Our Elsewheres: Excerpt from  Alexander Kluge's 'Air Raid'

The Capitol Cinema is owned by the Lenz family. Theatre manageress, also ticket seller, is their sister-in-law, Frau Schrader. The wood panelling of the boxes, the balcony, the stalls is painted ivory, red velvet seats. The lamp coverings are brown imitation pigskin. A company of soldiers from the Klus Barracks has marched up for the showing. As soon as the gong sounds, at 10 on the dot, the lights very slowly dim, Frau Schrader herself had constructed the intermediate special resistor with the projectionist. As far as film is concerned, this cinema has seen a great deal of suspense which has been prepared for by the gong, atmosphere of the house, very slow fading of the yellow-brown lights, introductory music, etc.

Now, hurled into the corner, Frau Schrader sees, just where the right-hand row of balcony seats meets the ceiling, a bit of smoky sky, a high-explosive bomb has opened up the building and smashed its way down into the cellar. Frau Schrader had wanted to check whether auditorium and toilets were completely cleared of customers after the final warning. Behind the firewall of the next building, flames flared through the drifting smoke. The devastation of the right-hand side of the cinema stood in no meaningful or dramatic relationship to the film shown. Where was the projectionist? She ran to the cloakroom, from where she could see the imposing foyer (cut- glass swing doors), the display cases for forthcoming attractions, all ‘higgledy-piggledy’ in a mess. She wanted to set to work there with an air-raid protection shovel, clear up the rubble in time for the 2 p.m. screening.

This was probably the most powerful shock that the cinema had ever experienced during the time Frau Schrader was in charge, the effect triggered by even the best films is hardly comparable. For Frau Schrader, a seasoned cinema professional, however, there was no conceivable shock, which could call in question the division of the afternoon into four fixed screenings (or six with matinee and late show). But meanwhile the 4th and 5th assault waves, which dropped their bombs on the town from 11.55 a.m., approached with an unpleasant and ‘low’ humming sound, Frau Schrader heard the whistle and the roar of the bombs, the explosions, so she hid herself in a corner between box office and cellar entrance. She never went down to the cellar, since she didn’t want to be buried under rubble. Once her eyes were more or less functioning again, she saw through the shattered glass of the little box office a string of silver machines flying off in the direction of the Deaf School.

Now she did begin to have second thoughts. She made her way over the pieces of rubble that covered Spiegelstrasse, saw that the ice- cream parlour in the corner house of Spiegelstrasse had received a direct hit, reached the corner of Harmoniestrasse, joined some men from the National Socialist Motor Corps who, with crash helmets, but without vehicles, were looking in the direction of the smoke and the fire. She reproaches herself for having abandoned the Capitol. She wanted to hurry back, but the men stopped her, as the facades of the buildings on Spiegelstrasse were expected to collapse. The houses were burning ‘like torches’. She tried to find a better word for what she saw in such detail.

By late afternoon she had worked her way through to the corner of Spiegelstrasse and Hauptmann-Loeper-Strasse (she still said Kaiserstrasse); here there is a square, formed by the convergence of five streets; she stood next to the concrete pillar which hours before had borne a public clock and looked diagonally across to the Capitol Cinema, now burnt to the ground.

The Lenz family, who were staying in Marienbad at the time, had still not been informed. It was impossible, however, for the cinema manageress to get to a telephone. She circled the plot with the ruin of the cinema and from the courtyard of the neighbouring building managed to reach the cellar emergency exit. She had got hold of soldiers, who helped force a way in with pickaxes. In the cellar corridor lay some six members of the matinee audience, the pipes of the central heating had been ruptured by explosions and poured a jet of hot water onto the dead. Frau Schrader wanted to establish some order here at least, placed the boiled and scattered body parts—whether dismembered as a result of this occurrence or of explosive force—in the wash cauldrons of the laundry room. She wanted to make a report to some responsible authority, but in the course of the evening was unable to find anyone willing to accept a report.

She walked, shattered by now, all the way to the ‘Long Cave’ where, in the company of the Wilde family, who had fled there during the raid, she chewed a sausage sandwich and they took turns spooning preserved pears from a jar. Frau Schrader felt ‘no good for anything any more’.

In Air Raid, a thirteen-year-old Alexander Kluge witnesses the sudden, near-total destruction of his unimportant hometown when American bombers, diverted by weather, unleash an air raid on Halberstadt in the final weeks of World War II, a catastrophe he later reconstructs in a fragmented, deeply personal literary account.

ALEXANDER KLUGE, a leading German writer-theorist and filmmaker, helped launch New German Cinema as a signatory of the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto. His cross-media practice extends Frankfurt School critical theory into fiction, film and television.