Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome

by Alexander Kluge, Christopher Pavsek (Translator)

Fiction writer, internationally known filmmaker, critical theorist, Alexander Kluge is perhaps postwar Germany’s most prolific and diverse intellectual. With this translation of Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome , a novella first published in German in 1973, one of Kluge’s most important literary works becomes available to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Written in a quasi-documentary style, this fascinating hybrid work combines science fiction with modernist forms of montage and reportage to describe a future in which Earth has been almost totally destroyed following the catastrophic Black War. The planet’s remaining inhabitants have been driven underground or into space where the struggle to establish a new society rages on.
Whether describing the scene in China where the devastated landscape is reconstructed according to old paintings, or in the galactic realm of the Starway where giant, turf-battling, corporate colonizing forces exploit the universe’s resources, Kluge tells his tale by inventing various forms of “evidence” that satirize the discourses of administrative bureaucracy, the law, military security, and the media. He gives us some of his most bizarre and hilarious characters in this peculiar world in which the remains of the past are mixed with the most advanced elements of the future. The cast includes highly specialized women workers who have adapted to the massive gravitational field of their heavy-metal planets, a commander with lethal foot-fungus, and ex-Nazi space pioneers who, in their lonely exile from the conflagrations on earth, spend their time carving enormous facsimiles of operatic sheet music in the forests of uninhabited planets.
With parody, and humor, Kluge shows how the survivors of Armageddon attempt to learn the art of civilization, and, despite the disaster they have suffered, how they set out to reproduce at new sites a caricature of a classic and fascistic feudal capitalism.

Genres: Fiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published July 24, 1996

About the author

Kluge was born in Halberstadt at the year 1932.

He studied history, law and music at the University of Marburg Germany, and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt, where befriended the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who was teaching at the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School.

In 1960 he shooted his first films, before the launch of the New German Cinema.

He also is a remarkable fiction writer, which tend toward the short story form, significant for their formal experimentation and insistently critical thematics.

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Verhoeven dystopia told through the documents that the mindless bureaucrats are signing as they send waves of young people in to fight the 'evil bugs'; not literal here, but the bugs in the system of our own creation, the atomic warfare and the utter destruction of the global climate. Horrifying and combative to its own readers.