Alexander Kluge attaches much greater importance to music as an autonomous aesthetic element in the overall montage construction than do other directors who work predominantly with the possibilities afforded by montage. Operatic motifs played through many of Kluge's films well before opera itself became a motif. Verdi, Bizet and Wagner, dismantled into minimalised parts, run like a thread of sound fragments through his films, as do popular hits, male choirs, humming, warbling, tangos, marches and other musical material. The musical motifs suffer the same fate at Kluge's hands as do the images and the script: they are a collector's spoils, often stripped down so as to bear the burden of the visual and verbal material. In his printed work, musical motifs tend to crop up in the form of sheet music, scraps of larger scores. Thus, the stories in the Learning Processes with a Deadly Ending finish with a Schubert lied printed white on black. It contains the message that researchers have burned into the forests of a distant planet with chemical weapons and can now decipher with a telescope: I'Aurore, the first flush of dawn, the hymn of the planet of the same name. For Kluge, musical motifs are not illustrative conveyors of atmosphere; rather, like words and images, they are signs of a social experience that has congealed in the subject.

Spitzname: Carmen

This is the title of a short story in Kluge's book, The Power of Emotion. The story concerns Friedrich Karmecke, chief editor of the politics desk of a West German radio station, who finds that he is to be subjected to a security check that will include his private life:

Carmen as shorthand for exogamy. In his famous essay on Bizet's Carmen, Adorno offers an interpretation of what in Kluge's work functions to condense the concrete experience of a definite, if ideal-typical case.