SOURCE: Labanyi, Peter. “Programmed for Disaster.” Times Literary Supplement (9 July 1976): 854-55.

In the following review, Labanyi considers the defining characteristics of Kluge's short fiction.

A wholly quixotic bid for Lebensraum by white Africa has failed, unleashing a major crisis. The world waits, trying to piece together fragmentary reports and scattered communiques—while there is still time. Confusion and despair prevail. Meanwhile, the sociologist H., “a sensitive seismograph,” is in a basement room in the hotel where he is attending a conference, hastily trying to compose his thoughts “in case there will be time for the publication of a little volume”:

For over a hundred years we have been able to observe the cynicism of a bourgeois consciousness which, as it were, denies itself: in philosophy, in an attitude towards the modern world dominated by cultural pessimism, and in political theory. Nietzsche radicalized the experience that ideas capable of...