'Der Himmel ueber Hellas und Halberstadt': A study of the image of the sky in Greek philosophy and recent German literature (Plato and Alexander Kluge)

This dissertation examines the sky as an image of thought, time and morality in Greek philosophy and German film and literature by way of the paradigmatic cases of Plato and Alexander Kluge. The first part explores Plato's Timaeus as a source of meanings that the West has ascribed to sky above and earth below. Plato explicitly refers to the starry sky as an image of time and reason. Other senses that he attributes to these images can be discovered by examining the systematic context and internal structure of this work. This entails reading it, not just as a cosmology, but as an anthropology, politics and ethics. The divide these images mark on the cosmic level returns on each further level of the system, so that these master images come to signify important relations pertaining to each. Thus, Timaeus's sky is also an important image of politics and ethics. The second part shows how these binary relations not only continue in the twentieth century, but how they structure certain strains of contemporary thought, as well as forms of literature and film. Our main object of study is Alexander Kluge's "Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945". In preparation for the reading, I survey Kluge's aesthetic notions and techniques, as well as basic themes and theoretical ideas. While the second chapter offers a reading of the whole of the literary work, the final chapter marshals earlier materials to examine the images of sky and earth in this literary work. These images not only give its multiple perspectives a central focus, but put the work into a relation with all the discourses that have grouped themselves under these rubrics since antiquity. In this chapter, I also examine how these figures function as images of time, morality and politics in the modern context. The aim of the dissertation is to show how themes from Plato continue in the modern context, but also how they are re-contextualized and revised to help us make sense of contemporary concerns.