March into the Ruins

In a documentary i saw some years ago, I remember Jürgen Habermas, when asked to describe his friend the writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, responded that for all his life Kluge remained the person who was bombed as a child. Kluge was thirteen in April 1945, living with his parents in the beautiful medieval city of Halberstadt in Germany as World War II drew to a close. American troops were a day or two away from entering the city when U.S. B-17 bombers flew over and all but demolished it, killing some two or three thousand civilians. Kluge wrote about that day in Air Raid. The book, written in the 1970s but untranslated until 2014, begins with a ticket-taker in the local Halberstadt cinema, who is trying valiantly to sweep the rubble out of the aisles in time for the afternoon show when half the building has just been blown apart and the basement is crowded with corpses.

The moral seems to be that, like the ticket-taker, we try to keep to old habits when our world has exploded. The book is permeated by a sense of the absurd which, for all its indignation, somehow also leaves something to be savored. Kluge never seems to fit neatly within the philosophy he took from his teacher Theodor Adorno or, for that matter, the strenuously produced normative propositions of his friend Habermas, that other late-blooming flower of the Frankfurt School. Kluge wrote an obituary for Habermas, who died on March 14, days before his own death on March 25.

After studying modern history, music, and law in Frankfurt—he briefly served as the Frankfurt Institute’s legal counsel—Kluge began a career as an experimental filmmaker. His early films got him described by some as the German Godard, though he was less interested than Godard in placing himself within, and disrupting, cinematic tradition and more focused on exploring the particular squalor of his country’s recent past. In the late 1960s, prizewinning films like Yesterday Girl (Abschied von Gestern), starring his sister Alexandra as a Jewish refugee from East Germany, helped make the reputation of the New German Cinema. Unlike such filmmakers as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Werner Herzog, and also unlike Habermas, he did not become a household name outside his country despite his towering stature as a German intellectual. For all the respect it won him at home, his career in television, as a creative and prolific interviewer and producer, was not designed to make him famous abroad. His fiction, as resolutely uncommercial as everything else he did, also faced a language barrier and frequent lags in translation.

In the United States, the book by which he is probably best known, with the possible exception of Air Raid, is Public Sphere and Experience (Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung). Written in 1972 in collaboration with the sociologist Oskar Negt and not translated into English until 1993 (Verso reissued it in 2016), Public Sphere and Experience was a response to Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962, translated 1989). Against a backdrop of Frankfurt School pessimism about the so-called consciousness industry, which seemed to leave no place in society for active political dissent, Habermas had developed the concept of publicity or public-ness—in German, Öffentlichkeit, or openness—in an attempt to salvage the emergent institutions of the eighteenth century, where free discussion flourished outside both the government and the market. For Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere offered both a valued history and a still-viable norm. Kluge and Negt, arguing that the existing bourgeois public sphere had largely suppressed working-class experience, put forward the alternative concept of a subaltern counterpublic. They paid more attention to modern mass media, especially television, and (naturally enough) the student uprisings of the late 1960s, which had not yet happened when Habermas was writing. Unlike other critics of Habermas, however, who saw the concept of the public sphere as fatally compromised by its exclusion of non-normative gender, class, racial, and sexual experience, they retained Habermas’s key concept. For as Kluge put it, “The public sphere is the site where struggles are decided by other means than war.”

Kluge, however, did not seem to feel Habermas’s compulsion to inhabit Germany’s public sphere—that is, to take loud public positions on the issues of the day. In the 1980s, Habermas distinguished himself by standing up to the right-wing revisionists of the Historikerstreit who tried to use the Soviet Union to relativize the Holocaust. On the other hand, obituaries of Habermas have found it hard not to underline his late-life alignment with Germany’s guilt-soaked, morally unforgivable fidelity to Israel in the era of the destruction of Gaza. Mistakes of this kind are a Frankfurt School tradition. Adorno did not hide his impatience with the student rebels of 1968. In this sense, Kluge was less like Adorno or Habermas than like John Berger. Berger, too, will not be remembered for his theories or concepts. Berger was less a thinker than an artist, if a highly politicized one, showing good taste in his expressions of solidarity when he came out with them but finally more oblique in his political position-taking. Kluge has said, I remember, that when the American troops marched into the ruins of Halberstadt, he was glad. It’s not a sentiment that lends itself to easy political commitments.

Kluge and Negt continued to collaborate, for example in the beautifully titled History and Obstinacy (1981, translated in 2014), an archaeology of embodied labor over the last two thousand years. But much of Kluge’s subsequent work went off in entirely different directions. Kluge followed his love of dialogue into a long series of televised interviews with remarkable guests, including Godard. One I remember asked guests to explain the meaning of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. In a sort of dialogue with the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, he took up Eisenstein’s unrealized project of adapting Marx’s Capital for the screen. One section is called “Objects Are Enchanted People.” The most recent of his many collaborations with visual artists, a series of exchanges with the painter Anselm Kiefer, has appeared in English as Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful Under Shifting Circumstances (Seagull, 2026). It pulls off the almost unimaginable feat of facing the horror of Germany’s unspeakable past with good cheer.

Thinking of this life of such wildly generous, proliferating creativity, it is hard to know what to mention and what to leave out. Project follows project follows project. Kluge was inspired to write a series of stories in response to the first book of poems by Ben Lerner, leading to a series of poems Lerner wrote in response to the stories, which in turn it led to a collaborative book with Lerner and the painter Max Richter entitled The Snows of Venice (2018). One section is called “Can We Talk About Angels a Little Bit?” Something I remember Kluge saying, perhaps to me, perhaps in public, is that there are no angels in Habermas. By one means or another, Kluge always wanted to give people, and the principles to which people try to be faithful, some extra lift.

In Air Raid, Kluge leaves out what his editors must have most wanted him to put in: his own experience of the bombing, what he must have felt as the bombs were falling, what it must have been like as a child to see the ruins and the corpses around him. The book won’t allow its readers to lose themselves in empathy or indignation. That was another thing he carried through life from his childhood experience. For Kluge, outrage, whether at the Americans or at the Nazis, at modern technology or modern bureaucracy or modern capitalism, was always tempered by absurdity. When Rachel Kushner met him in his eighties, she was struck by his tireless energy, high intelligence, and gentle, sunny radiance. When I had the chance to tell him that my father had piloted one of the planes that bombed Halberstadt on the April 8, 1945, I saw all the same things in him and went away feeling that the existence of a sensibility like his was a kind of miracle.