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The Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8 April 1945, by the German writer Alexander Kluge, turns on a truly unusual narrative decision. Published in 1977, it describes the firebombing of a strategically-unimportant German cathedral town in the waning days of World War II. Kluge was thirteen years old at the time and directly experienced the destruction of his hometown—a bomb exploded thirty feet from his house—but his personal story is nowhere to be found in the text.
This decision reflects Kluge’s powerfully heterodox approach to literature. Starting in the 1960s, and across an ever-growing number of books, he has engaged in a sui-generis form of documentary writing with a particular focus on contemporary political and military history. Whether the subject is the siege of Leningrad, the founding of the United Nations or, most recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kluge sidelines big historical actors in favor of stories about civilians, public servants, and military personnel caught up in the tumultuous events of our recent past.
Crucially, his stories do not transform such individuals into protagonists. Instead of centering the subjectivity of a character, as is the norm in modern Western literature, Kluge is invested in building up what I call a human situation, which brings to the surface various latent realities and forces that are present in any given dramatic scene. Kluge reconstructs past events for the sake of uncovering alternative possibilities consistent with human thriving. The aim is to dispel the fog of inevitability that can gather around any scene to show readers that one can recover, even from the direst of circumstances, socially-committed ways of seeing the world and living in it.
This is an uncommon goal in the modern Western literary tradition, which generally privileges the individualistic values of aesthetic experience and self-expression. Kluge’s radical commitment to the utility of narrative has thus resulted in an uneven critical reception. Even those who praise his work neglect its human-centered core by reinforcing the idea that it is highly impersonal. W.G. Sebald’s 1982 essay on Air Raid (included in the 2014 Seagull Books edition of the text) argues that Kluge’s accomplishment lies in providing trenchant lessons about the mechanics of historical phenomena: “Kluge’s art, if one wishes to apply the term, consists in making discernible the details of the broad outline of the fatal tendency of history until now.” More skeptical critics see the impersonal quality of Kluge’s work as a major defect. In The Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson argues that Air Raid is a “blank text” consisting of “radically meaningless anecdotes.” He attributes this lack of meaning to the supposed total absence of emotion and affect in the work. Ultimately, Jameson construes Kluge’s approach to literature as a fascinating but sterile effort appearing in the wake of “the dissolution of realism and modernism.”
This assessment reflects Kluge’s opposition to the major values and forms of modern Western literature, at least since the dawn of Romanticism in Europe. “What I do,” he says in a 2003 interview, “is below the threshold of literature. It is antiliterature.” But Kluge isn’t an anti-literary rebel in the Dada mold; his commitment to deemphasizing subjectivity is not an end in itself but a means to the end of generating human situations with vital feelings and perspectives on the world.
Kluge’s artistic orientation is grounded in his early training in critical theory. He was mentored by the philosopher Theodor Adorno, and Dialectic of Enlightenment is a cornerstone of both his work and thought. His particular version of critical theory, as Richard Langston notes in the Kluge Reader (2019), involves a broad commitment to relationality, encompassing “dialectical and multidimensional difference.” His methods are flexible because he’s interested in any tool or approach that can help us find ways out of the reality that modernity unleashed. In taking up the devastations of modern warfare and industrialization, Kluge thus constantly seeks to turn any human scene into a human situation. In a literary text, the former generally involves a narrowing of attention to the parameters of a certain individual(s). The human scene is constructed to intensify personal experience, which involves a generally-inward orientation such that even the world of the text is devoted to the plight of the protagonist.
Writing for the human situation creates a very different purpose and direction for the text. As Kluge says in the same 2003 interview, “My question is always: where is the way out? I am not looking for intensive description.” The human situation includes the personal element in a human scene but also much more as it opens out onto an expanded field of relevant information. Any individual is constituted by various realities and forces such as professional and social conventions, familial and racial histories, and the conditions and possibilities of the environments they inhabit. “A person is thus,” Kluge writes in Kong’s Finest Hour: A Chronicle of Connections (2018), “comprised of SPHERES that extend outward to one’s ‘own country’ and the ‘world.’” The human situation aims to encourage readers to think about existence multidimensionally so as to escape being hemmed in by the relatively limited perspectives of any present moment.
It’s an orientation that is especially useful when engaging with the large-scale devastation of aerial bombardment. The original text of Air Raid consists of thirty-one vignettes about the attack on Halberstadt, structured around a dichotomy of above and below. (The later edition includes seventeen additional stories of air war including September 11th and the 1930s Italian invasion of Ethiopia.) On the ground (“below”), we learn about a wedding party that had “hoped for a crisis-free day”; an innocent photographer who’s nearly killed on suspicion of being a spy; and men and women trying to survive in a network of bomb shelters. Up above, meanwhile, “a conceptual system is flying, a system of ideas wrapped in metal.” This system took the form of three hundred plus US bombers whose formations, “merchandise,” and route of attack are detailed across texts, charts, and illustrations. “The strategy from above,” however, goes far beyond the visible machinery, as we learn through behind-the-scenes dialogues between journalists and military officials about the structure of the operation.
Kluge’s multi-faceted reconstruction of the event strives for maximal usefulness, an effort that operates on various scales and takes different forms. His staging of the strategy from above is intended, at one idealistic level, to determine whether the people on the ground could have done anything at all to prevent the disaster: In one vignette, for example, the commander in charge of the attack replies bluntly in the negative when asked whether a large white flag tied to a church steeple could’ve stopped the planes. At another level, Kluge demonstrates the great contingency underlying the raid: Halberstadt was bombed only because several higher-priority targets were clouded-over that day. The significant role of chance in any historical phenomenon is a constant theme in Kluge’s oeuvre, orienting the reader toward a view of military and political decision-making as a confrontation among individuals, systems, and constantly changing conditions. (A particular focus, in Kluge’s 2017 book of political vignettes Drilling Through Hard Boards, is the impact of weather conditions on the political process.)
Above all, this perspective helpfully emphasizes the unpredictable fluidity of power, which is constantly closing but also creating openings. Kluge’s artistic ambition dovetails with his notion of the purpose of narration, which, as he puts it in his 2013 talk, “Theory of Storytelling: Lecture One,” “is to tell stories with happy endings that do not lie.” Getting there involves a narrative practice that is anticlimactic, mobile, and diffuse. Instead of mining a “pivotal moment” for its expressive potential, Kluge persistently writes through it to introduce other spaces, timescales, and relations. In The Devil’s Blind Spot (2002), for instance, a vignette titled “The Failed Divorce” begins with a couple having decided to end their marriage. Kluge’s focus is not on the build-up to this momentous decision but rather on the relatively mundane task of the couple driving together to the country courthouse to make it official. But then an unexpected circumstance intervenes. A fire has been raging in nearby forests and the roads leading to where the couple has to go are blocked off. Unable to proceed, “they began to talk to one another,” and in time, decide not to go through with the divorce.
Such fortuitous happy endings are possible in war as well. In the Air Raid vignette, the photographer (“owner of a camera shop on Breiter Weg”) is mistaken for a spy in the upheaval after the bombing, when he was taking photos of the wreckage of his hometown. (The photos accompany the text.) On the verge of being shot, he’s released possibly because the guards had “some doubts about the point of what they were doing in such devastated surroundings.” The common experience in the field of war is, of course, much less fortunate. In narrating hopeless human scenes, Kluge explores the “catacombs, wells, and abysses” of reality to create a human situation of greater possibility. One of the shorter vignettes in the book—with an address for a title (“Number 9 Domgang)—neatly encapsulates this orientation:
In the window stood a selection of tin soldiers, which had fallen over immediately after the raid, the rest of them being packed away in boxes stored in cupboards, 12,400 men in all, Ney’s Third Corps as they desperately advanced through the Russian winter toward the eastern stragglers of the Grande Armée. They were put out on display once a year, during Advent. Only Herr Gramert himself could arrange his troop of soldiers in the correct order. In his terrified flight, leaving his beloved soldiers, he has been struck on the head by a burning beam, and he can form no further plans. The apartment at Number 9 Domgang, with all its marks of Gramert’s personal style, lies quiet and intact for another two hours, except that it grows hotter and hotter during the afternoon. Around five o’clock it catches fire, and so do the tin soldiers who melt into lumps of metal in their boxes.
This vignette includes the death of Herr Gramert, but not as a primary subject. His presence in the text is formally limited so that he receives no more narrative attention than his apartment or the collection of tin soldiers. The former is imprinted with “Gramert’s personal style,” but this is ironic since we’re not told what that style consists of. The meaning(s) of the apartment and the tin soldiers are thus not conditioned by Herr Gramert’s subjectivity or the event of his death. The soldiers are material, vulnerable objects, linked symbolically to 1812, another instance of senseless loss of life. This link intensifies the tragedy of the human scene in Herr Gramert’s apartment by creating a sense of repeated history.
But, as always, Kluge writes towards a way out, offering a different perspective on human beings and their capacity to live together in peace. The human situation he develops includes a vital counter-element in the detail that all 12,400 tin soldiers were displayed by Herr Gramert at Advent. In its relative banality, this detail exemplifies the exact kind of “quiet sounds,” as Kluge puts it in a 1985 essay on the German writer Heinrich von Kleist, that characterize the music of positive social relations. If “loudness reproduces unreal relations that tear open wounds,” the quiet sounds speak to alternative possibilities. A different temporality, embodying “longer-term flows of time,” is introduced here through reference to the Advent season and Herr Gramert’s ritualistic display of the soldiers. In this very different temporality, a communal celebration is present and the tin soldiers are a part of it as a wonder to behold. The text thus encourages the reader to think outwardly in this desperate scene and tap into the vital human-centered feelings that have sustained our communities for millennia.
Feelings, in fact, are a crucial dimension of Kluge’s work. He sees them not as the private property of a person but as mobile, trans-temporal phenomena. They may well-up in a person, a group, or some man-made structure; “they are everywhere,” he says in a 2001 interview, “even in unexpected places . . . they live in institutions, which only become solid and have staying power when they are filled with feelings.” War and industrialization represent the objectification of feelings that run counter to human thriving, but there is a vital counterforce which Kluge calls the “antirealism of feeling.” In “Theory of Storytelling” he argues that throughout the history of our race, humans have rejected “those conditions of reality that did not mean them well.” Our survival has depended on such resistance, which is located not in the mind but the body. The rich and salubrious feelings Kluge seeks to recover actually baffle the mind—which is highly susceptible to ideological pressure—because they destabilize the bedrock modern value of self-interest. Devotion and absentmindedness are particularly useful in this regard, and Kluge is especially interested in narrating their sudden, automatic emergence in a given human situation, such as in the vignette from The Devil’s Blind Spot in which a mother steps in front of a vehicle bearing down on her child.
Ultimately, all of Kluge’s books contribute to one large, ongoing project to build up a toolkit of resistant feelings that readers can use to plot their own ways out. There is nothing singular about these feelings, and that’s reflected in a formal procedure that is uninterested in centering a protagonist. In the opening vignette of Air Raid, about the bombing of the Capital Cinema, theater manager Frau Schrader is presented not as a particular individual but an extremely dedicated and “seasoned cinema professional.” Above all, she cares about her patrons and the theater she manages. After the first wave of bombers, “she wanted to . . . clear up the rubble in time for the 2pm screening.” She was forced to flee the theater after the fourth and fifth waves and had to be prevented from running back in. She then tried to contact the theater owners and report to someone in authority but all to no avail. At the end of the vignette, we get the first and last instance of Frau Schrader’s direct thought: she “felt ‘no good for anything anymore.’”
Critics writing about the vignette have stressed the ineffectuality of Frau Schrader’s actions, with Sebald arguing that she “makes panicky attempts to create order somehow” in an overall effort that is “irrational” and “absurd.” These descriptors do apply but in a weak sense that misses the vital lesson of Frau Schrader’s actions. Her life is in mortal danger, yet all her activity is directed toward helping and serving others. This selflessness is exemplary in an unconventional way because it doesn’t rely on an individuated character.
In a profound sense, there is no individual redemption in Kluge’s work. Frau Schrader, along with other selfless characters in Air Raid and Kluge’s other works, taps into the deep human capacity and desire to help, restore, clean-up, and account for. These feelings, as Kluge shows, cannot be destroyed from above. They are always present, and they can guide the action and behavior of anyone, irrespective of their particular subjectivity. There is, from that perspective, nothing irrational about Kluge’s characters. But there is something irrational, in a positive sense, about Kluge’s work. With its indifference to aesthetic experience, devotion to common human feeling, and constant pursuit of happy endings, it poses a vital challenge to the orthodoxies of modern Western literature.
Semyon Khokhlov is a writer and librarian living in Philadelphia. He edits LEAN magazine, which is devoted to non-protagonist-centered fiction.
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