Johannes Schneider

Thought Paper – Alexander Kluge

24 Oct 2007

 

In his 1999 Zurich lectures on “Air War and Literature” W.G. Sebald contrasts and links the importance of the air war as a national trauma[1] to the deficiency of the narratives dealing with it, therein as well the oral history of the contemporary witnesses as belletrist approaches of post-war German literature.

 

Sebald describes a “stream of psychic energy that has not dried up to this day, and which has its source in the well-kept secret of the corpses built into the foundations of our state [...]” (Sebald 13). According to him this secret gains a lot of its metaphysic power from the German’s inability to verbalize the horror: “Those who had escaped the catastrophe”, he claims, were “unreliable and partly blinded witnesses”, only able to refer to the life-changing disaster by using stiff and stereotypical phrases such as “’a prey to the flames,’ ‘that fateful night,’ ‘all hell was let loose’” (Sebald 24-5). When he states that even the famous diary of Victor Klemperer – in the description of the air raid on Dresden – “remains within the boundaries of verbal convention” (Sebald 25) he effectively points out the total failure of verbalization and narration of air war in Germany. In fact, when it comes down to dealing with total destruction Sebald seems the be rather attracted by their visual representation in pictures and films:

 

Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me, and one from which I shall never entirely emerge. (Sebald 71)

 

In his essay “’Mich für mein ganzes Leben verletzendes Geschehen als Erlebnis’: Die Luftangriffe auf Salzburg“ (1944) in Thomas Bernhards Die Ursache and Alexander Kluges Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945” Walter Pape takes this problem (of the missing of proper narrative methods) – and finds it solved in Kluge’s text.

 

Therefore he paradoxically puts Kluge’s filmic inspired text montage into the historical context of literary narration. Although Pape states that the literary 19th century notion of epic totality (e.g. in the realistic novel) has been overcome in modernism, he still recognizes the Hegelian “Trieb zur Totalität” (Pape 181), especially when it comes to dealing with giant catastrophes. Thus Pape is looking for “neue ästhetische Modelle, die zumindest in der Lektüre ein Ganzes entstehen lassen” (Pape 182).

 

When directly referring to Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt he first declares the single text scenes to be „in höchstem Grade anschaulich“ (Pape 186), even striving for the “ideal presence” (ib.) of classical fiction theory. By means of the first scene (Abgebrochene Matinee-Vorstellung im “Capitol”) Pape explains how Kluge stylistically overcomes the danger of drowning the monstrous experience in verbal conventions:

 

Kluge versucht nicht nur die Wahrnehmungssituation, sondern auch den speziellen Wahrnehmungsprozess seiner Frau Schrader dem Leser so anschaulich wie möglich vor Augen zu stellen. Er zeigt, wie die Sinne der Frau nicht auf das Ereignis eingestellt sind, wie die Bombenwirklichkeit weiter auf die gerade aktivierten und die alltäglichen Wahrnehmungs-Raster trifft. […] Diese Unmittelbarkeit der Wahrnehmung der Figur und der Versuch, sie ebenso unvermittelt wiederzugeben, werden beim Leser […] zum Eindruck einer scheinbar unangemessenen Reaktion der Figuren. (Pape 186-7)

 

So, in contrast to conventionalized statements Kluge retells the shock-experience, which for Pape leads to a reformation of the notion of mimesis:

 

Ein traditioneller Gestalt-Begriff oder eine enge Mimesis-Vorstellung (‘Muster der rein mimetischen Beobachtung’) kann moderner Literatur nicht gerecht werden, der es im Grunde nie um eine ‚Beschreibungskompetenz’ ging. Moderne Literatur kann allenfalls Wahrnehmungs-Mimesis sein. (Pape 188)

 

In Pape’s train of thought it then becomes obvious why Kluge employs the filmographic technique of montage, of loosely combining the different narrations (even employing pictures, posters, and interviews): For leading mimesis to “sense” while dealing with an overwhelming catastrophe that no witness was able to experience completely (and correctly) it seems for him necessary to employ the visual principle of a multi-perspective view: “Der Akt der Sinnstiftung soll bei Kluge im Akt des Lesens und in der Verbindung der unterschiedlichen Perspektiven geschehen.“ (Pape 188-9)

 

Pape continues: “Kluge, rationaler und autoritärer Vermittlung misstrauend, glaubt, dass der Leser die ‚Formenwelt des Zusammenhangs einer abstrakt-gewordenen, funktional-imaginären Wirklichkeit’  nur auf diese sinnliche Weise in den Blick bekommt.“ (Ib.)

So instead of a linear narration, that has to fail because of its one-dimensionality Kluge’s multi-perspectivity of “alle Teilmomente eines einzigen Katastrophen-Geschehens, wie es sich zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt, an einem bestimmten Ort ereignet” (Pape 189) leads to something that Pape calls – referring to Götz Großklaus (and of course also to the language of film) – a “historische Totale“ (Ib.).

 

Already at the very beginning of the essay this visual notion is linked back to an asserted discourse complex in European intellectual history. Pape claims this to be based on the “Dominanz der optischen Wahrnehmung”: He mentions Plato’s definition of theory [“bezeichnet den Blick für das Ganze und Umfassende” (Pape 181)], quotes da Vinci’s notion of the eye as the “window of the soul,” (Ib.) and refers to Hegel’s view on epic totality which constitutes itself “nicht einer bestimmten Technik der Narration, sondern einer (geistigen) Anschauung” (Ib.).

 

The more than possible notion of Kluge’s project as a fragmented, filmic anti-narration is thus misemployed and substituted by an interpretation that sees it as the consequent enhancements of this vision-based system of thought and reflection, the almost only possible reaction to the diversity of an air raid, a new mode of narration beyond narration that also employs the medial experience Sebald referred to: “Sinngebung scheint nicht wie in der Geschichtsschreibung über narrative Strukturen herstellbar, an Stelle der narrativen Perspektive tritt der Fluchtpunkt der Einzelbilder.” (Pape 184)

Works Cited

 

Pape, Walter: “’Mich für mein ganzes Leben verletzendes Geschehen als Erlebnis’: Die
     Luftangriffe auf Salzburg“ (1944) in Thomas Bernhards Die Ursache and Alexander
     Kluges Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945.“ Amsterdamer Beiträge zur
     Neueren Germanistik Vol. 60 (2006): 181-97

W.G. Sebald: “Air War and Literature (Zurich Lectures).“ On the natural history of
     destruction (2003): 1-105

 

 

Thought-provoking question:

 

When narration fails and pictures gain the power over a collective memory – where is the sense in still using a narrative form – and employing therefore non-narrative (filmic and photographic) devices? Why not just leave the collective memory alone with the pictures?

 

In other words:

 

Why does Kluge think that those shock experiences have to (!) be told, that they are in fact only real, perceivable, when (!) they are told?[2]


[1] Although the term “trauma” does not appear in this explicit work by Sebald I use it freely. Without knowing too much about Sebald’s use of “trauma” in other contexts and Dr. Weilnböck’s obligations on this use I simply justifiy this by the basic notion of the term as “physical trauma”: There it refers to a lasting injury of the body due to physical violation. This is something we can most definitely find in Sebald’s notion of the air raids as “destruction, on a scale without historical precedent, entered the annals of the nation […]” (Sebald 4).

[2] Cp. Alexander Kluge: Lakonie als Antwort. Gespräch mit Volker Hage,  p. 205: “Es gibt etwas Lebensnot-wendiges am Erzählen, nicht nur in der Literatur, sondern auch unter den Menschen. Der Luftangriff ist erst wirklich, erst wahrnehmbar, wenn er erzählt wird.“