Reclaiming “geballte linke Energie”: War in Alexander Kluge’s DocufictionHeidegger auf der Krim

Abstract

In his docufiction Heidegger auf der Krim, the German author, director and television producer Alexander Kluge rekindles the polemical debate between two towering figures of German philosophy (Heidegger and Adorno). The nucleus of the story emerges in a discussion with Heiner Muller on the role of the intellectual faced with war and dictatorship; but the text is also a direct reaction to the discussions surrounding the Wehrmachtausstellung (1995), which hinged on the involvement of the regular Armee as well as the complicity of civilians and prominent intellectuals in the atrocities of the Holocaust. Kluge puts Heidegger’s philosophy to the empirical test by confronting it with the most extreme scene of war: the persecution of the Jews on the Crimea during the Second World War. Making use of avant-garde montage techniques, Kluge scans discourses from various intellectual angles in view of their potential of salvaging “concentrated left-wing energy”. The aim is to establish (post factum) a utopian alliance that possibly could have channelled world history into a less destructive course. In an act of retroactive headhunting, Kluge calls upon a wide range of thinkers to build a trans-ideological alliance. I argue that this counterfactual text is pivotal in Kluge’s literary oeuvre because it strives to situate war within a wider, global frame. The particular geographical location of Heidegger auf der Krim – the Crimea – is juxtaposed with geo-political constellations and other historical timeframes, thus testifying to a global turn in Kluge’s documentary representations of war.