Alexander Kluge, Russia Container, trans. Alexander Booth (Chicago: Seagull Books, 2022). 392pp., £27.50 hb., 978 1 80309 065 8 Russia Container is not a book about Russia. It’s about the images and stories that East Germans had of Soviet Russia before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and after. Alexander Kluge wrote it ‘on commission’ by his sister Alexandra Kluge, who, unlike her brother, lived in the German Democratic Republic after the separation of their parents. There Alexandra learnt Russian at school and read Pushkin as well as Russian fairy tales. After her death in 2017 Kluge collected some of her stories about Russia together with other (former East) German stories. The book shows the romantic feeling that East Germans had, and still have, for Russia. It also demonstrates how these passions spilt over to the ‘western’ part of Germany, or at least to Kluge himself. But the romanticism of the book is not one of exalted ideas of a nation or state, but rather of the individual human experience, which is in a fundamental conflict with abstract ideas and which tries to resist them. Kluge received the final version of the English translation of Russia Container on the day before the Russian tanks invaded Ukrainian territory. He decided to include an introduction which is meant to serve as a ‘reading aid’. After 24 February the reader might indeed need help reading Russia Container – a book that neither anticipates this event nor deals with other Russian interventions, operations and annexations before 2022. However, if the reader expects Kluge to make sense of the recent events, then the makeshift introduction fails. There Kluge chooses the form of diary entries, which begin with fantasising about the possibility of turning back time. The motive of turning back time suggests that something unamendable has happened, which history cannot rectify. Then he proceeds with a story of James Baker, who as the US Secretary of State travelled to Russia in 1991 with the abstract idea that Russia should not repeat the history of the German Empire after 1918 – humiliation and then total war. It is implicit in Kluge’s story that not much was done to prevent this. This could be read as a suggestion that if time could be turned back, it should go to 1991 – although another story in the introduction suggests that ‘what is happening in Ukraine’ has been developing for over 100 years and that this is why we cannot readily understand what is now happening or why it hurts so much: ‘The older [the crystal] is, the harder, the more unreal and more abstract’. The ‘reading aid’ also includes the opinion of a desperate civilian who suffered the war and who just ‘wants peace’, no matter who started it. If this was intended as an overview of stories on the war, then it is not representative of their variety. Indeed, there are no stories told by Ukrainians in Kluge’s book. Their absence confirms that Russia Container is about German stories. In other words, the introduction doubles and reinforces the content of the book rather than offering aid in this traumatic and disorientating situation. It confirms that (East) Germans have not known how the Russian ‘crystal’ formed itself in relation to Ukraine. Perhaps there could not have been a worse moment to publish such a book about Russia. But the anachronism of its publication reflects the artistic and literary form of the ‘container’. A container for Kluge transports that which has been collected before it would be lost. The Children’s and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen) from 1812 is the most vivid example of a container. The Grimm brothers collected fairy tales at a point when the interest in telling stories had already faded. Fairy tales used to evolve, consolidate and renew their narratives and motifs through the process of oral tradition. The Grimm brothers tried to capture them before they vanished once and for all, thereby producing a written, literary culture of these tales. Children’s and Household Tales is therefore merely a snapshot of the fairy-tale tradition and should not be considered as a finished work. Rather, it is precisely a container of stories, which came … Continue reading Containing Russia