As past and future blur, this work from Alexander Kluge reveals the emotional and intellectual currents that drive human survival.
A kaleidoscopic journey through history and the vast landscape of human emotion, The Long March of Basic Trust presents Alexander Kluge at his most expansive and incisive. Moving seamlessly across time and space, Kluge weaves a tapestry of lived and imagined experience, interrogating the forces that shape our resilience in the face of catastrophe. From the wreckage of World War II to the deep time of geology, his singular prose dissolves boundaries between the real and the speculative.
Blurring the lines between fiction and philosophy, Kluge builds an intricate world enriched by hybrid images and his latest experiment: the “virtual camera,” a cinematic eye that captures the interplay of memory and invention. Now in his tenth decade, Kluge continues his lifelong pursuit of uncovering the patterns that connect us and the basic trust that allows us to go on. Both intellectually provocative and deeply humane, this latest installment in his Chronicle of Emotions is a testament to his unmatched ability to fuse thought and feeling into an electrifying literary form.
A kaleidoscopic journey through history and the vast landscape of human emotion, The Long March of Basic Trust presents Alexander Kluge at his most expansive and incisive. Moving seamlessly across time and space, Kluge weaves a tapestry of lived and imagined experience, interrogating the forces that shape our resilience in the face of catastrophe. From the wreckage of World War II to the deep time of geology, his singular prose dissolves boundaries between the real and the speculative.
Blurring the lines between fiction and philosophy, Kluge builds an intricate world enriched by hybrid images and his latest experiment: the “virtual camera,” a cinematic eye that captures the interplay of memory and invention. Now in his tenth decade, Kluge continues his lifelong pursuit of uncovering the patterns that connect us and the basic trust that allows us to go on. Both intellectually provocative and deeply humane, this latest installment in his Chronicle of Emotions is a testament to his unmatched ability to fuse thought and feeling into an electrifying literary form.
Table of Contents
1.The Spanish Sentry
2.The Pedagogue of Klopau
3.Those Who Hope Die Singing
4.Arrival of Sunday’s Child
5.The Long March of Basic Trust
6.Cooperative Behaviour
7.Back to Basic Trust
8.Basic Trust and Basic Fear
9.Distrust Towards Reality
10.On the Deep Sleep of the Spirit
11.Waking Sleep of Whales and Dolphins
12.Undoing a Crime by Means of Cooperation
13.A Saturday in October 1929
14.The Man Without Qualities
15.They Did Not Come to Any Conclusion
16.Wanderer by Night
17.Executing an Elephant
18.The Emperor of My Trust
19.Star Wars
20.Clear Moscow Evenings, When the Northwest Wind Blows
21.Galina Starovoitova
22.20 Billion Years Before Christ
23.More Animals on Earth than Stars in the Milky Way
24.The Confidence of Caged Cows
25.Negligence in War, Nuclear Power and the Death Penalty
26.The Blind and the Inexperienced
27.Encounter with the Unknown
28.The Waltz of the Generals
29.A 570-Million-Year-Old Cloak of Invisibility
30.Robinson in Russia
31.The Quantum Vacuum, a Poetic Metaphor
32.My Paternal Ancestors
33.A Complicated Generational Sequence
34.Thinking About One’s Own Children in 1908
35.How the War Was Lost
36.The Inventor of Infiltration Tactics
37.‘… like a multitude of soft whistles…’
38.A Forgotten Weapon
39.The Fifth Art of Forgetting
40.The Power of Fate
41.Extreme Dwarves
42.Devils Have a Waiting Period
43.The Underwater Artist
44.Modern Humankind
45.Slave Water
46.A Lift into the Oceanic Depths
47.Heiner Müller and Project Spring Water
2.The Pedagogue of Klopau
3.Those Who Hope Die Singing
4.Arrival of Sunday’s Child
5.The Long March of Basic Trust
6.Cooperative Behaviour
7.Back to Basic Trust
8.Basic Trust and Basic Fear
9.Distrust Towards Reality
10.On the Deep Sleep of the Spirit
11.Waking Sleep of Whales and Dolphins
12.Undoing a Crime by Means of Cooperation
13.A Saturday in October 1929
14.The Man Without Qualities
15.They Did Not Come to Any Conclusion
16.Wanderer by Night
17.Executing an Elephant
18.The Emperor of My Trust
19.Star Wars
20.Clear Moscow Evenings, When the Northwest Wind Blows
21.Galina Starovoitova
22.20 Billion Years Before Christ
23.More Animals on Earth than Stars in the Milky Way
24.The Confidence of Caged Cows
25.Negligence in War, Nuclear Power and the Death Penalty
26.The Blind and the Inexperienced
27.Encounter with the Unknown
28.The Waltz of the Generals
29.A 570-Million-Year-Old Cloak of Invisibility
30.Robinson in Russia
31.The Quantum Vacuum, a Poetic Metaphor
32.My Paternal Ancestors
33.A Complicated Generational Sequence
34.Thinking About One’s Own Children in 1908
35.How the War Was Lost
36.The Inventor of Infiltration Tactics
37.‘… like a multitude of soft whistles…’
38.A Forgotten Weapon
39.The Fifth Art of Forgetting
40.The Power of Fate
41.Extreme Dwarves
42.Devils Have a Waiting Period
43.The Underwater Artist
44.Modern Humankind
45.Slave Water
46.A Lift into the Oceanic Depths
47.Heiner Müller and Project Spring Water