ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the critical theorist and film director Alexander Kluge's approach to an extended crisis of the post-1989 Left in Germany and beyond. It discusses Kluge’s approach in the broader German tradition which seeks to understand and harness modern history by approaching it through the classicist’s or ancient historian’s lens. This tradition includes other responses to German reunification, but also a set of responses to an earlier, more well-defined crisis: the fall of the Weimar Republic. The German approaches suggest ways in which the distinctive skills, disciplines and perspectives taught in Classics and Ancient History departments might themselves help to further understanding of the modern world. The kind of fine-grained philological exegesis of modern texts and archaeological attention to the physical ruins of industrial modernity adumbrated by Kluge could be intensified — into, for example, systematic epigraphic studies of modern cities, linking technical precision and exhaustive coverage with broader interpretive questions about public writing, literacy and politics.
