Alexander Kluge
​A Hidden Object Book for the Discerning Reader

With his films and books, Alexander Kluge practices the art of associative overextension. This is also true of his latest book, which contains all sorts of anecdotes and esoteric ideas from and about Russia.

By Holger Moos

© Suhrkamp The very first heading of his latest book Russland-Kontainer (Russia Container) reveals how 88-year-old Alexander Kluge works. The filmmaker, television producer, writer and theorist writes, “The thirst for knowledge comes from curiosity, not from an ought (a theory of virtues). And it comes from storytelling. I start telling stories even before I know anything.”
 
As he frankly admits in the preface, Kluge is not an expert on Russia. But Russia is an ideal country to conquer with his imagination after so many generals, dictators and utopians failed to do so, politically and physically, due to the country’s vastness. What Kluge delivers in anecdotes, mental leaps and associations is literally overwhelming once again in this book. The reader is overwhelmed by the wealth of thought and detail. We are led from one topic to another; it is a hidden object book for the discerning reader, a quarry of ideas and stories.

AS REAL AS IT IS MAKE BELIEVE

“The Russia that the German writer describes is just as real as it is make believe,” writes Paul Jandl in the NZZ. The boundaries between science and poetry are fluid. It's not always clear where the facts end and fiction begins – or vice versa. In Kluge, even an obsessive surveyor analysing data from an early Soviet satellite can experience “poetic events.” The “precision freak” came to the conclusion that the great mountain ranges, he calls them “seas of rock,” move up and down under the moon’s influence. And when Jupiter, the moon, the sun and a mysterious companion star are aligned in a certain way, it could even lead to a sort of “spring tide” of the landmasses.
 
Kluge is not necessarily a fan of abstraction, a great deal falls by the wayside on the route there. In the context of an anecdote about another Russian surveyor, he draws an analogy to an idea Franz Kafka had in 1916, according to which a surveyor made a 1:1 map, “It actually contained every feature of the country.” 

SEARCH FOR “RESIDUAL SECRETS”

Kluge still hopes that there will be an audience for demanding and even unwieldy TV formats. For example, he writes about a conversation with the Russian astronomer Karina Sedova, whose German vocabulary was so limited that the interview was “conducted at the border of the incomprehensible.” Kluge appreciates ​​conversations like it and, because they are unusual, he believes that they appeal to young TV users and draw them into a “zapper trap.” “When I get fed up with the same thing everywhere that’s completely obvious to comprehend and switch channels to something that is alien to me, a ‘residual secret’ traps me there.”
 
In fact, we’re familiar with so many secret-free books, everyday and work situations in which the same things are always written, said, claimed and sold as new. So we can hope that Kluge will continue to provide plenty of residual secrets and that he retains his optimism that we’ll remain open to what challenges us and sometimes eludes our understanding and total decryption.