4 - Observing the Observation of Nuclear Disasters in Alexander Kluge

Summary

ALEXANDER KLUGE is famous for his kaleidoscopic war narratives: Schlachtbeschreibung (The Battle), on the battle of Stalingrad, and Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945(The Air Raid on Halberstadt) are well-known titles. Less known is Kluge's polymorphic focus on recent disasters such as the attack on the World Trade Center, the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk, and the nuclear disasters at the power plants in Chernobyl and Fukushima. Kluge organizes his narratives on the management of nuclear disasters as a mix of fictional and factual narrative and has written almost sixty short stories on Chernobyl in Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt (The Devil's Blind Spot) in addition to a number of visual media productions and a dozen short stories about Fukushima in Das fünfte Buch (The Fifth Book).

In his stories on the management of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, Kluge reconstructs “Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome” (the translated title of a book by Kluge from the 1970s) as he depicts the reaction of the government of the Soviet Union in the springtime of 1986: administration officers fly to the nuclear power plant to organize the struggle against the disaster, but nobody claims the leadership position. Kluge focuses as well on the efforts of secret agents from the West who attempt to infiltrate the scene in order to observe and learn from the Russian management of the nuclear disaster, an ultimate MCA (maximum credible accident) that had never occurred before on such a scale. Deconstructing the omniscient narrator, Kluge often uses two interlocutors (e.g., experts, secret agents) who comment on the actions from a distance or inserts hypothetical dialogues between figures competing with one another to solve the problem at the scene.

Shifting from Chernobyl to Fukushima, Kluge focuses, beside the question of evacuation, on how the media make heroes. He tests the ethics of disaster narratives with carnivalesque interviews and subtle humor when he depicts a group of mobile adaptive robots merrily approaching the dead zone in Fukushima to commence cleanup efforts: the beginning of a posthumanistic age. It is clear that Kluge, in his short stories and short films, uses but also avoids traditional patterns and reception expectations of fictional and factual disaster narrative.