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  • Reclaiming “geballte linke Energie”:War in Alexander Kluge’s Docufiction Heidegger auf der Krim
  • Gunther Martens

Introduction

In his docufiction Heidegger auf der Krim, the German author, director, and television producer Alexander Kluge rekindles the polemical debate between two towering figures of German philosophy (Martin Heidegger and Theodor W. Adorno). The nucleus of the story emerges in a discussion with Heiner Müller on the role of the intellectual faced with war and dictatorship, but the text is also a direct reaction to the discussions surrounding the Wehrmachtsausstellung (1995), which hinged on the involvement of the regular Armee as well as the complicity of civilians and prominent intellectuals in the atrocities of the Holocaust. Kluge puts Heidegger’s philosophy to the empirical test by confronting it with one of the most extreme scenes of war: the persecution of the Jews on the Crimea during the Second World War. Making use of avant-garde montage techniques, Kluge scans discourses from various intellectual angles in view of their potential for salvaging “geballte linke Energie.” The aim is to establish (post factum) a utopian alliance that possibly could have channelled world history into a less destructive course. In an act of retroactive headhunting, Kluge calls upon a wide range of thinkers to build a trans-ideological alliance. I argue that this counterfactual text is pivotal in Kluge’s literary oeuvre because it strives to situate war within a wider, global frame. The particular geographical location of Heidegger auf der Krim–the Crimea – is juxtaposed with geopolitical constellations and other historical time frames, thus testifying to a global turn in Kluge’s documentary representations of war.

Historical Heidegger, Fictional Heidegger

War has always been a prominent theme in Kluge’s writings. His earliest literary endeavours, Lebensläufe (1962; Chronik 2: 673–826) and Schlachtbeschreibung (1964; Chronik 1: 509–794), tackled the topic of war along the lines of a strictly objective conception of documentary literature. Especially Schlachtbeschreibung, compiled out of documents and reports, minutely details the “organizational construction” of the collapse of the German army in Stalingrad. Written from a [End Page 69] “cold” point of view informed by Marxism, it attempts to clarify how the subjective decisions and psychological dimensions of the conflict are underpinned by objective media and communication structures as well as long-term processes of ideological habitus formation. His most famous war text, Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. Mai 1945 (published in 1978; Kluge, Chronik 2: 27–82), is a multiperspectivist rendering of the industrial dimensions of the air war over a medium-sized German city, which hardly mentions that Kluge himself was a survivor of that air strike. When Hans Magnus Enzensberger compiled a re-edited translation of Diderot’s Encyclopedia, Kluge contributed the entry “Krieg.” With his Chronik der Gefühle (2000), Kluge made a somewhat surprising comeback as a literary author, culminating in winning the Büchner Prize in 2003. While Kluge’s earlier works had been associated with a raw, documentary approach to both film (New German Cinema) and literature, the new millennium saw his style shift to a more outspoken (and bewildering) mixture of fact and fiction.

In his docufictional collection Heidegger auf der Krim, Kluge dispatches a person called Heidegger to the peninsula of the Crimea during the German invasion of Russia (Chronik 1: 415–507). In order to understand the motivation for this fictional departure from reality, it is fruitful to give some background to the debate between representatives of Critical Theory (with whom Kluge identifies) and Heidegger. The text is an aggregate of quotations predominantly stemming from Heidegger’s 1933 rectoral address, “Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität,” and his writings on Heraclitus, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche. In the years leading up to the Second World War, the historical Heidegger infamously proclaimed his support of the Hitler regime in his 1933 acceptance speech as the newly appointed rector of Freiburg University. In what is now known as the “Rektoratsrede,” Heidegger called upon all academics to join forces with the new political regime and imagined a new university structure with philosophy as its centre, similar to the university during antiquity. The post-war years saw this speech and his other texts as...

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