On Alexander Kluge's 90th Birthday
News13.02.2022
© SUHRKAMP VERLAG
»Alexander Kluge, that most enlightened of writers.« W. G. Sebald
»Alexander Kluge is a gigantic figure in the German cultural landscape. He exemplifies – along with Passolini – what is most vigorous and original in the European idea of the artist as intellectual, the intellectual as artist.« Susan Sontag
»Alexander Kluge is a gigantic figure in the German cultural landscape. He exemplifies – along with Passolini – what is most vigorous and original in the European idea of the artist as intellectual, the intellectual as artist.« Susan Sontag
We congratulate Alexander Kluge on his 90th birthday. Kluge, born on February 14, 1932 in Halberstadt, is an author, lawyer, philosopher, film maker and mixed-media artist; but he considers his books to be his most important work: »As I write in 2015, I can already see the next fifteen years in my mind's eye. Altogether, since I was born in 1932, this amounts to a chronicle of about one hundred years.« Kluge has been awarded numerous prizes for his work including the Georg-Büchner-Preis, the Theodor-W.-Adorno-Preis as well as the Heinrich-Heine-Preis.
»I am and remain first and foremost an author of books, even though I have produced films or pieces for television. This is because books have patience and can wait, since the word is the only repository of human experience that is independent of time and does not remain incarcerated in the lives of individuals. Books are a generous medium and I still grieve when I think of the library burning in Alexandria. I feel in myself a spontaneous desire to rewrite the books that perished then.« Alexander Kluge (acceptance speech for the Heinrich-Böll-Preis, 1993)
To mark the occasion of his 90th birthday, two new volumes by Alexander Kluge have been published by Suhrkamp Verlag: Circus / Commentary and The Book of Commentaries. Kluge's works have been translated into various languages.
»Kluge’s genius is for exposing those little interruptions, those moments that escape the totalizing systems.« Ben Lerner, Artforum
»Comet-like fragments that whistle through the European past and present« Times Literary Supplement
»Elegant provocations to seize an opera addict’s imagination.« Kirkus
»A bold, galvanizing hybrid of fiction, interview, film theory, German history, scientific inquiry, and his cosmology of cinema.« KGB Bar Book Review
»Comet-like fragments that whistle through the European past and present« Times Literary Supplement
»Elegant provocations to seize an opera addict’s imagination.« Kirkus
»A bold, galvanizing hybrid of fiction, interview, film theory, German history, scientific inquiry, and his cosmology of cinema.« KGB Bar Book Review