Filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge – one of the representatives of the so-called New German Cinema of the 1960s – died at the age of 94 in Munich, the Surhkamp publishing house announced Thursday on behalf of the family.
His first feature film, “Farewell to Yesterday”, won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1966 and his literary work won him the Georg Büchner Prize in 2003, the most important German-language prize for a writer’s complete works.
In 1968 he won the Golden Lion in Venice with “The Artists in the Circus Dome” and in 1982 he received a special award from the festival for his entire film oeuvre.
Much of his literary work consists of short stories collected in books such as “El hueco que deja el demonio,” a selection of which has been published in Spanish by Anagrama.
Kluge, alongside Volker Schlöndorf and Rainer Maria Fassbinder, was among the directors involved in the film “Germany in Autumn” (1978) which is a confrontation with the terrorist offensive of the Red Army Fraction (RAF) gang in 1977.
Born in 1932 in Halberstadt (eastern Germany) Kluge made his debut as a writer in 1962 with “Lebenslaufe” (Leaves of Life), a series of fictional biographies in which he traverses German history around the turning point of 1945.
In the same year Kluge was one of the signatories of the so-called Oberhausen Manifesto, considered the founding document of the New German Cinema.
“We live in a strangely changing world,” he said a few weeks ago in a dialogue with his recently deceased friend Jürgen Habermas.
“Some are even talking about a murky illustration that has emerged around Silicon Valley,” he added, reported Agencia EFE.
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