As some of you know, I’m writing a biography of Alexander Kluge, a contemporary German author, filmmaker, and social philosopher. Although I came late to the biography game, I soon found out that it was important to have some feel for the places the person lived. In writing about Walter Benjamin, I was able to visit nearly all of the many places he lived. That is a bit easier for Alexander Kluge, who has lived, with very few exceptions, in Germany for his entire life.
So Sue and I are flying to Frankfurt tonight (Kluge spent formative years as an apprentice lawyer in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden); it’s then on to Marburg (where he was a student), Ulm (where he taught filmmaking at the Hochschule für Gestaltung–the “second Bauhaus”), and finally Wiesbaden. Not an exciting trip, but it will be good to get away.
And there is an added bonus: we feel like we’re leaving for Burma! We’re flying Singapore Air on the same flight that we always took to Yangon; the flight makes a first stop in Frankfurt…where we’ll get off this time instead of Singapore!
Getting to JFK by public transportation is easy, if not the fastest. Leaving the house at 2:45, a combination of NJ Transit, the LIRR, and the JFK Air Train brought us to Terminal 4 by shortly after 5. It looked like we were going to fly through security, but I triggered random checks both at Clear and TSA pre. We holed up in the Amex Centurion Lounge, which turns out to be crammed into a kind of corridor with views of the runways. Comfortable seats and a beer go a long way, though.