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Days before his own passing in March 2026, Alexander Kluge published an obituary for Jürgen Habermas, his friend of nearly seventy years. Its title chose a collective imperative, a call for action, rather than an elegiac tone: “Now we must return to the workshop!”

Born in Halberstadt in 1932, Alexander Kluge trained as a lawyer and moved in the orbit of the Frankfurt School—it was Theodor Adorno who arranged the apprenticeship with Fritz Lang through which he came to film. In the 1960s he became a co-founder of the New German Cinema and, in part thanks to his legal expertise, drafted much of the movement’s institutional scaffolding. In dialogue with the philosopher Oskar Negt, Kluge answered Habermas with the concept of a counter-public sphere: a public built from below, out of historical as well as affectively-imbued experience. Kluge’s films, his thousands of stories and dialogues, his decades of late-night television were all assembled by montage—cut and joined, advancing by association and interruption, so that a situation can open at the seam and show the alternatives still folded inside it. “The utopia gets better the longer we wait for it,” he would iterate throughout his life. Alexander Kluge kept building on these cultural windows into his nineties, taking up the image-worlds of AI in his latest books and installations in the 2020s.

This two-day event honors the work of the late writer, philosopher, and filmmaker Alexander Kluge (1932-2026). Inviting Kluge’s readers, collaborators, and friends to Princeton, and further drawing on archival holdings as our working material, the symposium alternates between film screenings and roundtables around topics including Kluge’s relationship to critical theory; his multimedia and collaborative praxis; and his intertwined understanding of historical experience, meaning, and political emotion. The event features film screenings of Kluge’s award-winning Abschied von gestern (1966) and Sarah Morris’s Finite and Infinite Games (2017). Two further sessions will feature a seminar-style close reading of Kluge’s prose fiction and a workshop on Kluge’s recent approach to digital tools and video work. 

The event honors the life and legacy of a seminal thinker whose friendship and collaboration with Princeton spanned decades. It also aims to open his work to new audiences—and to lay up material for the Kluge scholarship still to come.