Bertolt Brecht has a short story, “The Monster” (1928), about the making of a Soviet film, “The White Eagle,” a historical picture about the pogroms carried out by one governor Muratov. While shooting, the crew receives a visit from a needy old man who wants a part, claiming his uncanny resemblance to the historical Muratov. They take him on and give him the chance to act out a scene in which Muratov receives a delegation of Jews. The crew is confused by the “routine, bureaucratic way” the old man acts the scene, absent-mindedly leafing through a newspaper in the delegation’s presence. But some old Jews, retained for historical accuracy, declare that the old man has got it right, the historical Muratov was just that way, an unnerving droop. Of course, though no one realizes it, the old man is Muratov himself.

Brecht’s story must have been in the back — or quite possibly the front — of Alexander Kluge’s mind when he wrote “Cinema Stories” (New Directions, 336 pages, $11.95). Mr. Kluge, who has been called “the last modernist,” studied with Theodor Adorno in the late 1950s. Adorno led him to the work of Walter Benjamin, and in turn to Brecht, and when Adorno encouraged Mr. Kluge to make films, he set up an introduction with Fritz Lang, the by-then blind director of “Metropolis” (1927) and “M” (1931).

Adorno and Lang are huge names. But was Mr. Kluge truly lucky in his influences? His work, in recent translations, smells distinctly of the library. Engaged as Mr. Kluge may be — he has not one but two television programs, practices law, and thinks habitually about the nuts and bolts of the business of art — he seems to be viewing the present through the lens of Adorno’s critical theory.

Not yet available on DVD, the films of Mr. Kluge belong to the New German Cinema, of which he was a founding member, and a few experimental shorts, available online at the excellent Ubu Web site, anticipate the didactic side of more well-known artists like Fassbinder.

But the flower of Mr. Kluge’s career is probably his first story collection, “Case Histories” (1962, revised 1974), available in a hard-to-find translation from Holmes & Meier Publishers. A new and, I think, hugely influential blend of fiction and nonfiction, Mr. Kluge’s typical case history tracks the personal life of a German individual before, during, and after World War II. “Sergeant Major Hans Peickert” follows the life of the anti-hero Peickert who, “trapped since birth” by the strict social classes of Prussia, views the war as a long-awaited opportunity for profiteering and corruption. “Mandorf” concerns a pale academic who finally gets to explore his personality when, toward the end of the war, he becomes the administrator of Crete. We learn a great many facts about these men; we even know how many reichsmarks Peickert makes from any given deal.

Precedents for the embellished biographical episode, epitomized by Plutarch, are easy to find. Brecht himself published a volume, 20 years after “The Monster,” called “Kalendergeschichten” (1949), a play on the small, edifying tales printed on the obverse pages of German calenders in the 18th and 19th centuries. Brecht took up figures like Francis Bacon, Socrates, and Lucullus, treating them with considerable respect, while always definitely making a moral point that interested himself. Bacon, for example, is shown to be an imperfect, bribe-taking politician whose scientific breakthroughs are ignored by peasants obsessed with their perverse loyalty toward the political man. He is a prototype for the modern artist, who seeks to be value-neutral against the grain of his own publicity.

Unlike Brecht, Mr. Kluge was working in the shadow of a single, dominant moral fact: postwar German guilt. His case studies seek out exceptions to the rule: unfamous, and probably fictional, persons. The nonfictional element comes from the narrative voice, which is methodical and quotes from real documents. “An Experiment in Love” quotes at length from Nazi medical documents; other stories are peppered with clinical questions. “Why doesn’t she face facts?” asks the ironically disapproving narrator of “Anita G.,” a story about a little Jewish girl gone haywire in Federal Republic. Think of the chilling objectivity of Heinrich Böll’s “Lost Honor of Katharina Blum” (1974) or of the diagnostic intent of Fassbinder’s “Marriage of Maria Braun” (1979). Think also of the bitter question and answer narration in Walter Abish’s “How German Is It” (1979). Think, distantly, of W.G. Sebald, who took from Mr. Kluge his use of photographs in text.

All of this to say that “Cinema Stories,” and still less “The Devil’s Blind Spot” (2002) are not the best places to start with Mr. Kluge. The late Kluge, long-famous and lately lionized, seems to be writing for the likes of American German Departments where visual studies are prized. A story like “Gigolo,” from the new volume, traces the career of a ruined aristocrat, masquerading as a pseudo-aristocratic companion during the Weimar years, only to rejoin the Wehrmacht as an officer in the 1930s. “Now he could be a gentleman again,” Kluge writes — an ominous thing to say about a Nazi. But the story is “The Monster” turned inside-out and made notational, an aperçu, fodder for discussion, but not a living, breathing story in the sense of either Brecht or the young Kluge.