In a Spiegel review of Kluge's 1977 Neue Geschichten (New Stories), his most voluminous and ambitious collection of stories to date, Hans Magnus Enzensberger said something that ten years later still has the ring of truth: ‘Among well- known German authors Kluge is the least well-known'. Least well-known in this case means well-known, but not widely read. It seems that Kluge's unique versatility as film-maker and film politician, social theorist and storyteller has hampered rather than enhanced the reception of his literary works. Many people will have seen one or the other of Kluge's many films, and there is a lively and growing debate about formal and political aspects of his film-making. For the past fifteen years, his theoretical works, coauthored with Oskar Negt, have played an important role in the German discourse of social and cultural theory. But comparatively little serious work has been done on his storytelling. Many of the early reviews of his stories betrayed, more than anything else, the perplexity and helplessness of the critical establishment, and there seems to be a shared assumption that Kluge's ‘primary’ medium is cinema. Surely, the resistance to Kluge's literary texts has something to do with the ways in which these texts consistently and programmatically disappoint readers’ expectations. But it also reflects the simple fact that even people interested in contemporary cultural production are more likely to submit themselves to the demands of a ninety- minute Kluge film than to spend several days working through hundreds of pages of seemingly unconnected, discontinuous stories which systematically prevent reader identification and frustrate the pleasures of literariness. Despite the studied simplicity of style, the demands Kluge's stories make on the reader are no less intense than those his films make on their spectator. It is not only that Kluge's filmic or literary texts resemble construction sites, as has often been said. The very structure of his writing is designed to transform the reader's head into a construction site.