Abstract:
The central figure in Alexander Kluge's 1979 film The Patriot (Die Patriotin)
is Gabi Teichert, a high school history teacher from the German state of Hesse,
whose complaints about the shortcomings of her discipline guide us through the
diverse collection of photographs, drawings, stories, poems, maps, and staged
and documentary footage out of which the film is constructed. Gabi Teichert,
we are informed by the director, is a 'patriot' because she takes an interest in
the rubble of history-in the memories, stories and diverse materials which
have been forgotten and/or discarded by the official narratives which appear in
the textbooks assigned to her students.
In this article I argue that, in stark contrast to these narratives, the form of
historiography practised in-and cultivated by-The Patriot (and Kluge's film,
literary, and television work more generally) is more akin to the extracurricular
activities of Gabi Teichert, which revolve around digging up materials which
complicate the highly reductive official narratives which chart the relationship
between the past and the present. I argue that, for Kluge, it is only by destabilising
these narratives that the conception of historical necessity upon which such
narratives are based can be destroyed. If, Kluge argues, such a practice can free us
from conceiving of the past as a continuous narrative which leads straight to the
present, then it is not only the past-but also the possibilities for the future
embedded in the past-which can be renegotiated and re-explored.
