2023-05-02 14:05:23
Dhe war is a mole, peace is more like a tortoise. “Wars that end unsolved don’t stop digging underground. They dig their way through the centuries,” writes the filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge, who was born in 1932, in his “War Primer 2023”, which, despite the title, is largely devoted to the Second World War. It ended in Kluge’s hometown of Halberstadt in 1945 with a firestorm. “The formations that I saw with my own eyes when we fled from the already burning but otherwise intact parental home through the fire gorge on Kaiserstrasse in the direction of Braunschweiger Strasse consisted of American aircraft types.”
Three days later, Kluge, his sister and his father, “on Braunschweiger Allee, drainage ditches to the left and right, avenue trees next to the ditches, the main street in between, await the American invasion.” First a firestorm, then the victors march in, described with as much precision as it is all this happened to the 13-year-old just yesterday. The relationship? “I can say with certainty (a ‘memory error’ is impossible): at no time did I connect this force moving into the city with the planes that destroyed the city three days ago. There is no generic term ‘enemy’ for a thirteen-year-old’s powers of observation.”
It remains to be seen whether “the observation skills of a thirteen-year-old” can be generalized. And to ask how the scene is for this thirteen-year-old, if the US Army had not marched into the destroyed city, but the Red Army, seems inappropriate in view of personal experience. Because their “right of veto”, as the historian Reinhart Koselleck once put it, also applies here.
Although Alexander Kluge himself seems to invite speculation about what-ifs: “The danger we students at the Halberstadt Cathedral High School actually found ourselves in in December 1944,” he wrote just a few pages earlier, “we had no idea. In the breaks we played ‘Fighter Pilots’.” Back in the classroom, sentences from Caesar’s “Gallic Wars” were broken down into their grammatical parts: “The way we were working here and running fifteen minutes earlier, we weren’t ‘warlike’.”
Unfinished Business
The danger: If the Wehrmacht had crossed the Maas in the west and advanced on Antwerp, the war in Europe “could have been extended by up to three months. The danger, of which we students knew nothing, was that the atomic bomb ready for use in the summer of 1945 would not have been detonated in East Asia, but in the middle of the German Reich.” The weather prevented this: “At the time of the attack if the clouds hung low over the valleys of the Ardennes, and if this weather had not cleared over the Christmas period, the American air forces might not have been able to prevent the advance from succeeding.”
Difficult to claim that the Second World War is unresolved for Alexander Kluge. It is undeniable that he digs into Kluge, constantly returning to Halberstadt to the surface – even now, during the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. He also digs into Kluge, who says in an interview with the “Philosophie Magazin”: “At the moment it seems to be the time of the manifestos. That’s not enough.”
Kluge also signed such manifestos. Against the war, also against tanks for Ukraine, for negotiations. Kluge also says that we are like elementary school students: “Today we are dealing with a ‘tangle of conflicts’, a partially hybrid war. You have to understand every strand of this tangle, deal with it, negotiate it, bring it to peace. For this we need many new alphabets and probably many primers.”
The primer already served Bertolt Brecht as a form in 1955, his “War Primer” is a model for Kluge: “If war breaks out, according to Bert Brecht, we have to learn to read and write again. Something was wrong, we have to start over.” Brecht assembled his image-text panels in the post-war period, although he collected the material for them in exile. But how to start again, in the middle im War? That he must end, of course: “When you reach a certain point of cruelty, it doesn’t matter who committed it, it should just stop,” Kluge quotes the mother of a childhood friend as saying.
But will the war stop if we still learn to read the balance of terror between the nuclear powers as an illusion of armor that is as little a guarantee of survival as the turtle’s shell? Hardly likely. Is it still necessary to learn how to read again? As a sober and sobering activity, yes. Because that’s how Alexander Kluge’s book “War Primer 2023” leaves its reader behind.
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