Der Chronist Alexander Kluge. Poetik und Erzählstrategien (review)

Wolfgang Reichmann provides a succinct, though somewhat problematic, examination of recent literary publications by author, theorist, filmmaker, and television producer Alexander Kluge. The book focuses above all on Chronik der Gefühle (2000), a twovolume, over 2,000- page collection of Kluge’s literary output to date, with occasional reference to the author’s subsequent and similarly substantial story collections, Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt (2003) and Tür an Tür mit einem anderen Leben (2006).

Reichmann understands his project as a more thorough study of the generic similarities between Kluge and Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Peter Hebel, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin than scholars have previously attempted. In this regard he builds above all on the work of Lothar Müller, Christian Schulte, and Jan Philipp Reemtsma. As the title of the book would suggest, Reichmann is also interested in exploring Kluge’s narrative strategies as well as his conception of himself as a collector and chronicler. Reichmann’s book contains five chapters, the first of which consists of a brief introduction, followed by a rough outline of previous research in German on all areas of Kluge’s artistic production. The second chapter, “Der Sammler und Erzähler Alexander Kluge,” focuses on the importance of found texts for Kluge’s writing process and compares his project to that of Walter Benjamin. In Chapter Three, Reichmann views Kluge’s story collections through the lens of the chronicle, the Kalendergeschichte, and the anecdote, with comparisons to works by Hebel, Kleist, and Brecht. Chapter Four, “Dokument und Fiktion—Montage und Intertextualität,” continues the discussion of narrative strategy broached in chapter one. In his fifth and final chapter, Reichmann offers a few closing remarks.

Der Chronist Alexander Kluge is cohesive, clearly written, and well researched. Reichmann illuminates the connections between Kluge and the aforementioned authors and genres with the help of relevant examples from primary and secondary literature. His comparison of Kluge’s texts to Kalendergeschichten and anecdotes is particularly compelling, and he does a very competent job of situating an author who at first glance seems quite idiosyncratic within a longer literary tradition. The book is rather too descriptive, however, and sometimes runs the risk of making Kluge appear to be a more straightforward writer than he really is. Reichmann completely fails to account for Kluge’s humor, and by artificially separating his chapter on Kluge as collector from his nuanced exploration of Kluge’s blend of document and fiction, he gives the false impression in the earlier section that Kluge neutrally presents information to his readers without any kind of creative intervention beyond the selection of texts. Although the difficulty of providing a coherent overview of these enormous and multivalent texts should not be underestimated, there has been enough written on Kluge that one could certainly find a better characterization of his project elsewhere.

A more serious failing than the tendency to resort too often to (occasionally misleading) description is Reichmann’s over- reliance on Kluge’s own statements about his work, which have appeared in numerous interviews and conversations published over the course of a long career. Kluge is a particularly articulate artist, capable of describing his interests and aims in pithy and memorable ways. He is furthermore a master of the interview form, as evidenced by the many interviews and dialogues that appear in his films, television productions, and literary texts. It becomes therefore all the more necessary in Kluge’s case to resist the temptation to simply quote him at length. Reichmann’s critical voice, however, is precisely what is missing from his account. For instance, one of the major difficulties that Kluge’s readers confront is the problem of making sense of a vast array of diverse, often very short texts presented in a seemingly random order. Kluge hopes that this approach will liberate the reader from the falsifying hierarchies of traditional historical narratives and encourage him or her to recognize the connections that unite apparently disparate people, places...