Was literally reading about the Oberhausen Manifesto last week for a class and now this. 94 years old, that's a whole century of German film history gone with him.
Their story
Alexander Ernst Kluge was one of the great polymaths of postwar Germany: a lawyer who became a film-maker, a film-maker who insisted he was above all a writer, and a writer who smuggled philosophy, history and poetry into late-night commercial television. He died in Munich on March 25, 2026, at…
Alexander Ernst Kluge was one of the great polymaths of postwar Germany: a lawyer who became a film-maker, a film-maker who insisted he was above all a writer, and a writer who smuggled philosophy, history and poetry into late-night commercial television. He died in Munich on March 25, 2026, at the age of 94. His publisher Suhrkamp announced his death on behalf of his family.
He was born on February 14, 1932, in Halberstadt, in central Germany, the son of the physician Ernst Kluge and his wife Alice, née Hausdorf. His younger sister Alexandra, born in 1937, would later act in several of his films. He started school in Gotha and then attended the Domgymnasium in Halberstadt. In 1944 he was drafted into the Volkssturm. His parents separated in early 1945, and on April 8, 1945, the thirteen-year-old narrowly survived the Allied air raid that destroyed much of his home town, when a high-explosive bomb landed about ten metres from him. That day became a lifelong subject. He returned to it again and again in his stories, and in 2008 published "Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945" (translated as "Air Raid").
After the war he moved with his mother to Berlin-Charlottenburg, where he took his Abitur. From 1950 he studied law, history and church music in Freiburg, Marburg and Frankfurt am Main, and in 1956 he received his doctorate in law from the University of Marburg. In Frankfurt he befriended the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno and served as legal counsel to the Institute for Social Research, the home of the Frankfurt School. It was Adorno who in 1958 introduced him to Fritz Lang, and Kluge worked as an assistant on Lang's "The Tiger of Eschnapur." He then practised as a lawyer in Berlin and later in Munich, but he was soon drawn to literature and film.
In 1962 he published his first book, "Lebensläufe," was invited to Gruppe 47, and became one of the leading initiators of the Oberhausen Manifesto, in which 26 young directors declared that "the old film is dead" and called for a new German cinema. The same year he co-founded the Institut für Filmgestaltung at the Ulm School of Design with Edgar Reitz and Detlev Schleiermacher, and in 1963 he founded his own production company, Kairos-Film.
His first feature, "Abschied von gestern" ("Yesterday Girl," 1966), starring his sister Alexandra as a young Jewish woman from the East adrift in West Germany, won the Silver Lion at Venice, the first such award for a German director after the war. Two years later "Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos" ("Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed") won the Golden Lion. Over the following decades he made films including "Die Patriotin" (1979), "Die Macht der Gefühle" (1983) and "Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit" (1985), and contributed to the collective film "Deutschland im Herbst" (1978). His style, built on montage, text panels, archival fragments and documentary interruptions, made him the theorist and conscience of the New German Cinema that also produced Fassbinder, Herzog and Wenders.
With the sociologist Oskar Negt he wrote "Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung" (1972, "Public Sphere and Experience") and "Geschichte und Eigensinn" (1981, "History and Obstinacy"), landmark works of critical theory. He became an honorary professor at Frankfurt in 1973.
In 1987 he founded DCTP, the Development Company for Television Program, which won independent cultural slots on private channels such as RTL, Sat.1 and VOX. Programmes such as "10 vor 11," "Prime-Time/Spätausgabe" and "News & Stories" brought thousands of conversations with artists, scientists and thinkers into living rooms late at night, among them his celebrated interviews with the dramatist Heiner Müller between 1988 and 1995.
Kluge never stopped writing. "Chronik der Gefühle" (2000) gathered his stories in two volumes, followed by hundreds more in books such as "Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt" (2003). In his later years he collaborated with Gerhard Richter, Ben Lerner, Ferdinand von Schirach and Anselm Kiefer. He received almost every major German literary prize, including the Kleist Prize (1985), the Georg Büchner Prize (2003) and the Heinrich Heine Prize (2014), and in 2024 was admitted to the order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts.
He married the film producer Dagmar Steurer in 1982; they had a daughter, Sophie, and a son. In keeping with his wish, he was buried at the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery in Berlin, near the grave of his sister Alexandra.
He summed up his own priorities simply: "I am and remain first and foremost a book author, even if I have made films or television magazines."
Biography adapted from https://www.suhrkamp.de/trauermeldung/zum-tod-von-alexander-kluge-b-5040.
In their own words
“The old film is dead. We believe in the new one.”
Oberhausen Manifesto, 1962 (translated)
“My main work is my books.”
Quoted by Suhrkamp in its death notice (translated from German)
“Poets are diamond polishers. But there are also collectors of raw diamonds. I am a good archaeologist.”
The Paris Review, 2018
“I am and remain first and foremost a book author, even if I have made films or television magazines.”
On his own work (translated from German)
Photos
2Kluge receiving the Theodor W. Adorno Award in the Paulskirche, Frankfurt, 2009
Jan 2009 · by People Forever
Alexander Kluge at the NRW reception, Berlinale 2020
Feb 2020 · by People Forever
he outlived almost everyone else from that movement