Obituary for Alexander Kluge  History was his obsession

A constant lightness of character was the hallmark of film-maker and author Alexander Kluge. Yet war was the very substance of his work. An obituary.

Teichert is a history teacher who hopes to redefine how her subject is taught. She feels she owes this to “the war dead”. Alexander Kluge’s 1979 film essay The Patriot satirised the blinkered attitude to history demonstrated by narrow‑minded school bureaucrats. The film evoked a stream of consciousness of the repressed “desires, hopes, irony, scepticism, protest energy and errors” that mattered to him.

Even his production of laconic short and ultra-short stories was always embedded in the textures of historical found footage. Adopting an encyclopaedic approach, Alexander Kluge subjected historical material to his sharp-witted analysis, exposing subtexts and contradictions and inventing new stories along the way.
The “active” audience was called upon to come up with associations of its own. Kluge’s books and films experimented with multiple perspectives and time layers, sparking the “cinema in the mind” to which he attributed the most powerful enlightening effect.

A prompt for undogmatic reflection

A year after Germany in Autumn, a collaborative episodic project that emerged from the Munich film scene during a time of political tension, Kluge’s Patriot prompted undogmatic reflection. His complex material constructions followed a distinctive poetology that was rooted in historical theory, one that could be interpreted as a critique of entrenched political confrontations and authoritarian logics.

The topic of history in diverse fields of knowledge was Kluge’s obsession. Born in 1932 in Halberstadt into a culture-oriented family of doctors, he was influenced by his father’s operatic vinyl collection, but more than anything else by the formative experiences of his childhood during the war. It is possible, a Kluge scholar speculated, that the lightness radiating from his engaging character stemmed from the vital triumph of having survived that existential moment.

From law practice to the literature and film scene

Throughout his life, the raw material of his art remained the question of what happens to individuals amid the chaos of war, how catastrophic decisions born of ambition, subordination and delusions of grandeur unleash the deaths of hundreds of thousands on military and civilian fronts, and how the resulting traumas reverberate in the most absurd forms.

After his parents divorced, he moved to West Berlin with his mother and took his Abitur there. He then studied Law, Philosophy and Church Music in Freiburg, Munich and Frankfurt (Main), subsequently achieving a doctorate in 1955 with his thesis on the legal principles of student representation.

Although the high achiever began his career as a lawyer, he became increasingly focused on the literature and film scene. Theodor Adorno organised a work placement for his “dear Axel” with Fritz Lang, who at the time was remaking his silent film The Tiger of Eschnapur at the CCC Studios in Berlin.

Alexander Kluge quickly became established as a key figure in Germany’s literary and cinematic resurgence. His short film Brutality in Stone (1961), which was co-created with Peter Schamoni and explored the brutal National Socialist architecture in Nuremberg, marked his debut at the influential Short Film Festival in Oberhausen.

A year later, he introduced the legendary manifesto through which a new generation proclaimed its affinity with European auteur cinema. At the same time as establishing his own film production company, Kairos, in 1962 he began working with Edgar Reitz to develop the film studies degree at the Ulm School of Design in terms of both theory and practice.

A guest of Group 47

Another achievement of 1962 was his first book of short stories, Case Histories, which placed him as a new voice in the post-war literature scene. He portrayed the biographies of National Socialist perpetrators and victims up to the then present-day 1960s, with a laconic, matter‑of‑fact tone reminiscent of case studies in legal casuistry. With this debut and the subsequent story collection Battle Description, Kluge became a guest of Group 47 – a distinction tantamount to a knighthood in Germany’s literary world.

Kluge’s full-length movie debut Yesterday Girl won him the Silver Lion in Venice, along with some of the most important awards in the German film industry. Kluge played a decisive role in shaping the legal framework of the hard‑won new funding body, the Kuratorium junger deutscher Film. He also formed alliances with film critics and with writers and producers, co‑authoring impassioned interventions in film policy targeted at the dominant television networks whose involvement in auteur‑film funding he insisted upon.

During the 1970s, Alexander Kluge broadened his cultural‑critical engagement by entering into a collaboration with the social philosopher Oskar Negt. Their books Public Sphere and Experience (1972) and History and Obstinacy (1981) revolved around the idea of an emancipatory counter‑public and an approach to work organisation with a focus on subjective productive forces – each of which is a valued vade mecum of the emerging Cultural Studies genre.

A passion for collaborative projects

To start with, Kluge was still using concise plot structures to address contemporary phenomena in his films. Occasional Work of a Female Slave (1973) depicted the archetype of a woman bearing a dual burden: that of a mother and an abortion doctor. In the film In Danger and Dire Distress the Middle of the Road Leads to Death (1974), co‑directed with Edgar Reitz, a “pickpocket sex worker” robbed her clients of their wallets by way of compensation, while an East German spy observed squatters in Frankfurt being evicted aggressively. Strongman Ferdinand (1975) excelled as a satire of a former policeman and factory security guard who completely lost the plot.
After receiving an honorary award in Venice in 1982, Kluge addressed the growing crisis of New German Cinema in his anthology Taking Stock: Utopia Film (1983).
In The Power of Emotion (1983), Kluge sought to explore love and the musical “power station of emotions” through a storm of absurd plot sketches and operatic scenes.

Dialogue with scholars and artists

In 1987,  Alexander Kluge reinvented himself. He founded a TV production platform that compensated for the void in cultural programming that the newly established private broadcasters were legally supposed to provide. dctp, Kluge’s partnership project with a well‑funded Japanese advertising company, spent thirty years broadcasting documentaries in late-night programme slots – but his own TV magazine shows made up the core content. In compact historical sketches and staged scenes, as well as in-depth dialogue with scholars and artists, he remained faithful to his themes.

In his writing retreat at Schloss Elmau, he continued to write books well into old age, including re-released editions of earlier publications with bonus material, now including QR codes for access to thematically linked films from the dctp archive. He revisited the traumatic memory of the end of his childhood in 1945 in War Primer (2023), and his book Russia Container – dedicated to the “love of Russia” felt by his sister, who grew up in the GDR – used a collage format to explore the long history of exchange and conflict between the two countries. Following Russia’s attack on Ukraine, he voiced his opposition to German military aid. Alexander Kluge died on 25th March 2026 in Munich at the age of 94.

Alexander Kluge’s “wilful character” and his complex manipulation of contradictions expressed through his “mercurial thought processes” constantly challenged audiences; his search for history’s “spaces of possibility” will never be forgotten.

Editor's note: This is the edited and abridged version of an article that first appeared in taz.

March 2026