11 - The Politics of Feeling: Alexander Kluge on War, Film, and Emotion

Summary

AN ENTRY IN Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia bears the title “Out of the Firing Line.” From the tenuous safety of the position described by that title, Adorno reflects on the ongoing war in the fall of 1944: its industrial nature, its human consequences, its reification in the newsreel. What ties these concerns together, though, are questions about the stakes for experience and representation “after Doomsday,” as Adorno puts it. Noting that the Great War had already destroyed the very possibility of experience because of the incongruity of human bodies and the energy of machines, he locates one of the central motifs of critical theory — the “withering of experience” (Erfahrung) — in the two world wars. The Second World War accordingly “is as totally divorced from experience as is the functioning of a machine from the movements of the body.” This radical breakdown of experience, in turn, poses obstacles to representation and memory: “Just as the war lacks continuity, history, the ‘epic’ element, but seems rather to start anew from the beginning in each phase, so it will leave behind no permanent, unconsciously preserved image in the memory.” The representation of war, if not the war itself, has been obliterated, Adorno argues, by information, propaganda, commentary, and the newsreel. The war and the Holocaust “quite literally will soon be past thinking on,” and this bodes ill for the future of representation itself. Since there can be no memory (nor any healing oblivion) of the disjointed, traumatic events that make up the fractured totality of war, there will be no adequate representation.

There is clearly a line that connects these “reflections on a damaged life” to W. G. Sebald’s arguments concerning the German failure, if not inability, to represent the air war. Like Adorno’s entry of 1944, Sebald’s 1997 lectures are concerned with the disjuncture between experience, memory, trauma, and (literary) representation. To be sure, Sebald’s arguments are subsumed under a larger repression hypothesis, which Andreas Huyssen has rightly characterized as perhaps the least persuasive of his interventions. He couches his analysis in moral terms of failure and the Germans’ refusal to look at the horrors of war, as opposed to Adorno’s more principled, philosophical claims about the withering of experience and the impossibility of representation.