Kluge’s episode from the film Germany in Autumn features the fictive history teacher Gabi Teichert, who he would reprise in the equally celebrated and condemned The Patriot (1979). Teichert, played by one of Germany’s great theatre and film actresses, Hannelore Hoger, gets quite practical in her efforts to better understand German history and the particular fascination nationalism has held for the country: she drills into historical tomes, cooks them in beakers in makeshift science labs and literally ingests them. In one of the best examples of Kluge’s favoured formal trick of combining documentary and fictive modes, Teichert attends a (real) SPD party gathering to demand a “German history worth teaching” from perplexed and annoyed delegates. But despite the film’s obvious claims to deal with German history and nationalism, it ignores the most obvious victims of that history. Its opening passages tread on extremely controversial ground when Kluge’s voiceover declares that Teichert, as a teacher of history and a patriot, “is concerned with all the dead of the Reich.” This is followed by old war-film footage of a battlefield strewn with corpses, accompanied by Hanns Eisler’s well-known music from Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955). Perhaps this juxtaposition is meant to register the presence of all the victims of the Reich, with Eisler’s music somehow standing in for the victims of Nazi extermination policies and the visuals somehow standing in for the German dead, but the effect is to equate the two groups and their suffering. In the subsequent two hours of the film, there is no mention of the Holocaust, let alone any distinction made between innocents and perpetrators or soldiers and civilians, nor is there any reflection on the degree to which German national identity, ostensibly a serious concern of Kluge’s, relied upon the demonization of an entire people. It is this sort of historical obtuseness which at times lessens the power of Kluge’s often remarkable formal efforts, and it makes us recall that at a fundamental level no degree of formal subtlety or innovation makes up for a crude insight. —Christopher Pavsek
Alexander Kluge (born 14 February 1932, Halberstadt, Saxony-Anhalt) is a noted film director and author.
After growing up during the Second World War, he studied law, history and music at the universities of Marburg and Frankfurt am Main, receiving his doctorate in law in 1956. While studying in Frankfurt, Kluge befriended the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who had returned to Germany and was teaching at the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School. Kluge served as a legal counsel for the Institute, and began writing his earliest stories during this period. At Adorno’s suggestion, he also began to investigate filmmaking, and in 1958, Adorno introduced him to German filmmaker Fritz Lang.
Kluge directed his first film in 1960, Brutalität im Stein (Brutality in Stone), a 12-minute, black and white, lyrical montage work which, against the German commercial (Papa’s Kino) cinematic amnesia of the prior decade, inaugurated an exploration of the Nazi past. The film premiered… read more
A discussion with one of the leading founders of New German Cinema, upon the release of his films on DVD and his 80th birthday.
Happy Birthday to the author, social critic, television producer and filmmaker.
One of the many ways in which Ule Edel's recent film The Baader Meinhof Complex failed, both artistically and in terms of actual address of
