Containing Russia
Alexander Kluge, Russia Container, trans. Alexander Booth (Chicago: Seagull Books, 2022). 392pp., £27.50 hb., 978 1 80309 065 8Russia 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...
