Alexander Kluge (1932-2026)
Alexander Kluge (1932–2026), the German writer, filmmaker, and public intellectual who profoundly shaped postwar European culture, has died at the age of 94. The Suhrkamp publishing house, citing his family, announced that he passed away in Munich on Wednesday. Kluge began his career in film as an assistant to Fritz Lang on Der Tiger von Eschnapur (1959), before emerging as one of the central figures of the New German Cinema in the 1960s. Alongside contemporaries such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Edgar Reitz, and Volker Schlöndorff, he helped redefine German filmmaking in the postwar period. In 1978, he collaborated with them on Deutschland im Herbst, a landmark reflection on the wave of political violence that marked 1970s Germany.
From the 1980s onward, Kluge turned increasingly to television, producing a wide-ranging body of work that included documentaries on German history, in-depth interviews with scientists, writers, and philosophers, and experimental, often satirical treatments of historical figures such as Adolf Hitler. In his later years, he also created video installations for museum contexts, continuing to expand the formal possibilities of his practice. Throughout his work, Kluge remained committed to an innovative use of language, text, and editing, driven by a desire to create an alternative public sphere in which the lives of working people could be made visible. A unifying thread in both his theoretical reflections and his films is the idea that “man is essentially not interested in reality,” and that the invention of fiction and “counter-histories” constitutes a powerful form of political resistance.
In 2018, on the occasion of the screening of Die Macht der Gefühle (1983) at CINEMATEK, organized by Courtisane, Sabzian published a selection of texts and excerpts from the accompanying book Die Macht der Gefühle (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1984) in a new Dutch translation. In 2022, on the occasion of the exhibition “Alexander Kluge: Minutenfilme #5” at argos centre for audiovisual arts, Sabzian published an interview with Kluge on his Minutenfilme.
