From history's rubble: On the future of the past in the work of Alexander Kluge
The central figure in Alexander Kluge's 1979 film The Patriot (Die Patriotin) is Gabi Teichert, a high school history teacher from the German state of Hesse, whose complaints about the shortcomings of her discipline guide us through the diverse collection of photographs, drawings, stories, poems, maps, and staged and documentary footage out of which the film is constructed. Gabi Teichert, we are informed by the director, is a ‘patriot’ because she takes an interest in the rubble of history—in the memories, stories and diverse materials which have been forgotten and/or discarded by the official narratives which appear in the textbooks assigned to her students. In this article I argue that, in stark contrast to these narratives, the form of historiography practised in—and cultivated by—The Patriot (and Kluge's film, literary, and television work more generally) is more akin to the extracurricular activities of Gabi Teichert, which revolve around digging up materials which complicate the highly reductive off...