Alexander Kluge, whose eightieth birthday coincides with the release of this book, is a key figure in the German cultural landscape, having worked prolifically - over some fifty years - as a film-maker, writer and television producer. Outside the German-speaking world, Kluge is best known as one of the founding members of the New German Cinema and as the director of films such as YESTERDAY GIRL (1966), THE PATRIOT (1979) and The POWER OE EMOTION (1983). Film, however, is just one of the mediums with which he has worked throughout the course of his career. In 1962, Kluge published Lebensläufe, the first of several collections of short stories; he is the author (along with Oskar Negt) of a number of key books (including Public Sphere and Experience and Geschichte und Eigensinn); he has written extensively on a diverse range of topics including (among others) film, television, history, politics, opera, literature and the public sphere; and - since the establishment of his own television company DCTP (Development Company for Television Programmes) in 1987 - he has produced thousands of programmes for German television, many of which can now be viewed on DCTP's fascinating Theme park’ website.

As the first English-language sourcebook devoted to Kluge's work, the aim of this collection is to provide the reader with a comprehensive introduction to some of the key issues, themes, preoccupations and ideas driving the development of his groundbreaking film, television and literary productions. Following Thomas Elsaesser's introduction, the book is divided into eight thematically organised sections, the contents of which (as summarised below) contain a broad range of different texts, including: articles and stories by Kluge; critical essays on various aspects of his work; transcripts from some of his television programmes; and interviews with Kluge himself. Each of these texts explore central issues, themes and ideas that feature across Kluge's body of work, and the book as a whole encourages the reader to draw their own connections and associations between material that was produced both in different mediums and at various points in his career.

Kluge himself places great emphasis on fashioning texts (be they films, television programmes, interviews, or stories) that are neither closed nor didactic in their structure and that refrain from channelling the viewer/reader's thinking in a specific conceptual or ideological direction.

As Christian Schroder has argued in his review of Alexander Kluge's television programmes, tuning in to watch Kluge's work on late-night German television is akin to the experience of stumbling upon a literary bookshop in the middle of a red-light district. Wedged between the pornographic films, crime thrillers and live competition and shopping programmes that constitute the regular evening fare on the commercial stations, Kluge's 10 vor 11 (10 to 11), News and Stories, Mitternachismagazin (Midnight Magazine), and Primetime Spätausgabe (Prime Time Late Edition) certainly strike the viewer as strange anomalies. Constructed, in a similar vein to his films, out of a highly diverse collection of raw materials (including photographs, drawings, diagrams, clips from films and documentary footage), Kluge's programmes are - in both their form and content - certainly unlike anything else on German television.

Organised predominantly around interviews with writers, artists, musicians, film-makers, academics and directors from theatre and opera, the aim of the programmes is to provide what Kluge describes as ‘cultural windows’ for the ‘old media’ within the comparatively ‘new’ medium of television. These interviews (which provide the backbone for the majority of Kluge's programmes) are, however, unlike those conducted on other cultural magazine programmes - a format which has become increasingly popular on German television. Although the basic structure of Kluge's work for television resembles the interview format characteristic of these programmes, the interviewer (a role regularly performed by Kluge himself) remains predominantly off-screen - his presence marked only by the highly enthusiastic voice guiding and animating the discussions. Although these conversations are organised around the discussion of a particular theme, topic, or event (such as a documentary about techno, Werner Schroeter's staging of an opera by Bellini, the unfinished film projects of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Siegfried Kracauer's writings on film and mass culture, or the ideas of Deleuze and Foucault) the discussions frequently shoot off in directions that would not appear to be related to the topic in question.