Grey Room

Straw in the Ice: Stories

Alexander Kluge

Abstract

In 2010 Kluge published twinned projects on the theme of coldness: December, a book of short stories illustrated with photographs by Gerhard Richter, and a box set comprising of the film Landschaften mit Eis und Schnee (Landscapes with ice and snow) and an accompanying booklet of short stories Stroh im Eis: Mittel gegen die “gescheiterte Hoffnung” (Straw in the ice: Remedies for the “wreck of hope”). The excerpts selected from the latter and translated by Langston here succinctly reflect many of the concerns captured in Kluge’s prose on coldness and reverberate with those in the accompanying article “Landscapes of Ice, Wind, and Snow” in the same issue of Grey Room.

Close