Content area
Full Text
Alexander Kluge was born in the Prussian town of Halberstadt on February 14, 1932. Three years earlier, Al Capone had already robbed St. Valentine of some of his sentimental magic, and Kluge's own eleventh birthday was more immediately overshadowed by the fact that, eleven days earlier, the Press Office of the Third Reich had officially acknowledged the end of "the heroic battle for Stalingrad" and declared several days of national mourning.
For Kluge, the mourning for the millions of lives wasted and scarred by National Socialism is-like the process itself-not yet over. Images of senseless destruction and mindless reconstruction are frequently intercut with the frenetic activities of his screen heroines; while his prolific "literary" output includes two documentary novels: The Battle,1 concerned with the Germans' defeat at Stalingrad in 1943; and Attendance List for a Funeral,2 of which one story, "Anita G.," contains the basis for ABSCHIED VON GESTERN (YESTERDAY GIRL).
More recently, Kluge has co-authored with SDS theoretician Oskar Negt a rather formidable tome, Public Life and Experience,3 about the organizational structures of bourgeois and proletarian experience; and has also published a volume of his own short stories, some of them science-fiction, roughly translatable as Learning Process with Lethal Conclusion.4 He still practices as a lawyer, and is a Professor of Law at the University of Frankfurt. On the lighter side, he collects old Mack Sennett movies, nursery rhymes and toys, and was pseudonymously responsible for that minor Latin classic, Winnie ilk Pu.
Kluge's latest film, GELEGENHEITSARBEIT EINER SKLAVIN (PART-TIME WORK OF A DOMESTIC SLAVE) stars his younger sister Alexandra (from YESTERDAY GIRL) as Roswitha Bronski, an impulsive Utopian whose devotion to her own family leads her up and down a snakes-and-ladders career as abortionist, political agitator and sausage vendor. On Kluge's own admission, the second half of the film-the section outside the Bronski home-was shaped by his sister's ideas rather than by his original intentions. ("The director's role is to interpret the experiences of his interpreters.") Whatever their shared obsessions, the generation gap has evidently exposed the sister to a less cautious faith in the efficacity of localized militancy.
In Munich last July, while he was finishing his latest book for a deadline in Frankfurt and I was attempting to view all of...