When I found out that Alexander Kluge had died at age ninety-four on March 25, I picked up my copy of Case Histories, his first short story collection. Kluge was a postwar polymath: an innovative filmmaker, television producer, Marxist theorist, lawyer, and a writer of provocative and political fiction.
He wrote Case Histories, so the story goes, in the cafeteria of a West Berlin film studio in 1959. His mentor, Theodor Adorno, had arranged for Kluge, at that time the Frankfurt School’s young lawyer, to help the exiled German director Fritz Lang make his return to filmmaking in his home country.
Kluge found the experience of watching the great auteur wrangle with German movie executives depressing. Lang was, he felt, disrespected by producers who constantly overruled him. But the episode had some value for Kluge. It helped inspire a deep suspicion of the commercial aspects of cinema and pushed him to guard his artistic practice against submission to a system that turned a work of art into formula.
How did the fiction he wrote in that West Berlin cafeteria protect itself from subordination to the commercial interests of the market? The narrator in Case Histories follows German protagonists and the paths they took from 1933 through World War II in what would become Kluge’s trademark, sometimes grating, sometimes nauseating, almost cryptic fictive voice. This was a style that was impersonal yet morally concerned, a stickler for process, eager to juxtapose (sometimes comically), unafraid to plow forward against worries that the irony may be too heavy-handed. Read one Kluge short story, and it’s clear that he is hostile to the idea of a smooth reading experience.
A representative example is the beginning of “Anita G.”:
The girl Anita G., crouching under the staircase, saw the boots when her grandparents were taken away. After the capitulation her parents returned from Theresienstadt, something no one would have believed possible, and founded factories in…
Auteur: Matt Weir
