Chartbook

Chartbook 440: Between complacency, escapism and cognitive dissonance. Impressions from the spring week in Washington, April 2026.

Adam Tooze — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:44:21 GMT

In April the meetings of the IMF and the World Bank attract a crowd of financial decision-makers of all types to Washington DC. Unlike New York, DC is not normally a center of global finance. One of the fascinating things to watch during the spring and autumn meetings is to see the mingling of global finance with the “blob” i.e. the world of DC think tanks, the IMF/World Bank nexus, a sprinkling of NGOs and the Washington DC “swamp” i.e. US national politics.

In April 2026, one might imagine that such a meeting would be a theatre of polycrisis. We are in the midst of two shooting wars. More broadly, indicators of policy uncertainty are at spectacular levels.

In the latest World Economic Outlook of the IMF, the severe scenarios for the impact of the Iran war are spectacularly bad.

“In the severe scenario, (1) The shock to commodity prices is more severe and persistent, with oil prices increasing by 100 percent starting in the second quarter of 2026, relative to the January 2026 WEO Update baseline, but also staying at that level in 2027, before dissipating in 2028 (corresponding to an average petroleum spot price index of about $110 per barrel in 2026 and about $125 in 2027). Gas prices for Europe and Asia increase by 200 percent over the same period, and food commodity prices increase by 5 percent in 2026 and 10 percent in 2027. (2) One-year-ahead inflation expectations ratchet up by as much as 100 basis points in advanced economies by 2027 and by as much as 130 basis points in emerging markets excluding China, also by 2027. (3) A significant risk-off episode pushes up corporate premiums in advanced economies and in China by 100 basis points in 2026, and they stay at that level in 2027, while emerging markets excluding China experience a widening in sovereign spreads of 100 basis points over the same period, along with an increase in corporate spreads of 200 basis points. As in the adverse scenario, the monetary policy response is geared toward containing inflationary pressures rather than stabilizing output.”

We could see a major hit to global growth and a nasty surge in inflation.

Source: IMF WEO April 2026

But, far from such scenarios leading to an earnest conversation about worst case scenarios and their possible impact on the world economy, what actually ensues is a conversation defined by silences and euphemism. The conversation is not prescripted as at China’s Development Forum, but the conversation is nevertheless stilted.

The Trump administration representatives talk their book.

US policy wonks, including those associated with the Dems, tiptoe around the reality of disruption coming from the White House.

Financial market players point to the relative stability of equity valuations and the stability of bond markets.

Meanwhile, the IMF provides a helpful graphic explaining why its gloomy forecasts for 2025 were trumped by global economic resilience.

Source: IMF WEO April 2026

The ongoing US-Israeli assault on Iran is discussed, if it is discussed at all, in terms of the extraordinary daily expenditure claimed by the Trump administration - of $2 bn per day. Or, in terms of its impact on relations with the Europeans.

China is discussed. But China itself, is barely in the room.

Shyly, in closed door meetings, people will ask, “are we being complacent”? Are we underestimating the risks?

Possibly, but it surely goes deeper than that. The very construction of our situation as one of “uncertainty” and “risk”, denying the obviously political origin of the shocks, amounts to a cocktail of escapism and cognitive dissonance.

The cognitive dissonance manifests in the treatment of politics and the derangement of the United States, even in DC itself, as some kind of “external”, ultimately “exogenous” disturbance.

The escapism lies in the underlying assumption of a domain of rational market calculation, investment and business process that all simply continue “regardless”. And of course, for many in the DC rooms they do, in fact, simply continue and will do so. But there is no reckoning with what makes this possible and where the boundaries of that stability will be drawn.

And as a way of making sense of the mess, naturalism can also offer hope.

In one particularly candid, off the record exchange, a well-connected DC/corporate operator remarked to a large table: “We know we are burning the house down. An entire system is being reduced to ashes. Its a historic transformation. But, you know, new growth flourishes after a fire.”

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Chartbook 439 Electrostates v. petrostates. Clarifying a tricky distinction.

Adam Tooze — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:39:48 GMT

Some time last year a distinction began to be drawn between electrostates and petrostates. China was the key instance of an electrostate. The US under Donald Trump has made a spectacle out of its commitment to fossil fuels. The result have been a spate of headlines and articles pitting electrostates v. petrostates. I made my own contributed to the genre with the title of my LRB talk in the fall.

Since then I’ve become increasingly worried about the proliferating uses of the contrast. Because, as compelling as it may be for leader writers, it is a distinction that needs to be handled with care.

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We call a country an electrostate, if it draws a large and increasing share of its total final energy consumption in the form of electricity.

Source: Ember

This is opposed to a society that relies heavily on burning gas, oil or fuel directly, whether in industrial or domestic uses or in cars, trucks, ships and airplanes. How you get your energy delivered matters, because in the clean energy transition, the key mantra is “electrify everything”. Electricity is one form of power that we know how to produce by clean means. In most places that is still far from true for much of electricity generation, but it is the prospect of the energy transition that gives significance to the question of electrification and supercharges the idea of an “electrostate”.

China has been singled out as the archetypal electrostate. It has been expanding the share of its final energy use which is delivered in the form of electricity. Added to which, in the last five years, renewables have taken over as the most rapidly expanding form of electricity generation. Furthermore, Chinese manufacturers dominate the EV business, bringing the prospect into view that the internal combustion engine will be rapidly displaced. Ultra high-speed (electrified) railways compete with inter-regional flying inside China. And China, of course, is very much a mixed economy with the state playing a key role. So China ticks all the boxes of an ElectroState.

But think for a second about it, and you realize that the vision of electrostate development is not inherently confined to particular states and countries. When coal and hydro were the cheapest means of generating electricity and gas could not be shipped long-distance except by pipeline, the advantage in electrification was with mountainous countries with suitable rivers and with those with large coal deposits. But the advent of LNG and the arrival of renewables and batteries mean that electrification is now an option for everyone, everywhere.

Who would not choose versatile electric power, especially if it can be provided from clean and cheap sources? The Soviet Union was an electrical engineering powerhouse, where the PRC’s first generation of electrical engineers learned their trade. Brazil is a hydro power. The Gulf states have been eager importers of Chinese solar panels and batteries. In the United States, the state of Texas is the leading generator of utility scale renewable energy. For long stretches of the day, America’s largest producer of oil and gas, runs its electricity grid heavily on solar and wind supported by batteries.

The hyperscaling AI companies who are due to spend $650 bn on “compute” in 2026, are desperate to build out the US electrostate. Their problem is not just that the US resists imports of the cheapest Chinese solar panels and wind turbines and, under Trump sabotages renewables development in general, but that regardless of who sits in the White House, the process of grid expansion, connection and interconnection is so broken, that even if generating capacity becomes available, it cannot be hooked up efficiently.

In short, any economy can be an electrostate. Whether you produce huge quantities of oil, gas or coal, makes no difference. The degree to which you are an electrostate is an expression not of underlying factor endowments, or of economic structure, but of economic and governmental rationality. It is a complex index of your capacity for modern economic and technological development. The US is not not an electrostate. It is an electrostate, just one that is slouching rather than racing towards the new era of ultra-low cost electric power.

Nevertheless, it has been increasingly common to dub the US a petrostate. Generally, this isn’t meant kindly. Why?

The shale revolution has turned the United States into the leading oil and gas producer in the world. And into a major exporter. But the term “petrostate” was generally a designation reserved for economies and states that are dependent on oil and gas to generate rents (GDP), valued added (GDP), export earnings (dollars), or government revenue (taxes), or all four. To be designated a petrostate, in other words, means that you were at a relatively low level of economic development, or a low-level of state capacity.

The designation of petrostate applies to an economy like that of Angola. It can be sensibly applied to the Gulf states, though they have worked hard to diversify their economies. Officially, oil and gas account for “only” somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the Saudi economy. Saudi Arabia isn’t a city state. It is a county of 32 million inhabitants. At a pinch the designation as “petrostate” an be applied to Russia, particularly on the government revenue and export earnings side. But in the classic sense, it really does not make much sense when applied to the US. The American Petroleum Institute credits its own lobby - the oil and gas industry - with a $1.8 trillion contribution to US GDP 2021 or 7-8 percent. In Texas, oil and gas account for 15-16 percent of GDP. That is significant but not large enough to qualify even Texas as a petrostate in the strong sense of the word. If pundits and politicians choose to talk about the US as though it were a “petrostate” that is for political reasons. It is a matter of “discursive construction”, rather than an obvious economic fact. The strength of the US fossil fuel lobby needs explaining not taking for granted. And as for the contrast to electrostates is concerned, Texas may be responsible for 42 percent of US oil and gas production. But it is also America’s leading producer of renewable electricity and a pioneer in the deployment of battery power. Why? Because it makes economic sense. Being a competitive oil and gas producer, like Texas or Saudi Arabia, is not a license for waste. Having a dynamic sector, like oil and gas, in a regional economy in fact tends to raise costs for other sectors (Dutch disease), making them more, not less interested in other ways of saving money, as, for instance, with cheap, clean electricity.

What is truly distinctive about the USA as an oil and gas producer, and what puts the designation as a “petrostate” back in play, is not so much the production side, as the demand-side. The US economy is not just the leading oil producer in the world, producing over 13 m barrels per day, it is also the number one oil consumer, with demand running at c. 19-20 m barrels per day, roughly 20 percent of global demand. By comparison China consumers 15-16 m barrels, and produces at home no more than 4 m barrels. The EU consumes 10 m barrels per day and produces barely half a million. Saudi Arabia produces around 9.5 m barrels per day and consumers only 3.5 m barrels. Russia produces just short of 9 m barrels per day and consumes around 3.9 m barrels.

So this sets up three different positions with regard to the fossil fuel future. China and the EU have every reason to look for ways to replace imported oil with home generated (clean) electric power. Hence the compelling logic of China’s electrostate development and the puzzle as to why Europe is not pushing far harder in the same direction. In any case, the trend seems clear. Expect the EU and China to conform ever more comprehensively to the electrostate model.

Saudi Arabia (and Russia) face more of a dilemma. As suppliers they are petrostates, but with production far in excess of local demand they ultimately rely on global markets to absorb their production. They can cultivate and “lock-in” those global markets by building infrastructure like pipelines, LNG terminals and refineries. But ultimately they are competing on price against other energy types, notably electricity. Being dependent on foreign demand (and often on foreign capital and technology) was another common feature of classic petrostates. With China (and the EU) decarbonizing, the outlook for fossil fuel demand is not bright. This gives the classic petrostates a powerful incentive to diversify their economies away from fossil fuels. The rich producers - Saudi Arabia not Iraq or Angola - have money to invest. And clean and affordable electric power is an obvious line to pursue. Hence the investments by the Gulf states in Chinese renewables. Expect their future trajectory to be that of petrostates with electrostate sectors.

What qualifies the US as a unique kind of “petrostate”, is not just its huge oil and gas production, but the fact that this supply is met by even greater demand. This gives the United States a choice. The balance of demand and supply means that it could simply decouple from the global trend towards (green) electrification and “lock in” a hydrocarbon based national or continental model. This is not the most obvious path. The most obvious path for the US, as a much larger and more sophisticated economy than either Russia or Saudi Arabia, would be to opt for the same mixed economy model but with a different balance i.e. an increasingly green electrostate with a large hydrocarbon sector. This was the “all of the above” model favored by the Obama and Biden administrations. But the GOP und Trump don’t favor this path. For ideological reasons, they oppose a mixed model of fossil and electrotech development. This is a perverse, political choice. But unlike for the rest of the world, this is at least thinkable in the US case. In an inversion of familiar logic, the US is large enough, rich enough and sophisticated enough to simply freeze in place the late 20th century model for the foreseeable future.

To do this, the push to electrify mobility would be aborted. Internal combustion engines would rely on America’s domestic oil production or cheap imports of oil. If it chose to exclude renewables in electricity generation by regulatory decree, the US could revert to the early 2000s gas-based model of electrification. An electricity system based first and foremost on natural gas is an option for the US. At the margin this would be less efficient than a model with a growing share of renewables. But the main obstacle to this path is not so much economics, but the inability to produce enough gas turbines and the inability of America’s network to rapidly connect new capacity. Though it is rarely spelled out in this form, it is this specter which keeps the talk of an American “petrostate” in circulation.

If this were to be the future it would be highly significant not only for its immediate impact, but also for the way that it scrambles normal models of causation. The petrostate designation was after all based on a naturalistic model of economic development driven by factor endowments. Petrostates precisely in being determined by their natural endowments were also in some more “primitive” than diversified economies that survived and prospered through finding niche in the division of labour. If the United States chooses to use its endowment of fossil fuels and the size of its economy to freeze in place the early 20th-century status quo and thus to fall more and more out of step with global electrotech development, that will not be a natural fact, but a matter of political choice. The US would be the pioneer of a novel form of “closed petrostate”.

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Chartbook 438: "The continuation of critical theory by narrative means" - Alexander Kluge and the anti-realism of feelings.

Adam Tooze — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 13:43:02 GMT

14 February 1932 – 25 March 2026

I was, I am, I will be: that is a unity for every one of us. I cannot feel sensations without reawakening in myself the child I was and the parents who influenced that child. Without hope, I cannot even speak. I would be paralyzed. I cannot do without this one moment in which there still seems to be something to be decided: this is what we call the present. In this sense, the three grammatical times—I have named only the simple ones here—are present in every moment, thought, memory, thing forgotten, and job done. There is not one time, as the novels and new poetry of the nineteenth century would have us believe. D&O, 30.

For Alexander Kluge - Adorno-student, filmmaker, writer, one-time legal counsel of the Frankfurt School, extender of critical theory by any means necessary - it was always clear that time is multiple, overlapping, broken. Narration, his chosen means of engagement, is for Kluge attached directly to life and the sequence of generations:

it is very important to note that the narrative space in which we humans narrate and experience—together they constitute life spans—is first and foremost a vessel of time between birth and death. Within this receptacle, three generations together create an intelligible narrative space insofar as they directly engage one another in the act of storytelling. There is another aspect to this—namely, that we also look outward from within our many concurrent life spans. For example, that six-year-old boy I once was is watching you right now because I am now curious and the kind of curiosity I had as a child is not something you can easily unlearn. At the same time, my thirty-year old self that played the organ is also active. This, too, is present, but not at every moment of my life. As is the case with a Russian grandmother, sixteen if not eighty eyes peer out of a single adult human being upon the world, and the world looks back at them. And other people look back as well. These are, in toto, the unified life spans of experience, something that is an abiding theme for me, one that belongs to storytelling.

Over against these life spans stands a reality that purports to be something real. One need not always believe this claim. At first glance, reality is characterized by an extreme rigidity. An inmate who runs headfirst into the wall of his jail cell realizes instantly how objective the real conditions around him are. Conversely, these conditions are also brittle. This form—at times capricious and capable of metamorphosing like spirits and at other times hardened matter—is what we must understand when we say that Critical Theory works with an antagonistic concept of reality. The reality contained within this concept is real in the sense that, for example, an accident has cost someone his life or wars break out. Likewise, reality is a crude invention, a cocoon we fashion around ourselves so as to be able to withstand the real world. Reality, then, has many properties when it comes to narration. When it comes to enumeration, registration, or balancing accounts, reality is fairly straightforward. But once you begin to tell stories, you begin to notice that reality has catacombs, wells, and abysses. Below every linear narrative lie happiness and misfortune. D&O, 102-3

The line between psychosis and neurosis may turn on the distinction between the relationship to reality, but Kluge gives no ground:

I believe the sharpest ideology that exists is the one that considers reality to be real. D&O, 421

As for his three generation model:

For me, reading Kluge for the first time in the late 1980s was a defining experience. He was then at the peak of his career, transitioning in his three-phase biographical schema from the height of stage 2 to the uplands of stage 3. I was just entering intellectual adulthood, transitioning from stage 1 and 2. He was for me an obscure hero, a secret passion. A much less well-known than figures like Foucault or Habermas, but for me almost as important. On a par with Latour. More German. Intensely preoccupied with precisely the history that I was struggling with as well. It mattered that Kluge was alive. That he was still productive. That there was always more Kluge to read. In the successor generation to Adorno and Horkheimer, if Habermas was the official academic wing of the Frankfurt School, Alexander Kluge (sometimes in conjunction with his long-time collaborator Oksar Negt) were the left-wing cultural counterpart. The generational logic turns inexorably. My younger self is now layered with many more. And Alexander Kluge is died. He died on March 25 2026.

Kluge once said that knowing that Ovid accompanied Heiner Müller in his final days in intensive care changed his relationship to that classic text (D&O, 86). Since reading the news of Kluge’s passing last week, I realize that for me, one of Kluge’s book might be a talisman I take to hospital with me, the next time.

Kluge is a comfort, but also a mystery. He speaks to us at many levels. Dozens of book and films. Hundreds of stories. Thousands of pages and hours of TV.

Shaken by the news of his passing, I’m filled with the need to understand his impact on me a bit better. I found answers in two volumes snatched, on the go, from the internet, a gesture Kluge, who embraced every kind of media innovation, might have appreciated. My two keys to better understanding Kluge are, first, the excellent collection of explanatory texts and interviews by Kluge himself, compiled by one of his main English translators, Richard Langston.

References in this piece are given as D&O, followed by a page number.

For further context I am relying on the excellent text by Christoph Streckhardt, from whom I borrow the title for this post.

Asked what is his central question, Kluge once responded, that his central preoccupation is with what he calls the anti-realistic impulse contained in human feelings and the very real effects of that anti-realism.

If real relations do not respect a person, then he will in turn deny these nonhuman relations. This is the antirealism of feeling. People are not objective in this respect, but rather human and subjective. This makes the topic of “reality” volatile because a person’s subjective reality is just as real as the objective relations, the wall we run into headfirst. D&O, 88.

This tension between nonhuman relations and the force of our internal emotional energies, is the “engine” of all of Kluge’s hundreds of histories, composed of part documentary and part inventive, modernist fiction.

If the real historical impact of the antirealism of feelings is Kluge’s central theme, this poses a deep challenge. Because feelings are both immediate and undeniable and mysterious.

It is not as easy as it may seem to discover a feeling or to describe how it behaves. Feelings are too rich and complex for the mind to comprehend. The philosopher Blaise Pascal says the heart has a mind, but that the mind itself cannot understand. This could also be the guiding theme for my Chronik der Gefühle. This is not an argument for or against feelings. Rather, it is an attempt to direct our attention. The things that move humans from within are indeed significantly stronger and more powerful than anything that happens on the outside D&O, p. 44-45

Kluge’s work consists of stories about people and things and what moves them, both the material and the emotional forces - soldiers in battle with their equipment and their bodies, engineers and machinery, teachers, social workers. You might call it a materialism with the feelings put back in.

It is not that I celebrate feelings. I just want people to recognize their existence. Also, it is not about inner worlds, but rather about the feelings that can be recognized in physical structures and not just in monuments set in stone. The houses we live in are feelings converted into space. D&O, P. 45

Not for nothing, alongside Adorno, it is Walter Benjamin and his extraordinary inventory of a history of the 19th century that is Kluge’s inspiration. Asked to give an illustration, of what kind of situation interests him, Kluge makes a characteristics swerve:

The first industrialized war takes place between 1914 and 1918. It involves a horrible clash of stockpiled munitions made from the labor of countless workers and engineers. Also involved are miners from both the Ruhr region and French coal mining regions who each dug tunnels into a hill outside of Verdun that were to be detonated. This is highly specialized labor power at work that will soon become dead labor. Marx applied the concept of the collective worker [ Gesamtarbeiter ] to this labor power; employed by two competing companies, the collective worker withdraws himself from the economic possibilities of both. The collective worker is tragic because he could develop a self-consciousness about his labor power, but instead he works against his own interests. Disconnected, objective, and subjective realities diverge. In contrast, capitalism, united by stock markets, knows quite well how to collaborate because it is only a matter of commodity exchange. Because everything comes down to the exchange of commodities, nothing matters all that much and nothing is psychically difficult, whereas labor is something quite valuable that people cling to and pin their own identity to. D&O, 88-89

A materialism with the feelings put back in, is one that demands its own type of history. This will be montage, combination, assembly, configuration and chronicle.

AK: We have the choice between an objective chronicle, a chronicle of events, or a chronicle of feelings, which describes what happened subjectively. It seems to me that this subjectivity has more staying power. It is the more materialist of the two elements. On the one hand, feelings are highly adaptable, and are quite resilient against distress and suffering. At the same time, however, they are more obstinate and more like concrete than anything else I can think of, because they do not fundamentally change over the course of 2,000 years.
JR: So you understand those historical events as expressions of emotional states? Are feelings the root causes of what has happened historically?
AK: Exactly. There is the saying, “The Celts are everywhere, we just do not see them.” The Romans used this phrase. It is exactly the same with feelings. They are everywhere, even in unexpected places. For example, they live in institutions, which only become solid and have staying power when they are filled with feelings. D&O, P. 44

This tension between the acknowledged authority (the Roman Empire in all its positivity and force) and the repressed (the Celts and their subterranean and guerilla culture) is the driving force of Kluge’s histories. This tension sets up reverberations in each and every one of us. As Kluge liked to remind his audiences, we carry within us, in our parentage, and their parents and their parents and so on, highly conflictual histories, that make up reality at any given moment. As Kluge described his father.

… my father when I visited him on the first of May in 1970 in what was then East Germany. I arrived with the eyes of a West German at a point in my life when I was working in Frankfurt. My father sat at the desk of his medical practice that contained a maternity ward; on the first floor lay a pregnant woman in labor. My father, always the focused doctor and obstetrician, took a pause before the onset of the woman’s next set of contractions. Long preoccupied with the Battle of Marne of 1914, which he believed could have ended differently, he was reading a book about Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Outside his window, the National People’s Army (of the GDR) drilled on Bismarck Square, replete with brass band, an official address, and a delegation of Communist Party officials. You are perhaps starting to see how disparate this reality is. I do not think that anyone on the square would have mentioned Napoleon in his speech; that would have been strange. Nor was the Battle of Marne topical for them. They experienced that May Day in the GDR along with all the cells in their bodies just like every other person equally equipped with billions of companions inside their bodies. Now, my father was then called upstairs to the pregnant woman whose contractions started up again. He operated in four realities simultaneously. This is narrative. When I allow it to happen, I create multidimensionality, which, in the case of Bach, contains polyphony. I would hold it in high regard were that also the case with my stories. In fact, I can easily produce it through respect and observation. I do not have to make it, for reality is itself multifaceted. This is what I meant earlier when I said that there is the linear narrative perspective as well as a vertical structure made of comments, catacombs, and wells that fundamentally enrich storytelling. For this reason, there is no narrative without a subtext, without double meanings, without ambiguity, or without metaphors about which I will talk next time. They are a mechanism for intercourse between so many levels that comprise a nonacademic— emotional—mine. That is a human being. D&O, 105-6

Until this week, I read Kluge piecemeal. Relishing his essayistic style. His fragmentation of the grand narratives that I myself am addicted to. Reading him more systematically in the last few days, with the help of Langston and Streckhardt, what I understand better than ever before is the very grand arc into which Kluge’s thinking is inserted.

The basic story is that Europe exited the early modern period the wrong way. Along with Ovid, one of Kluge’s great heroes is the great Renaissance essayist Montaigne (1533-1592). In Kluge’s words:

Michel de Montaigne has experience with religious wars: the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in which Catholics slaughtered Protestants. To be called a Protestant means nothing other than belonging to those Swiss who barricaded themselves in Switzerland or La Rochelle and slaughtered Catholics. For a moment under Henry IV, peace emerges. Feelings briefly become sensible. At this point, Montaigne assumes his place and says: Outfitted with Ovid, antiquity’s writers, and our contemporary experiences, we are going to set side by side all sensations, every experience ranging from lies to the fabrication of illusions, from establishing the truth to desire, in order to test once more the following: What brings people together? What is good for the community? What abolishes religious wars? In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, strong traces of an enlightenment reside in the tenacity found in the diaphragm. If the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was insufficient in order to defeat fascism, then one must dig deeper and inquire about earlier stages of enlightenment. D&O, 411-412

Not only was the 18th century enlightenment not enough to counter fascism, it had within it its own violence, the violence of the French revolution. Or, as Kluge puts it:

Yet we need to secure the seventeenth-century paths (perhaps he means 16th-century, AT) that we can still ascribe to emancipation from the palaver of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its rhetoricians who again introduce as much egocentrism as in the times of the French Revolution when one person sent another person to the guillotine to be executed. D&O, 427=8

Might things have gone differently? Was the terror, was Napoleon’s catastrophic imperialism the necessary telos of the revolution? As always in Kluge there were alternatives. History could have gone a different way. The 19th century could, for instance, have begun, not with Napoleon’s rampage, but with a Prussian-French synthesis orchestrated by figures such as Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, a key political figure in France’s stabilization of the late 1790s and a great admirer of Immanuel Kant, who at the time was at the absolute height of his influence across Europe. Kluge sees this possibility through the eyes of the German poet and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811).

At this point in time, (Kleist) he was motivated by the belief that it would be critical for Europe if the French revolutionaries once and for all schooled themselves and the new human characteristics both commercial and technical in nature that arose out of the Revolution by reading Kant. This could also be seen as a variation on partisanship, a new patriotism, that aims to connect the interests of the Prussian patriots with those in new France. Try and imagine that moment: what kind of craftsmanly Europe it would be, had manual and intellectual labor been introduced into the spirit of patriotism! D&O 32

But the possibility of a Franco-Prussian-Kant-Sieyes moment was blown apart by Napoleon’s drive to conquest. What resulted instead was Napoleon’s march to Ulm and Austerlitz (1805), the end of the Holy Roman Empire, the destruction of Prussia’s army at Jena (1806), Hegel’s Phenomenology, the foment of the Prussian reform period, the disaster of Napoleon’s march on Moscow and the “war of liberation” that followed. Kluge remembered the literature of the “Befreiungskriege” against Napoleon featuring prominently in his father’s study, fancy volumes whose strong bindings hid not only historical treasures but works of a more erotic variety, stashed behind them in the bookcase. D&O, 86.

Out of the “Sattelzeit” (Koselleck) of the transition from the 18th to the 19th century, emerge, for Kluge, three new forces.

At this seam (from the 1780 to the 1810s), spanning more than three decades bridging these two antagonistic centuries (18th and 19th), three new developments arise while individual forces struggle against one another: popular war, industrialization, and the codification of a new tenderness. In our own time at the end of the twentieth century, it is important to recognize the changed guises these three elementary processes have assumed, processes that begin in earnest in the early nineteenth century but whose roots go back to the eighteenth century: we find it in the grasping for the stars, which industrialized war does; in the departure from classical industry; and in this chimeric turn toward a new subjectivity … D&O, 31

The motive force of this iron triangle of popular war, industrialization and sentiment was not to be the French-German axis.

The possibility of a cooperative relationality on the Continent, assuming such a possibility ever existed, was decided negatively in the Battle of Waterloo (1815). It was the London Stock Exchange and not the pulse of united craftsmen that decided the fate of the European continent and all the others on our planet for the ensuing two centuries. After losing its Eurocentric orientation, this programmed world that resembled Babylonia now drifts away toward the Pacific Rim, the “Antipodes” as Kleist would say, the Californians. This is convenient for dramaturgically inclined presidents, Hollywood, and all the new suits ready to make comprehensive decisions, mistakes, and divisions anew, as if the task at hand were to bundle two forgetful centuries together. … D&O, 33

Thus Kluge in 1985 on receipt of the Kleist Prize, with Reagan and Kohl in the ascendant. Anglo-American capitalism’s hegemony was not just a geoeconomic development. For Kluge it went hand in hand with the 19th-century literary and cultural style. The linear, romantic novel, with its compressed and repressed view of history, was the cultural expression of this double-century. It is this which Kluge sets himself to resist, summoning figures like Kleist and Montaigne and Ovid against it: “There is not one time, as the novels and new poetry of the nineteenth century would have us believe. Kleist’s work makes clear just how broken the old concept of time is.” D&O, 30-31

This anchoring of an account of the 20th century, in a critical history of the transition from the 18th to the 19th century, is a movement of thought that was by no means limited to Kluge. Kluge himself briefly acknowledges Foucault as an obvious analogue (D&O, 47). It was, after all, in the same moment from the 1780s to the 1800s that Foucault located the epistemic rupture between the “Classical” and the “Modern Age”. For Foucault, as for Kluge, the 19th-century conception of history centered on the figure of “Man”, marked a radical reduction of possibilities, an episteme to be struggled against. In Germany, Carl Schmitt with his critique of the enlightenment, continued by Reinhart Koselleck in Kritik und Krise (1954), operated on a similar terrain, though they valorize the conservative 19th century differently than Kluge. The lack of any direct exchange between Koselleck and Kluge is a truly puzzling aspect of West German intellectual culture.

Kluge’s loyalty was to the Frankfurt School. As he affirmed in an interview in 2001:

Dialectic of Enlightenment is the foundational book to which I have committed myself. Suppression of the self is required if you want to sail between Scylla and Charybdis and make it home. And this suppression correlates with the enslavement of others and your own inner self. Odysseus’s comrades who have to row in the boat are essentially slaves, certainly not knights. Applied to our own country, we have to add that our forefathers on the medieval farmsteads in the time before the Peasants’ Wars did not have the option of escaping the Cyclops by boat. They were landlocked. Thus, for us the fairy tale “The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids” (A fairytale from the Grimm collection, much like the Three Little Pigs that is more familiar in the English-speaking world) is what the Odyssey is for the seafaring Greeks. 3 This fairy tale poses fundamental questions: Whom may I let in, and whom should I not let in under any circumstance? Who has to be locked out of the house? This is the mistake the little kids make initially. They let the wolf in, just as we let in Hitler in 1933. And then, on the other hand, the little kids miraculously manage to get out of the wolf’s belly safe and sound. These are continental variants of the same attempt to create security: “How can I protect myself? What must I be afraid of? What holds voluntary actions together? What can I put my trust in?”

The question then is how we narrate life and agency in a world described by Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of the Enlightenment. Kluge describes his own method as

not really all that different than the Dialectic of Enlightenment. If you go searching for traces of feelings and use the methods of poetry to observe carefully, you will find that these feelings are quite diverse. They are subject to the kind of metamorphoses described by Ovid. As such, they far exceed moral character, reason, or society. If a creature cannot bear something any longer, it transforms itself. This means that feelings have many ways out. They have, in fact, always been partisans with respect to myth, and they also behave like partisans with respect to reason, which seeks to overcome myth. They are, therefore, capable of resistance.

For Kluge the essential thing is to escape the conventions of 19th-century, historical realism. His fragmentary, cameo, style is not just a “lack” of coherence, but an essential method.

“Adorno’s style of writing is fragmentary. However, ellipsis is also, simply put, a narrative form I love. It is a fundamental form of the epic. I have enough role models: Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Homer’s narrative style in the Iliad . All great narratives have this structure. The linear story (the model of the “modern” novel and narrative history, AT) is an exception and an idea of the nineteenth century. By carefully moving the narrative from A to B, along a common thread, it does away with every side issue. It is a strategy for main streets and highways. On the other hand, walking on trails and garden paths, which involves sensing, guessing, wandering, and strolling, functions according to other rules.” D&O 59

The lack of structure is not a deficit, but a strength.

“From its beginnings until today, the form of the novel is insufficient for understanding and navigating our world. One needs clearer, more rigorous instruments.” D&O, 93

To insist that materialism must open itself to feelings, comes with obvious risk, the most obvious being a psychologism or a sentimentality. Another is repetition. The work of great 19th and early 20th century literature, the inward exploration of emotions and psychology - Kluge cites Tolstoy, Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Musil - was well done. Understanding and analysing how feelings act on society, we do not need to begin all over again. As Kluge insists, there is no need to redo Proust. “Proust wrote the definitive account of twentieth-century human relationships. We do not need to repeat his work again.” D&O, 79 For Kluge, Musil’s unavailing struggle to finish Volume III of the Man without Qualities - for Kluge the novel of the transition from the 19th to the 20th century - in Swiss exile, amidst the horror of World War II, is emblematic of the need to find a new path. What the 20th century and 21st century demand is not a “do-over” of Proust, but something more akin to a socio-emotional “physics”. Kluge’s texts have a coldness, akin to the neue Sachlichkeit of the interwar period. He embraces Gottfried Benn as his soulmate.

Kluge cites Musil as follows:

“The difficulty, then, cannot be anything other than a skewed relationship, an abiding miscommunication between the intellect and the soul. We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.” 16 I am always asked: “Can’t you make it a little cheaper? Can’t you make it somehow easier on the viewer? Then you’d sell more tickets at the theater.” I cannot do it that way. We filmmakers get just as few discounts as reputable physicists. … “I would like to align myself with societal relations, with good physics, with objectivity, precisely because I have feelings [ Empfindungen ].” D&O, p. 38

Musil, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and with them the catastrophes of modern European history hang over Kluge’s work: Napoleon’s disaster in Russia, Verdun, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the bombing war - but interspersed with that, in a move typical of Kluge, he insistently evokes also his parent’s divorce, which though it took place in 1942 was the preface to the physical destruction of his family’s home under allied bombs in Halberstadt in 1945. As Kluge wrote of 1942:

“To this day I fail to understand. . . . I suspect my parents were confused in their minds that year, and the year before as well. Wartime. The DRUG OF MILITARY CONQUEST, a pharmakon that infiltrated people’s innermost beings, about two years after its poison of the zeitgeist-suffused reality. THE GROWNUPS OF 1942! Furnished with phantasmagorias.”

From Barbarossa to divorce. It was catastrophe that drew me to the first work of Kluge’s that I came across, in a bookshop in Heidelberg, in the late 1980s, Schlachtbeschreibung (Battle) - Kluge’s once notorious, historical collage-montage-novel about the battle of Stalingrad (1942-1943). A book about war published by Suhrkamp, the house publisher of German social theory! For me, it was irresistible. It was precisely the six-year old that Kluge acknowledges in himself, that drew me to his book - the little English boy who on his sixth birthday, July 5^th 1973, learned that that day marked the thirtieth anniversary of the “tank battle of Kursk”, the “largest battle in human history”. Who to mark the occasion, begged for an endless pile of “computer paper” to create a scroll-like commemoration of the battle, learning to draw the distinctive profile of a T-34 complete with the drums of diesel on the rear. The boy who collected fragments of incendiary bombs, that in the 1970s could still be found in London attics and gardens, the same kind of ordinance that burned down Kluge’s Halberstadt on 8 April 1945.

If Kluge’s book about Stalingrad, Schlachtbeschreibung is sprawling and endlessly reworked, Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945, “The Air raid on Halberstadt on 8 April 1945' was one of Kluge, most complete and “finished” pieces. Streckhardt quotes Walter Jens on Kluge’s extraordinary vision:

“If anywhere in postwar literature, it is here that the totality of a process is brought to light: the thoughts of two women watching from a tower (close-up); the description of a wedding party who, without knowing it, are eating their last meal before execution (medium shot); the tracking of the airplanes across the sky (long shot). The confrontation of the tactics from below (fire beaters, makeshift cellar shelters) with the strategy from above (radar screen, the calculus of annihilation). A back-and-forth between individual plans (What happens if the piano lesson is canceled as a result of the bombing raid?) and the organization of the whole (A city is to be destroyed). And finally the dialectical turn: those who have descended from the sky go, after the surrender, to the survivors on earth—and behold, the same language is spoken.”[20]”

Of course, the nightmare of history as totality, is that it is ineluctable. In Kluge the fundamental urge is the opposite of fatalistic. He is above all interested in gaps, in “ways out”, in how we escape. He is interested in how wars of religion, civil wars - for the German tradition from Hobbes to Schmitt the worst kinds of wars - have been avoided. As he says, we should be kinder to the likes of Montaigne. Like him, it is our job too to collect fragments after the end of wars of religion. He commemorates Stalingrad precisely because it was doomed to failure. For good reasons. The best reason. Because, in the end, the Germans did not “want” it as much as the Soviets did. Stalingrad was not just a military defeat. It was a case study of political disaster.

Kluge turns Benjamin around.

Walter Benjamin writes of Paul Klee’s image of the angel of history who faces the past to witness something terrible while he is blown forward into the future by the winds of progress. This image can be interpreted in another way. It could also very well be the case that this angel is a guardian angel who originates from the untapped forces of humankind. These forces from every possible past have protected us up until now such that we are in fact smarter than our appeals to reason. We might in a certain sense host within us a balancing mechanism that enables us to continue our existence despite our frequent attempts … to eradicate our own species. That humankind may in fact be homo compensator instead of homo sapiens is admittedly a faint hope, though certainly more justified than merely entrusting the retelling of stories with the task of sustaining a straightforward, linear notion of hope for the future. D&O, 108

Or, as Kluge said in his commemoration of Adorno in 2009:

It seems that a theory, which discusses the dialectic of enlightenment and diagnoses the disease of reason extending from its ancient beginnings to modernity, neither constitutes a system of doomsaying nor does it call for one. Upon closer examination, we can always find redemptive elements—either before the catastrophe occurs, or as it is unfolding, or by learning from it and then reversing it after the misfortune. But these elements lie scattered far from each other. Our historical experience tells us that they rarely, if ever, have found their way back to each other just in time. The work of creating linkages (when a weaver creates a web, it is called a text) is necessary for perceiving the juxtaposition of redemption and catastrophe; this is heterotopia. One has to twist and turn the universal, the particular, and the treacherous singular just as the spider Arachne does with her webs in Ovid’s poem. One has to combine the facts into a story. Redeem the facts from human indifference! D&O, 452-3.

For Kluge this idea of reworking the material of history in narrative is a fundamental form of agency, directed agains fate:

humans, instead of resigning themselves to reality, decide to change it. They do not wait until Judgment Day, or a revolution. A permanent revolution in the sense of a nondogmatic Marxism would be storytelling in which humans voluntarily decide to alter their reality spontaneously and irrefutably. D&O,104

And Kluge takes inspiration for this vision of narrative agency from Marx himself:

“These petrified things must be made to dance by singing to them their own melody”. 4 Karl Marx wrote this sentence. It means that within every poison there is also an antidote. I can hardly maintain a prejudice while moving. If I use my ear to examine something that overwhelms my eyes and notice a wrong pitch, then the graven image is of less value than before. Interaction is the natural remedy against prejudice. This is more easily said than done, but it is still rudimentary. In Celtic speech and storytelling lies the antithesis: polyphony. There are many kinds of alliance systems that do not function like a uniformed parade. They are formed among partisans. Translated literally, a partisan is someone with a bias. Whoever is biased is ready for a fight and interrelates with others. They have opinions. The words “partisan” and “author” can actually be interchanged. D&O, 424.

Kluge’s turn against necessity also, however, refuses facile redemptive hope and any kind of “dialectical kitsch”. For Kluge on this score, there is a profound gap between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno.

I see myself more in accordance with Adorno’s line of thinking. He would never publish a book entitled The Principle of Hope. He would nevertheless admit that we cannot live without hope, even if we have to produce hope at the expense of truth. The most wonderful fallacy that has generally allowed creatures to continue to live on this planet is basic trust. Every life-form gets its share of this basic trust at birth. Even animals have it. Evolution teaches us those life-forms that survive are those that begin their existence believing that the world has their interests at heart. Looking at our century, this assumption is revealed to be a fundamental fallacy. The world has neither the intentions of those who died at Verdun at heart nor does it have the interests of Holocaust victims at heart. We can therefore objectively say: this is ideology, a wonderful fallacy that nonetheless sustains us and gives us strength. Adorno would agree on this point. It is for this reason that the last chapter in Chronik der Gefühle is called “The Long March of Basic Trust.” P. 45-46

In his wickedly titled Learning Processes with Deadly Outcomes (wicked because Lernprozesse was one of Habermas’s favorite phrases), Kluge imagines a handful of german suvivors of Stalingrad breaking out of the pocket, not to the West (in the direction of Germany and home), but to the East. Eventually, they make their way to China where they join the red forces and contribute to the total reconstruction of that country and its landscape, as well as eventually embarking on extra planetary adventures. Their loss of homeland in Stalingrad becomes the launching pad for extended lives of conquest, torture and war beyond the bounds of planet earth.

The title of one of Kluge’s later compendiums is telling, Die Luecke, die der Teufel Laesst. The Gap the Devil Leaves. The devil is the main actor, but his command is not complete. The point is not that these stories end well with “happy endings”. The point is to do justice to the motive force with which a certain kind of subjectivity impels history. A typical “Kluge moment” is one such as this:

Fleeing from Russia in the winter of 1812, the pontoniers (bridge-building engineers) of Napoleon’s defeated army together with their general, Jean Baptiste Eblé, are standing up to their necks in the freezing water of the Berezina River. A bridge is built for the grotesque purpose of evacuating the few surviving units from the Grande Armée. All of these pontoniers died of exhaustion in the following days. “For if your own life you are not willing to stake / That life will never be yours to make.” D&O, 32

It is a version of the master-slave dialectic in which the hero who stakes their life IS the worker. And the story ends not with the subordination of the slave to the master and a dialectic of progress, but instead, a death that is itself a monument to an obstinate sense of purpose and to a sense of self. But not every such story ends with death. There is no fatality for Kluge. There are possibilities. There is learning and development. Modernity is an achievement.

Imagine two trucks encounter each other on a lonely stretch of mountain road. There is a sharp descent to the right. It is drizzling or snowing. One of the drivers vaguely sees the other in his cab for a few seconds. If one of the wheels of one of the vehicles touches the wheels of the other, they will both fall into the chasm. How intently both of these professional drivers work their equipment, the steering wheel, the pedals! How respectfully they continue to think of each other for only a few minutes after they have passed each other! They could have seen each other only for a few seconds. How different and disdainful their feelings would have been had the other made a mistake! I call this an objectified encounter with danger. This is the only humane development that has ever been brought about by industry and its attendant discipline that is devoid of any ambivalent interference. D&O, 36-7

Clearly, sotto voce, this is an answer to Adorno for whom the only definite logic in history led from the “slingshot to the megaton bomb”. No, Kluge replies, we have learned something else: how not to crash on a narrow road. The consequences are crucial, but not all-encompassing. Having saved themselves from disaster by exquisite professional driving, Kluge speculates: “How carelessly both drivers presumably treat their wives when they come home, even though this kind of carelessness is just as dangerous as the mountain drive! Our society does not possess an ideal objectivity, neither in times of war nor in those leading up to it, nor in tender relationships.” D&O, 37

Non-disaster, humane development, is a precarious balancing act: “This is equilibration, essentially a circus-like achievement performed by two people”. D&O, 427 For Kluge and for Adorno, civilization is precarious. “Adorno never ceases to emphasize that the foundation of our modern civilization is thin and shaky”. D&O 455. And for Kluge, thus, what he prizes most is not “homo sapiens” endowed with the will to know, but “homo compensator”, the human as balancer, D&O, 496.

And yes I’m thinking what you may be thinking in reading this, In these fragile aspirations not to screw up, to learn to do better, to be better truck drivers, or - why not? - to be better dentists, resonates another chain of association. If the stakes are the preservation of civilization, if the key is a question of balance and kairos, of seizing the moment, was Kluge, as Geoff Mann might have it, a Keynesian? Or might one put this the other way around: Was Keynes (as I have come to understand him through conversation with Stefan Eich) an important instance of a “Klugean” actor? I prefer the latter version. But I’m not sure.

What I am certain of, is that at this moment I am feeling Kluge’s polyphony.

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Chartbook 440: Between complacency, escapism and cognitive dissonance. Impressions from the spring week in Washington, April 2026.

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Chartbook 438: "The continuation of critical theory by narrative means" - Alexander Kluge and the anti-realism of feelings.