Alexander Kluge was born in Halberstadt in 1932, studied law and became a writer and filmmaker. As a producer of legendary educational programs on German private television (dctp), he wrote media history. For him, books are part of the “food”:
“The books I adore the most do not belong to me. I live with them. Books connect the centuries. I find that trustworthy about them. No other medium unites such trustworthy authors over 2000 years as the book. I was touched that Heiner Müller, already suffering from cancer, bought an antiquarian edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in California: in English and in verse. He carried the book with him when he was taken up to the intensive care unit on the day he died.” Below, in his own words, he reveals the books that were most important to Alexander Kluge in his life, recorded by Thomas Combrink.
The Roman poet Ovid spent his last years in exile on the Black Sea. Even the death of Augustus in AD 14 did not change this situation. “Everything that suffers is transformed.” This motto could be used to describe Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”. Daphne, fleeing the lovestruck Apollo, is transformed into a laurel tree. In the future, heroes and Caesars will assemble their headgear from its leaves and use them to document their reign: virginity, incorruptibility.
Tereus rapes Philomela and cuts off her tongue. Procne learns of the fate and kills the son she shares with Tereus. All three are instantly turned into birds by the god. Tereus into a hoopoe, Procne into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale. I am particularly touched by the story of Arachne, the weaver, who spins a web, creating a context similar to Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” himself.
This novel was published in France in the 17th century. The young Mademoiselle de Chartres enters into a marriage of convenience with the Prince of Clèves. But she falls madly in love with the Duke of Nemours. She tells her husband about her feelings, who cannot live with them and dies. The Princess of Clèves is free, but renounces a relationship with the Duke of Nemours. She has lost faith in marriage. In the center of this philosophy of love is self-love or self-respect, referred to as amour-propre.
“You should respect the wildness, the stubbornness, the precision of your feelings.” You should trust yourself. From the same self-respect and self-love you must form a center of reliability. You have to comply with contracts, observe regulations. You consequently live in two worlds, one that is determined by society and your contractors (e.g. your husband) and one that is yours individually.
Thornton Wilder’s original play is called The Skin of Our Teeth. It is about the Antrobus family, the parents, the two children Henry and Gladys and the housemaid Sabina. Knowing the emergency exits is the most beautiful theater in the world: in three acts, people are confronted with the catastrophes of war, the flood and the ice age, while the plot is also set in the 20th century.
What draws me to Thornton Wilder is the enduring aspect. Whoever hopes dies singing. Humans are left in evolution because they can achieve their dreams. As savannah runners in Africa, humans have their eyes on the horizon. He searches for the limits of space. Thornton Wilder shows these limitations in We Came Away Again. Homo sapiens is a tough individual that has prevailed over millions of years.
In the “Dialectic of Enlightenment” there is a hidden text (in the appendix): “On the Genesis of Stupidity”. Intelligence, alert curiosity, the heart of philosophy are compared there to a snail’s feeler. This is a quality possessed not only by humans but also by animals. This alert spirit “timidly ventures forth”. If he is injured, i.e. threatened by fear or terror, he withdraws into the snail shell. Outwardly it seems like stupidity; it also has the effect of inertia and passivity, but in its substance it is merely another aggregate state of the living.
I know of no more beautiful simile for the guiding principle of the Enlightenment than this image of the sensitive snail, the image of the defensive character of intelligence, than sapere aude. Have the courage to use your sensual certainty yourself. This character is always present even where we do not see it. To entice him, to strengthen his courage, is education.
I had traveled to Switzerland with my sister, hitchhiking. In Zurich I wanted to see the house of Thomas Mann, whose books I have been reading since 1946. I sneaked around the building, saw a kid riding a tricycle. I didn’t dare ring the doorbell. What should I have given as the reason for my visit? I had read his book The Chosen One, published in 1951, a text about Pope Gregorius, who was born of the illegitimate union of two siblings.
Thomas Mann has already processed this story in “Doctor Faustus”, taken from one of the most magnificent collections of stories that have been written, the “Gesta Romanorum”. I was particularly impressed at the beginning of “The Chosen One”, in which the author introduces the “spirit of the story” that makes the church bells ring. Which medium speaks in a literary text? Which parts of the writer’s soul come together to form the narrative subject?
In his book “Structural Change in the Public Sphere” from 1962, Jürgen Habermas writes that first a literary and then a political public sphere is formed. The modern character type of the “public intellectual” emerges. We all have personal, i.e. private experiences throughout our lives, but whether people associate self-confidence with this result of their experience depends on being able to communicate it in public, that “one person is reflected in another”.
“Structural change in the public sphere” initially unfolds the image of the representative public, i.e. that of the authorities, the kings and the estates. The bourgeois public opposes this. A middle-class person feels self-confidence because of his achievement, not because of his birth. And the performance is so future-oriented, such a trait capable of improvement, that there is a deficit. This insufficiency of simple existence is one of the birth defects of the bourgeois public sphere, demands a means of reinforcement for its members, a public surrogate.
Colloquially amazing, Niklas Luhmann says that love is not a feeling, but a coding of intimacy. Luhmann’s view, which is simultaneously directed towards the 17th and the 21st century (from his perspective of the future!), emphasizes the paradox of love as a medium of communication. It is intended to create the basis for lasting relationships, he says, and it has a social function (not only when it comes to mobilizing military strength in the Third Reich or economic vigor in the reconstruction after 1948).
At the same time, it has a program of passion and suddenness that contradicts duration and practicality. In this respect, passion is not just an “anomaly”, but “a completely normal improbability”. In his book “Love as Passion”, Niklas Luhmann wants to explain why “the modern family has to be founded with a declaration of love and not with parental financial arrangements”.
Long before I met Ben Lerner myself, the literary scholar Thomas Combrink drew my attention to Lerner’s sonnets, which he had published in two languages as “Die Lichtenbergfiguren”. The booklet was out of print at the time and could only be acquired at very high prices and second-hand. I immediately caught fire at this lyrical and at the same time radically modern text, translated into German by Steffen Popp. I began to write stories based on individual lines of verse that I had marked. On a line of verse one or more pages of prose. Just as intensive and extensive agriculture coexist.
So at the beginning there were the following lines of verse: “In the medieval angelic doctrine there are nine orders of snow.” “The story pauses for emphasis.” “The sky stops painting and turns to criticism.” “Music touches an area, not a point / She climbs up one leg and stops the heart.” “Support your polis: chop the air.”
Like the Gracchus brothers, like Spartacus, like Toussaint Louverture, Joyce, Schwitters, Hans G Helms, Arno Schmidt, Reinhard Jirgl and Friederike Mayröcker accelerated the liberation of words from their yoke, offered colonization, i.e. new fields for the slaves. But the slaves didn’t want to work: we’ve never been slaves, the words said, we don’t let ourselves be resettled like Roman legionnaires or slaves of Spartacus. Our revolt is a permanent revolt.
How are we supposed to be oppressed if we are the reason that humanity and its constitution exist at all? We are self-confident creatures, we, the words, should not be underestimated. When I think of Friederike Mayröcker’s book, I have to think of Bizet’s “Carmen” and the pathos of this opera, in which Don José kills the protagonist at the end. The poem “Grabschrift der Schwalbe” comes to mind – by Rudolf Borchardt: “I, the wounded swallow, three days of man’s comrade, / saw the terrible death become friendlier and died.”
I add the following story to Gerhard Falkner’s book, it’s called “New Owners”: The sprawling property in the Schorfheide is currently, one day before Christmas Eve 1989, fully owned by the porter couple Brigitte and Alfred G. The building and the adjoining garden were once used of German-Soviet friendship. The employers and superiors have since disappeared. Telephone contacts with the superior authority cannot be established.
So the concierge and her partner have set up their domicile in the library and in the study (so called by the National Socialist builders of this site). Maybe they’ll marry soon, legalize their covenant? The garden pond on the site could be used for fish farming. The proceeds from this and the entrance fees for visiting the strange house could be used to finance the renovation of the “mansion”.
