Alexander Kluge

Alexander Kluge (Halberstadt, 1932 - Munich, 2026) was a German filmmaker and writer, one of the central figures of New German Cinema and the author of sharp, formally inventive short fiction. Working across film, literature and television over more than six decades, he became one of the most important cultural voices in Germany in the second half of the twentieth century.

The son of a country doctor, he survived the bombing of his hometown on 8 April 1945, when he was thirteen. He studied law, history and music at Marburg and Frankfurt and took his law doctorate in 1956. In Frankfurt he befriended the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who in 1958 introduced him to Fritz Lang, and he worked as an assistant on Lang's The Tiger of Eschnapur.

His short film Brutality in Stone (1960) looked at the Nazi era, and in 1962 he signed the Oberhausen Manifesto, which declared the old German cinema finished. His first feature, Yesterday Girl (1966), won a Silver Lion at Venice. His later films favour analytical, associative montage that mixes documentary and fiction. In 1987 he founded the television company DCTP, which produced unconventional programmes for private channels.

As a writer he worked mostly in the short story, using narrative disruption, non-literary documents and a dry, ironic tone. With Oskar Negt he wrote major books of social criticism on the public sphere and working-class experience, and he taught at Frankfurt University from 1973.

His legacy lies in his influence on auteur cinema in Germany and in his critical thinking about the media. He won nearly every major German-language literary prize, including the Georg Büchner Prize in 2003, and died in 2026 at the age of 94.