Die Schrift an der Wand – Alexander Kluge: Rohstoffe und Materialien

When this book appeared in its first edition in January 2000, Alexander Kluge was mainly present as a television author. His last literary release was 23 years ago and his last film was released in 1986. Nobody had expected that this author would become one of the central figures of the German cultural scene again. In autumn of that year the two-volume Chronicle of Emotions was published, a brilliant comeback as a writer; a year later, the philosophical oeuvre by Negt / Kluge followed under the title The Underestimated Man . Since then, Kluge has published a new book almost every year. His films and television productions are now available in several DVD editions. From today’s perspective, this book draws a kind of interim balance. In exemplary studies, it comments on Kluge’s work from the second half of the last century. The thematically and methodologically heterogeneous contributions question Kluge’s text strategies and the inter-media relationships between literature, film, television, theory and conversation, i.e. those fields that give one of the most complex oeuvres of our time its incommensurable form.