Ferdinand von Schirach

Alexander Kluge

Trotzdem

Gerhard Richter

In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, this work presents a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept photographs for the darkest month of the year. It includes stories drawn from modern history and the contemporary moment, from mythology, and even from meteorology.

39 Stories, 39 Pictures

December

Sokrates oder das Glück der Bescheidenheit, Voltaire oder die Freiheit durch Toleranz, Kleist oder das Wissen um den Menschen, Terror oder die Klugheit des Rechts, Politik oder das Lob der Langsamkeit: Ferdinand von Schirach und Alexander Kluge unterhalten sich über Grundfragen des Rechts und der Gesellschaft, über Theater und Literatur, über die Gefahren der direkten Demokratie und der sozialen Medien und darüber, was den Menschen im eigentlichen Sinn menschlich macht. "Die Herzlichkeit der Vernunft" ist ein sehr persönlicher Dialog der beiden Schriftsteller.

Die Herzlichkeit der Vernunft

Each of the thirty-nine tales of Alexander Kluge's Cinema Stories combines fact and fiction, and they revolve around movie-making. The book compresses a lifetime of feeling, thought, and practice: Kluge--considered the father of New German Cinema--is an inventive wellspring of narrative notions. "The power of his pros," as Small Press noted, "exudes the sort of pregnant richness one might find in the brief scenarios of unknown films." Cinema Stories is a treasure trove of strikingly original writing and cinematic lore.

Cinema Stories

Ben Lerner

American author Ben Lerner and German filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge come from two different generations but share a single passion: an interest in the long-term effects of things. A line from Lerner's poem "The Sky Stops Painting and Turns to Criticism," which Kluge was struck by some years ago, became the starting point for their first joint book project. Kluge responded to this celestial critique with a story about the technically controlled power of a squadron of bombers in the skies over Aleppo, which Lerner answered with a sonnet. Step by step this dialogue gave rise to poems, stories and conversations in which the heavens reveal their bewitching and threatening qualities. A series of 21 photographs that Gerhard Richter took in Venice in the 1970s augments the interplay of texts and the principle of interconnecting poetic horizons, as well as images by Rebecca H. Quaytman and Thomas Demand. Ben Lerner (born 1979) is the author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station as well as three books of poetry. He is based in Brooklyn and is a professor of English at Brooklyn College. Alexander Kluge (born 1932) is the author and director of numerous novels and films. A student of Theodor Adorno and assistant to Fritz Lang, Kluge has won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival four times and nearly every major German-language literature award.

The Snows of Venice

Elif Batuman

Daniel Smith

Rachel Sherman

Keith Gessen

Pankaj Mishra

Mark Greif

Peter Gizzi

Benjamin Kunkel

Marco Roth

Peter Frankel

Happiness

n+1, Number 2

The Devil's Blind Spot is a collection of 173 stories arranged in five chapters. The first group illustrates the little-known virtues of the devil; the second explores love; the third addresses power; the fourth considers the cosmos; and the fifth ranges all our k̀nowledge' against our feelings.

Tales from the New Century

The Devil's Blind Spot

Georg Baselitz

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 watercolour on paper, and the written word. The long history of humankind is also a history of rage, fury, 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.

News of the Antipodeans

World-Changing Rage

Russland-Kontainer

Fiction writer, internationally known filmmaker, critical theorist, Alexander Kluge is perhaps postwar Germany's most prolific and diverse intellectual. With this translation of Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome, a novella first published in German in 1973, one of Kluge's most important literary works becomes available to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Written in a quasi-documentary style, this fascinating hybrid work combines science fiction with modernist forms of montage and reportage to describe a future in which Earth has been almost totally destroyed following the catastrophic Black War. The planet's remaining inhabitants have been driven underground or into space where the struggle to establish a new society rages on. Whether describing the scene in China where the devastated landscape is reconstructed according to old paintings, or in the galactic realm of the Starway where giant, turf-battling, corporate colonizing forces exploit the universe's resources, Kluge tells his tale by inventing various forms of "evidence" that satirize the discourses of administrative bureaucracy, the law, military security, and the media. He gives us some of his most bizarre and hilarious characters in this peculiar world in which the remains of the past are mixed with the most advanced elements of the future. The cast includes highly specialized women workers who have adapted to the massive gravitational field of their heavy-metal planets, a commander with lethal foot-fungus, and ex-Nazi space pioneers who, in their lonely exile from the conflagrations on earth, spend their time carving enormous facsimiles of operatic sheet music in the forests of uninhabited planets. With parody, and humor, Kluge shows how the survivors of Armageddon attempt to learn the art of civilization, and, despite the disaster they have suffered, how they set out to reproduce at new sites a caricature of a classic and fascistic feudal capitalism.

Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome

Revolving around the opera, these tales are an “archaeological excavation of the slag-heaps of our collective existence” (W. G. Sebald) Combining fact and fiction, each of the one hundred and two tales of Alexander Kluge’s Temple of the Scapegoat (dotted with photos of famous operas and their stars) compresses a lifetime of feeling and thought: Kluge is deeply engaged with the opera and an inventive wellspring of narrative notions. The titles of his stories suggest his many turns of mind: “Total Commitment,” “Freedom,” “Reality Outrivals Theater,” “The Correct Slowing-Down at the Transitional Point Between Terror and an Inkling of Freedom,” “A Crucial Character (Among Persons None of Whom Are Who They Think They Are),” and “Deadly Vocal Power vs. Generosity in Opera.” An opera, Kluge says, is a blast furnace of the soul, telling of the great singer Leonard Warren who died onstage, having literally sung his heart out. Kluge introduces a Tibetan scholar who realizes that opera “is about comprehension and passion. The two never go together. Passion overwhelms comprehension. Comprehension kills passion. This appears to be the essence of all operas, says Huang Tse-we.” He also comes to understand that female roles face the harshest fates: “Compared to the mass of soprano victims (out of 86,000 operas, 64,000 end with the death of the soprano), the sacrifice of tenors is small (out of 86,000 operas 1,143 tenors are a write-off).”

Temple of the Scapegoat: Opera Stories

Michael Christ

Der Eifelturm, King Kong und die weisse Frau

In his literary texts, regardless of their length, Alexander Kluge says what needs to be said in the most succinct way possible. He notes his texts down on plain A4 pads in order to dictate them afterward. In this notebook, he outlines, in the space of a few lines, the emotional state of a woman named Gesine, who is unhappily in love with a man who has long since lost interest in her, if he was ever interested at all. She canU+2019t get away from him. She suffers and is consoled by her best friendU+2014the first-person narrator. KlugeU+2019s syntactical austerity in the description of emotional entanglements, the objective, distanced style of a more or less documentary character, gives rise to a precise consolidation of complex subject matter. Thus, out of only one portrayed instance, an entire life unfolds. -- Publisher's description.

Er Hat Die Herzlosen Augen Eines Über Alles Geliebten

It was on April 30, 1945 that the Red Army occupied Berlin, Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker and the United Nations was being founded in San Francisco. Alexander Kluge covers this single historic day and unravels its passing hours across the different theatres of the Second World War, 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. The collective experiences Kluge paints here are jarring, poignant and imbued with meaning.

the day Hitler shot himself and Germany's integration with the West began

30 April 1945

Alta L. Price

48 Stories for Fritz Bauer

Anyone Who Utters a Consoling Word Is a Traitor

350 neue Geschichten

Tür an Tür mit einem anderen Leben

Zorn ist eine grundlegende Kategorie in Alexander Kluges Werk ebenso wie in den 'Heldenbildern' von Georg Baselitz.? Zorn und Eigensinn sind enge Verwandte. Beide entstehen aus der Spannung zwischen Individuum und Kollektiv. Zorn ist dynamisch, kann aufwachsen und sich mit eruptiver Plötzlichkeit in flammendem Protest entladen, in Revolte, Revolution und Krieg. Im Typus des Helden vor allem konzentrieren sich seine Energien. Die Geschichte der Welt ist auch eine Geschichte des Zorns.0Dies ist der Ausgangspunkt einer verblüffenden Kooperation: Georg Baselitz und Alexander Kluge. In Bild und Sprache vereinen sie ihre Kräfte zu einem Parforceritt durch das Gelände heftiger Emotionen: Es geht um Fürsten, Führer und Feldherren, um CEOs ebenso wie um die kleinen, häufig nicht weniger spektakulär agierenden Rädchen im Motor der Geschichte. Dabei arbeitet sich Kluge erdteil- und kulturübergreifend vor, indem er den melancholisch geprägten Typus des abendländischen Helden mit dem so ganz anderen Heldenethos der japanischen Antipoden, der 'Gegenfüßler', konfrontiert. Genau darin trifft er sich mit den heldenmythischen Dekonstruktionen von Georg Baselitz und dessen formenreich-subtiler Auseinandersetzung mit dem großen Meister der japanischen Kunst: Katsushika Hokusai.

Alexander Kluge

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