Quoting from historian Tacitus' Annals, Alexander Kluge and Heiner Müller delve into the Roman Iron Age, talk about the modern style of Tacitus' prose, and debate borderline cases of legally sanctioned injustice. After Müller reads a passage about Tiberius' death (37 AD) and his successor...
In his experimental short film "Brutalität in Stein" (Brutality in Stone), Alexander Kluge demonstrates how Nazi architecture used dimensions of inhuman and super-human scale to bolster the regime's politics of the same kind. Shots of huge neo-classical architectural structures from the Nazi...
This portrait of Heiner Müller on the occasion of his 60th birthday is devoted for the most part to having Müller recount events and memories from the first quarter of his life, starting with his birth on January 9, 1929 and closing with his immediate postwar experiences in the mid-1940's. This...
A study of Alexander Kluge that also emulates his technique of seeking and linking. Kluge reads aloud, Kluge recounts, including stories from his childhood and youth, from the bombing of Halberstadt, his home town. “What you don’t understand as a child you will contemplate for the rest of your...
King Kong appears in various collages of a white cruise ship; meanwhile, a victory has been won and photographed in France in November 1918, and someone in a cartoon has stolen the Eiffel Tower, which now stands over an abyss in the American West.
Gabi Teichert, a history teacher, is unhappy with the way history is portrayed in textbooks and is looking for an alternative, more practical approach to 'uncovering' the past, quite literally digging with the spade and dissecting books with hammers and drills.
The horizon of this conversation is marked by Müller's personal memories, reflections about ongoing themes in his work, thoughts about his current production and the nearness to death that has been brought by his illness.
Citing Nietzsche, Müller defines intellectuals as the "ploughshares of evil," whose task it is "to create chaos, to destroy conceptions of order." Not "trace elements of reason," but rather chaos can perhaps bring about enlightenment.
The Mammoth’s Homecoming, a Composition of Th. W. Adorno in the Year 1941
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Adorno is not just a theorist and philosopher, he was also a composer and student of Alban Berg in Vienna. The text of the short song goes: “What’s driving there, on a cart and stretches out his long trunk?/ It is a mammoth! It is a mammoth! It is a mammoth which wants to go home.”
The point of departure for this discussion is the question of whether the collapse of the Soviet Union is dramatic material. Müller answers with this Brechtian sentence: "Oil resists the five acts." He describes how difficult it is to make a dramatic adaptation of structures or massive processes...
