The Long March of Basic Trust

As past and future blur, this work from Alexander Kluge reveals the emotional and intellectual currents that drive human survival.

A kaleidoscopic journey through history and the vast landscape of human emotion, The Long March of Basic Trust presents Alexander Kluge at his most expansive and incisive. Moving seamlessly across time and space, Kluge weaves a tapestry of lived and imagined experience, interrogating the forces that shape our resilience in the face of catastrophe. From the wreckage of World War II to the deep time of geology, his singular prose dissolves boundaries between the real and the speculative.

Blurring the lines between fiction and philosophy, Kluge builds an intricate world enriched by hybrid images and his latest experiment: the “virtual camera,” a cinematic eye that captures the interplay of memory and invention. Now in his tenth decade, Kluge continues his lifelong pursuit of uncovering the patterns that connect us and the basic trust that allows us to go on. Both intellectually provocative and deeply humane, this latest installment in his Chronicle of Emotions is a testament to his unmatched ability to fuse thought and feeling into an electrifying literary form.

Alexander Kluge is one of the major German fiction writers of the late twentieth century and an important social critic. As a filmmaker, he is credited with the launch of the New German Cinema movement.

Alexander Booth is a poet and translator based in Berlin.