Bruce Robbins in The Baffler:
In a documentary i saw some years ago, I remember Jürgen Habermas, when asked to describe his friend the writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, responded that for all his life Kluge remained the person who was bombed as a child. Kluge was thirteen in April 1945, living with his parents in the beautiful medieval city of Halberstadt in Germany as World War II drew to a close. American troops were a day or two away from entering the city when U.S. B-17 bombers flew over and all but demolished it, killing some two or three thousand civilians. Kluge wrote about that day in Air Raid. The book, written in the 1970s but untranslated until 2014, begins with a ticket-taker in the local Halberstadt cinema, who is trying valiantly to sweep the rubble out of the aisles in time for the afternoon show when half the building has just been blown apart and the basement is crowded with corpses.
The moral seems to be that, like the ticket-taker, we try to keep to old habits when our world has exploded. The book is permeated by a sense of the absurd which, for all its indignation, somehow also leaves something to be savored. Kluge never seems to fit neatly within the philosophy he took from his teacher Theodor Adorno or, for that matter, the strenuously produced normative propositions of his friend Habermas, that other late-blooming flower of the Frankfurt School. Kluge wrote an obituary for Habermas, who died on March 14, days before his own death on March 25.
After studying modern history, music, and law in Frankfurt—he briefly served as the Frankfurt Institute’s legal counsel—Kluge began a career as an experimental filmmaker. His early films got him described by some as the German Godard, though he was less interested than Godard in placing himself within, and disrupting, cinematic tradition and more focused on exploring the particular squalor of his country’s recent past.
More here.
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