Alexander Kluge Books In Order

Cinema Stories

Alexander Kluge turns 75 in autumn 2007, and to celebrate he will be the Special Guest of Honor at the 75th Venice Film Festival, showing his films in the Grand Salon; he will enjoy a MoMA retrospective; Facets Multimedia will launch DVDs of all his dozens of movies and all his TV work and New Directions is proud to present his new fiction collection, all about the cinema.

The thirty eight tales of Cinema Stories combine fact and fiction, and they all 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 prose,’ 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 box of cinematic lore and movie magic by ‘Alexander Kluge, that most enlightened of writers’ W. G. Sebald.

The Devil’s Blind Spot

Scathingly clever short stories. Includes ‘The Devil in the White House’ and ‘The Development of Iraq as a Case for the Files.’

At once a genuine story teller and a literary documentarian, Alexander Kluge’s genius lies in the very special way he makes found material his own. Each of the miniatures collected here touches on ‘facts’ and is only several pages long. In just a paragraph he can etch a whole world: he is as great a master of compression as Kafka or Kawabata.

Arranged in five chapters, the dozens of stories of The Devil’s Blind Spot are condensed, like novels in pill form. The first group of stories illustrates the little known virtues of the Devil. The second explores love from Kant and opera through the Grand Guignol. The third is entitled ‘Sarajevo Is Everywhere’ and tests how convincing power is. The fourth group concerns the cosmos, and the fifth ranges all our ‘knowledge’ against our feelings. In each piece, Kluge alights on precise particulars: on board the atomic submarine Kursk, for instance, we are marched precisely step by step through a black comedy of the exact, disastrous stages of thinking that lead to catastrophe. Sample titles include ‘The Devil in the White House,’ ‘The Development of Iraq as a Case for the Files,’ ‘Intelligence of the Second Degree,’ and ‘Love’s Mouth Also Kisses the Dog.’

Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome

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 Na*zi 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.