In a review of Kluge's volume of stories Neue Geschichten (1977) Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote: ‘Of Germany's recognised writers, Alexander Kluge is the least known'. Perhaps the main reason for this neglect is that Kluge's whole work is a protest against the contemporary division of labour. He is equally active as a film-maker, writer and theorist. His multimedia-projects and his blurring of the boundary between art and theory have certainly complicated the reception of his work by critics and the public. It is therefore important to stress the underlying unity in this variety: The basic impulse of his work comes from his experience of German history since the Third Reich. In this respect Kluge, born 1932, is typical of his generation (Günter Grass, Martin Walser, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Uwe Johnson, Rolf Hochhut, Siegfried Lenz), which had its breakthrough around 1960 through their engagement with the National Socialist past. Their defining experience is the Third Reich and the war. ‘Coming to terms with the past’ and ‘the work of mourning’ are the key terms for the historical consciousness of this generation, which was both close and distant enough from the Third Reich to be able to confront the whole question of German guilt. Kluge has remained faithful to his beginnings. Ever since the first collection of stories, Lebensläufe (1962), and the documentary montage on the battle for Stalingrad, Schlachtbeschreibung (1962), Kluge's work has been characterised by the struggle against the repression of the past, against the loss of experience and reality and by the task of historical analysis, whose culmination to date is the massive 1,300-page theoretical study, Geschichte und Eigensinn (1981), written together with the sociologist Oskar Negt, born 1934.

Kluge and Negt undertake an analysis of German history from the ‘abaric point’ of the caesura of 1945- The ‘zero hour’ of the Third Reich is that of Kluge himself. In the final days of the war his home town was destroyed by an air raid. The familiar world of home and small-town life was suddenly catastrophically cut off.