Expanded Alexander Kluge Website
We are pleased to announce the release of the newly expanded digital collection revolving around the works – and intellectual networks – of Alexander Kluge: Alexander Kluge: Cultural History in Dialogue. Alexander Kluge is a leading public intellectual, filmmaker, and cultural theorist in Germany, whose vast corpus of work engages with a broad range of social, historical, political, and aesthetic questions. The work represented on the site includes streaming videos of interviews with prominent German writers, as well as some of Kluge’s own experimental films. The majority of the work has been transcribed, translated, described, and time-coded for broad access and ease of discoverability. The entire website is presented in English and German.
Development of the site has been an ongoing collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Bremen in Germany, with additional input by Princeton University during the most recent phase of the project. The original project, Müller-Kluge: Conversations between Heiner Müller and Alexander Kluge, was funded as part of Sarah Thomas’s faculty grants initiative in 2004, and focused on conversations between Kluge and Heiner Müller, one of the most significant European dramatists of the second half of the 20th century. The project received two years of additional funding from the College of Arts & Science’s faculty grants program in 2010 and 2011 , which allowed for a significant expansion of the number of interviewees available on the site, including acclaimed poet and novelist Hans Enzensberger, among others, and a full responsive redesign of the website.
The project team includes David Bathrick, emeritus professor in German Studies (PI); Rainer Stollman, professor in German Studies at the University of Bremen (PI); Kizer Walker, Director of Collection Development at CUL (PI); and Michael Jennings, Director of the Alexander Kluge Research Center at Princeton (collaborator). On the development side, Melissa Wallace, James Reidy, and Jenn Colt were responsible for the website design and back-end programming, and Tre Berney oversaw the AV digitization and upload process. In addition, a large number of graduate students are credited with generating the metadata and translations for the site, most notably Hannah Mueller (Cornell); Erica Doerhoff (Cornell); Bret Leraul (Cornell); Felix Hampel (Bremen); and Fabian Roelen (Bremen). The overall project has been managed by Danielle Mericle.
The website is one of the most highly utilized digital collections hosted by the Library, with audiences spanning the globe and from a broad range of disciplines. It has been used in courses in German Studies both at Cornell and Bremen, and offers a rich user experience to anyone interested in European literary and intellectual history, the wars and revolutions of the 20th century, or any of the extraordinarily broad range of topics on the table in the conversations between Kluge and his colleagues. Working on such rich content and developing an accompanying site has been incredibly rewarding, and we hope to continue to add content in the coming years.
Danielle Mericle, Kizer Walker and Melissa Wallace