Caroline Muegge

Alexander Kluge, “Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945”

 

 

In his article, Walter Pape is interested in whether the war and “speziell der Bombenkrieg überhaupt” can be expressed in words, and states that this is really an aesthetic question, a question of “Wahrnehmung und der (perspektivischen) Darstellung.”  He wants to show that “Bilder bezeichnungsweise die Kategorie der ‘Anschaulichkeit’ gerade dann im historischen oder autobiographischen Erzählen eine bedeutende Rolle spielen kann, wenn die Sinngebung nur schwer über narrative Strukturen vermittelbar ist (184).”  Both of the authors that Pape examines, Bernhard and Kluge, were directly affected by the air raids, wrote about their experiences thirty years after they occurred, and make “die menschliche Wahrnehmung” a central focus of their work.  While Bernhards Ursache shows how perception and experience of the attacks and “Subjektbildung” are causally placed on top of each other, Kluge’s text clarifies the complicated network of perceiving and representing historical reality.  Pape says that Kluge does not just depict the perceptual situation for the reader, but also the process of cognition.  Citing the opening example of Frau Schrader, he shows how her senses are not attuned to the event, how she has not registered the reality of the bombing.  Kluge points many times in his text to the problem of appearance.  This access to the cognition of the characters, and the attempt to express it to the reader, who as non-participant does not have the same cognitive horizon as the character, results in a seemingly inappropriate reaction on the part of the character.  This discrepance results in “das bekannte Phänomen des Grotesken und der Komik“ (187).   Kluge also shows how a foreign, violent, unforeseen sensation disturbs the interplay of (Kant’s three) analogies (Substanz, Kausalität, Koexistenz).  He depicts experiences that are beyond human experience, yet succeeds visually and perspectively in creating a narrative “jenseits von Klischees” (188).  Just as Kluge tries to recreate the immediacy of cognition in his narration, the other materials in the text also speak directly to the reader: the quoted interview from 1952, photos, maps, and technical drawings.  “All das summiert sich zu einem Angebot an die Sinne des Lesers, an die Seelen-Tätigkeit der Analogien der Erfahrung” (188).  

 

In his article, Andreas Huyssen seeks to explain the recent German peace movement and how the German response to the Iraq war is set apart from massive opposition across Europe, namely that it “displays a curious mix of memory and forgetting” (163).  Huyssen argues that we are seeing “a kind of time-space expansion”: the present is expanded and the past looms large.  He asks what the nature of this time-space expansion is, what pasts are chosen to be incorporated into the present, and who does this choosing. 

In examining the German peace movement of 2003, Huyssen notes that “for the first time, the peace movement bolstered its positions by referring directly to the experience of the strategic bombings of German cities in World War II” (164).  He points to the publication of Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand in 2002 as an explanation of the altered memoryscape.  Huyssen argues that Friedrich structured his book similarly to Kluge’s, in that space rather than time organizes the material.  Kluge contrasted the strategy from above (production of flyers and bombs) with the strategy from below (trying to find safe shelters, surviving the fires), rather than narrating his story chronologically.  Huyssen also states that the text-image montages “operate at a documentary level, but are clearly intended to generate a strong affective response,” making “the borders between past and present more fluid, as if one shared the experience itself” (170).  Although this is a criticism of Friedrich rather than Kluge, who, according to Huyssen, maintains distance in his writing, it is worth asking what the relationship between past and present is in Kluge’s text.  And while Huyssen believes Kluge to distance himself from the reader, Pape argues that Kluge’s text is all about its immediacy to the reader.  Thus, how should we approach this distance/immediacy dynamic in Kluge’s text and how do the images play into this tension? 

 

 

Huyssen, Andreas.  „Air War Legacies: From Dresden to Baghdad.“  New German Critique 90 (2003): 163-176.

                                           

Pape, Walter.  „Mich für mein ganzes Laben verletzendes Geschehen als Erlebnis“: Die Luftangriffe auf Salzburg (1944) in Thomas Bernhards Die Ursache und Alexander Kluges Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945.” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Neueren Germanistik 60 (2006): 181-197.