Chapter 7: Raw Materials for the Imagination: Kluge’s Work for Television

As Christian Schröder has argued in his review of Alexander Kluge’s television programs, tuning in to watch Kluge’s work on late night German television is akin to the experience of stumbling upon a literary 1 bookshop in the middle of a red-light district. Wedged between the pornographic movies, crime thrillers, and live competition and shopping programs which constitute the regular evening fare on the commercial stations, Kluge’s 10 vor 11 (10 to 11), News and Stories, Mitternachtsmagazin (Midnight Magazine), and Primetime Spätausgabe (Prime Time Late Edition) certainly strike the viewer as strange anomalies. Constructed, in a similar vein to his films, out of a highly diverse collection of raw materials (including photographs, drawings, diagrams, clips from movies, and documentary footage), Kluge’s programs are – in both their form and content – certainly unlike anything on German television. Organised predominantly around interviews with writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, academics, and directors from both theatre and 2 opera , the aim of the programs is to provide what Kluge describes as “cultural windows” for the “old media” within the comparatively “new” medium of television. These interviews (which provide the backbone for