Drilling Through Hard Boards

It was Max Weber who famously described politics as 'a strong, slow drilling through hard boards with both passion and judgement'. Taking this as his starting point, Alexander Kluge examines in 133 stories the tools available to political actors in the hard struggle for power. Weber's driller is certainly a suitable figure to embody intelligent tenacity as a precondition for political change. But what is a hammer in the business of politics? What is a 'subtle touch'? Finally, all these questions lead to a single one: What is the 'political' in the first place? As a literary man, the question that interests Kluge is: How does one tell stories about this? Politics, he says, consists of everyday feelings in a special state of matter. It is everywhere. It animates private lives as well as the public sphere, and hence in his stories, as well as the major figure, we also find the small, unknown, almost nameless ones: Elfriede Eilers alongside Pericles, the Chilean miners rescued from a depth of 700 metres next to Napolean, or the sensitive nape of three-month-old child's neck besides Alexander the Great. --