than rage, they argue, is wit, as displayed in the work of Japanese master painter Katsushika Hokusai. In this volume, Baselitz repeatedly draws an image of Hokusai, depicting him with an outstretched finger, as if pointing towards Europe in a mixture of rage, wrath, irony, and laughter, all-too-fleetingly evident in his expression. A unique collaboration between two of the world’s leading intellectuals, World-Changing Rage will leave every reader with a deeper appreciation of the human condition.

A book about bitter fates—both already known and yet to unfold—and the many kinds of organized machinery built to destroy people. 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.