We mourn the loss of Alexander Kluge

Dr. Alexander Kluge
1932 - 2026
Film award winner of the city of Hof 2006

We mourn the loss of Alexander Kluge, a companion and friend of the Hof International Film Festival, director, producer, writer, philosophical theorist, visionary, artist, and time traveler.

Alexander Kluge was one of the defining figures of the Young German Cinema and later the New German Cinema. He was among the initiators of the Oberhausen Manifesto, which in 1962 declared “Papa’s cinema” dead and sparked a counter-movement against what was perceived as the backward-looking postwar cinema. Young filmmakers sought to tell their stories differently and free from convention—moving away from the entertainment cinema of the 1950s toward socio-political engagement. The auteur cinema of the New German Cinema, whose intellectual driving force was Alexander Kluge, was born.

Kluge, a friend of the long-time director of the Hof Film Festival, Heinz Badewitz, first presented his film KRIEG UND FRIEDEN at the festival in 1982, which he realized together with Stefan Aust, Axel Engstfeld, and Volker Schlöndorff. The film reflected on the planned NATO rearmament with Pershing II intermediate-range missiles, cruise missiles, and neutron bombs, scheduled for late 1983, as well as the public debate surrounding it.

Further films, as well as visits to the International Hof Film Festival, followed in all the years thereafter.

In 2006, he received the Award of the Citiy of Hof, which is awarded to personalities closely associated with the Hof Film Festival. The laudatory speech was given by Christoph Schlingensief.