What Alexander Kluge once wrote about love relationships – namely that no matter what one says about them, it is contradicted by their “natural richness in casuistry” – that basically applies to everything in the world as he sees it.
And that's why it can only ever be shown in excerpts, in episodes, 166 of them in his love book "Das Labyrinth der zärtliche Kraft", many more in the thick double volume "Chronicle of Emotions", countless in his films (take such as the edition of his "all cinema films", at that time on 16 DVDs).
Jan Wiele
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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How many episodes might an evening celebrating Kluge's life's work in his presence take?
Here, too, one has the feeling: hundreds - but it is very entertaining, this Saturday evening in the Munich Kammerspiele under the title: "There is no real life in the wrong rabbit".
The Adorno student explains the title himself: It is the continuation of the sentence from “Minima Moralia”, which was quoted to death, by the Austrian singer Eva Jantschitsch, a grounding of philosophy in the oven, as she once said.
Anyone who thinks this is nonsense may not have thought long enough about the original quote.
Correct sentences in the roasting oven
In any case, Kluge adds, ready for publication: "It is inherent in directional sentences that they cry out for variants as long as reality does not obey them." The audience bursts into spontaneous applause and laughter - it is also remarkable and funny, like the celebrated one here appears as emcee, professor and listener at the same time, sitting at the edge of the stage at a table like a stage manager with the actress Julia Gräfner, and tries to organize the divine plan of the three-hour program tightly.
Which goes well until the anecdote narrator Kluge trumps all his other roles.
For example, during a break during which he grabs the microphone: "I'll fill the break with information." This is followed by a five-minute impromptu speech about Habermas and several millennia of philosophy,
In addition to films about raindrops and tsunamis and puppet theater about the cowardly and courageous, there is above all music on stage, for example by the crooked Canadian theater pianist Sir Henry and the polyglot singing Lilith Stangenberg with Spanish revolutionary and Russian lullabies, which are reminiscent of what has been invoked here several times stir a child's mind.
Kluge himself claims, again referring to Adorno, that all little boys prefer sweets to reason.
If you believe those who talk about working with Kluge that evening, in a certain sense he still hasn't grown up after nine decades of his life.
Improvisation is the normal state
Not all of the many guests can be there in person during the ongoing pandemic.
"We had to improvise - hamwa done," says Kluge.
Hannelore Hoger, who was present in the flesh and recently in her ninth decade, explains that his films were made like this: there was never a screenplay.
If you sit right behind her in the theater and see her watching herself on screen in the scene with the elephant from Kluge's 1968 film The Artists in the Circus Dome: Perplexed, how she laughs when the elephant goes into the " Handstand" goes, how she and Kluge then read in a matinee from new episode books like the recently published "Book of Comments" and talk about war, circus and the "great narrator reality" - then you have, not for the only time on this one Weekend,
Of course, always broken by the next nonsense: Helge Schneider congratulates via video - with a captain's hat at the piano and superimposed sentences in neon letters, he caricatures the do-it-yourself aesthetics of Kluge's guerrilla television.
The Munich director Jan-Christoph Gockel also remembers the time when this ran in the late-night program of private broadcasters between action and erotic films.
However, when he was sixteen at the time, he switched off: "That unsettled me." Certainly not a rare, probably intended Kluge effect.
Alexander Kluge appears downright shaken by the performance of the singer Anja Plaschg (known as Soap & Skin), who closes this historic multi-generational evening with bird flutes and trumpets.