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Often composed of straw, wire, lead, dirt, steel wool,
and other castoffs from the dustbin, as well as from traditional
oil and canvas, the works of Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) invite
both scrutiny and speculation. Often painted in somber
grays and earthtones, a sense of past and impending dread
hovers over the landscape of his works. Taken as an a priori
position by critics, as well as by Kiefer himself, is the view that
his art represents the struggle of Kiefer, and by extension, the
German people, to come to terms with the horror of World
War II, and with their participation in that horror. They view
the work as a conscious decision by Kiefer to distillate and
articulate the guilt of the Germans, in effect to provide a
visual autopsy of the underpinnings of the German collective
narrative, to see if a specific spot exists which one could point
to and declare that that is where the troubles began.
This paper does not disagree with that interpretation
but, rather, will expand upon it. Though this is by no
means a comprehensive analysis of his work, or a detailed
psychological inventory, the theories examined may shed
some illumination upon the motives behind Kiefer’s artistic
output or raise questions regarding artistic creativity in
general. Though Kiefer may, as an adult, have made the
conscious decision to become a vehicle for the guilt-ridden
Germans, this paper will argue that that decision was entirely
out of his hands, that if not Kiefer then some other German
artist would have, and must have, become “spokesman” for
this guilt if the German psyche was to have any hope for
wholeness. This guilt, as well as the shame of the German
people post World War II, had a profound impact on the mind
of young Anselm Kiefer, mapping the mental landscape that
would define and later direct his art.
Children are not born with guilt and shame. In classic
Freudian theory, children experience guilt only when their
ids come into conflict with their super-ego directives and
prohibitions, and only after the Oedipal conflict has been
resolved after the age of five. 1 In effect, their childish desires
and impulses meet the brick wall “parent” of the superego,
blocking and channeling those impulses into socially
accepted actions.
Traditional theory states that guilt is felt when actions
cause psychic pain in another person for whom the child
feels empathy, and when he or she is remorseful for causing
that pain. 2 Other theorists contend that this interpersonal
conflict need not exist at all, that an intrapersonal conflict
between id and super-ego directives often motivates the
child to model his or her behavior on society’s dictates; the
target object is irrelevant and unneeded. 3 Later cognitive
theorists also suggest that guilt is only possible when children
can recognize that their behavior is unacceptable and yet
choose to act out regardless of the consequences. 4
Guilt and shame are passed by parent figures to
children as a form of societal control; if causing psychic
pain in another causes unpleasant emotions in oneself, it is
hoped that behavior will be avoided. In the case of postwar
Germany, the parent-figure of the nation passed the collective
guilt of its wartime actions (or inaction) to its children. How
was this collective shame of the German nation passed to its
children and one child in particular, Anselm Kiefer?
As Alice Miller points out, biographies of artists are
maddeningly deficient in the details of their early childhood. 5
In the case of Kiefer, little is known of his upbringing, and
though this discussion will focus on the effects of early
childhood trauma on artistic expression, there is no evidence
to suggest that Kiefer himself was ever abused by his parents.
Rather, we can extend the label of parent to mean the German
people or, at least, their collective guilt. By this extension, we
can suggest that, as posited above, it was inevitable that an
artist would arise to become the cultural spokesperson for
the German people, and in effect, the particular childhood
of the artist is almost irrelevant. If the artist were physically
abused during the encoding of the collective shame, that
would only compound and enforce the collective trauma of
that encoding.
Children are born utterly dependent upon the adult
caretakers in their lives. They will do anything to elicit their
attention and equally anything to keep it, even at the expense
of their own self-identity. Fully functional adults are capable
of articulating and processing their uncomfortable feelings.
Narcissistic parents, unable and unwilling to accept these
feelings, transfer them onto other objects, often those least
able to defend themselves against this, their children. They
are attempting, in Alice Miller’s view, “to attempt gratification
through substitute means.” 6 In effect, the children become,
in the words of Lloyd deMause, “ [a] poison container, a
receptacle into which one can project disowned parts of
one’s psyche, so that one can manipulate and control these
feelings in another body without danger to one’s self.” 7 The
child is now “expected to cleanse the mother [read: parent]
of her . . . fears and anger,” and, dependent upon the adult,
the child will now do all he or she can to fulfill this need in
order to survive. 8
Unable to face their collective post-war guilt, the
German people transferred those unacceptable emotions
onto their children. “Using children as scapegoats to relieve
personal internal conflict [guilt] has proved an extremely
effective way to maintain… collective psychological
homeostasis,” continues deMause. 9 To speak of German
crimes in the immediate years following the war, when Anselm
Kiefer was born, was something of a taboo in Germany: “It
was not something one could talk about in a direct way.”10
“Roped off in fear and dread,” these feelings became the
burden of the children.11 Forbidden to articulate their anger
at this encoding, and experiencing the unbearable psychic
pain transferred to them, the children repressed all memory
of that process and idealized those guilty of the transference.
12 A child’s needs, repressed or denied, will lead to feelings
of guilt and shame and their consequences (psychosomatic
disorders, neuroses, grandiosity, and psychoses) unless an
outlet for those feelings can be found, often in a symbolic
outlet, such as fairy tales, dreams, literature, and art. 13
“Creativity permits [psychic] survival, and helps
a person to live with psychic damage,” writes Miller, and
Kiefer, “guided by a compulsion he neither understood nor
recognized and indeed could not explain because it emerged
from his unconscious, which had become imprinted with his
earliest childhood experiences,” found that survival in his
art. 14 By examining his work, we can see the signs of the
encoding, which challenges the traditional view of his work
as merely “Wagnerian grandiosity” channeling a conscious
decision to revisit Germany’s past. 15
In Kiefer’s To the Supreme Being, we can see
an example of this process and how “painters tell the
encoded story of childhood traumas no longer consciously
remembered in adulthood.” 16 Traditional critics have seen
this work, part of a series depicting the Mosaic Hall of the
New German Chancellery in Berlin after its capture in 1945,
as an “overdose of Teutonic zeal,” an “ironic Valhalla” derisively
referred to as Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil), proto-facist in
returning to those themes that “spoke about things no one
wanted to hear. 17
The New Chancellery building, at the time of this
work’s creation in 1985, had been long repaired and in use,
and yet he choose to depict the building as it appeared in
the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. We can imagine the young
Kiefer holding the hand of his mother as she takes him
through the charred rubble that littered many German cities
post-war and into a structure like this, all the while conveying
the overwhelming sense of guilt and shame of the German
people. Indeed, the perspectival system, long assumed to
be a return to the Albertian, and in a time when all other
German artists had rejected traditional systems as passé,
can be seen as that of a child who is closer to the floor than
an adult. 18 The oppressive ceiling in this work mirrors the
oppressive weight of the guilt literally given with his mother’s
milk, and the impassive columns, “dead and rigid,” reflect the
stern-faced adults for whom this building was an unbearable
reminder of war-time horror. 19 Though possibly a reference
to the traditional prespectival system, seen through the eyes
of a child, the room looms large and oppressive, a crushing
weight upon the psyche of young Kiefer.
This scene has a profound impact on Anselm Kiefer;
he returns to this room and others like it time and again
in his work, in an attempt to work through those feelings
he cannot articulate. “Throughout their later life… people
unconsciously create situations in which these rudimentary
feelings may awaken but without the original connection
ever becoming clear,” notes Miller, and in this series, we see
the adult Kiefer returning to that place where “what cannot
be recalled is unconsciously reenacted and thus indirectly
discovered.” 20 As Kiefer himself notes when discussing his
use of perspective, it serves to “get you into the layers of the
image…to the idea of the land and what happened there …
The more you go back, under, the further forward you go.”
21
In Nero Paints, we can see Kiefer’s own identification
with the guilt of the German people and the sense of
grandiosity that informs those burdened with that guilt.
Over a barren and devastated landscape, we can see an
artist’s palette, a self-referent by which Kiefer identifies with
the destruction of das Land. Referring to the topos of Nero
fiddling as Rome burns, Kiefer both accuses and identifies
with the inaction of the German people as atrocities were
committed in war-time; the artist’s palette becomes a symbol
for the artist looming over the landscape just a guilt still
“hangs over everything…covering it with an…impenetrable
veil.” 22 His sense of grandiosity can also be seen in the scale
of his works; To the Supreme Being is well over twelve feet
long by nine feet high, and Nero Paints is ten feet high by
seven feet wide.
While working on his New Chancellery series, Kiefer
began what are called his “books.” Often bound by Kiefer
himself, they contain paintings, lead drippings, steel wool,
dirt, and other media associated with his work. Begun in 1985
and finished in 1989, Kiefer’s The High Priestess is composed
of over 200 books in two steel bookcases, bound together
with copper wire, weighing over forty tons.
Modern critics have come tantalizingly close to a
interpretation for this work based on the theories of Alice
Miller. Noting the sheer weight of the piece, James Hall
compares it to the “weight of knowledge,” not referring to the
weight of the knowledge of German guilt but the avalanche
of information in contemporary media. 23 Inside each of the
200 lead books are pictures of Nazi imagery, such as Kiefer
making the Nazi salute in famous sites around the world or
the interiors of famous Nazi buildings. By fragmenting these
images, Kiefer is attempting to redistribute the guilt they
convey and to undermine their power as they are literally
“put away on the shelf.” Referring to his images making
the Nazi salute, Kiefer could also be speaking of his art in
general: “I have to re-enact a little bit in order to understand
the madness.” 24
In Kiefer’s art, we can see the powerlessness of the
artist as he struggles to articulate what cannot, what must
not, be articulated. The recipient of the encoded transferred
guilt of the German psyche, Anselm Kiefer, on some level, can
be seen as creating from a “compulsion to repeat,” to revisit
what is unconsciously stored in a vain attempt to expurgate
what is intolerable. 25 Faced with such a burden, Alice Miller
believes that two choices face us: mental illness or expression
through symbology, i.e., art. Kiefer has spoken of the despair
he feels while creating his art, despair we feel when facing
such works as To the Supreme Being or Nero Paints. 26
Though he acknowledges his attempt to present the
intolerable truths of Germany’s participation in World War II,
if we look beyond the prima facie iconography of Teutonic
Germany seen in such works as Ways of Worldly Wisdom
– Arminius’ Battle (Art Institute, Chicago), we can see the
subtle signs of the child daily fed a diet of guilt and shame for
acts he did not commit and could not understand. Unable to
articulate these feelings, and terrified of losing the affection
of his parents, he sublimates the negative emotions.
Years later, when the adult Kiefer consciously revisits
Germany’s past in his work, these feelings still remain.
Reenacted unconsciously in his work, this compulsion to
repeat the history of Germany allows the indirect rediscovery
of the original trauma, the guilt of a people horrified over
their actions in war. Though Kiefer is by far not the only artist
to work in post-war Germany, and I do not mean to suggest
that the entire collective shame of Germany is bound up in one
individual, he is perhaps the most prolific voice of that generation
struggling with the shame of its parent’s actions. Seen in this vein,
the work of Anselm Kiefer becomes the plea of a child still clutching
his mother’s hand, listening with rapt attention as she feeds him the
guilt of a nation.
Notes
1 Jane Bybee, ed., Guilt and Children (San Diego: Academic
Press, 1998), 75-76.
2 Ibid, 128.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid, 76.
5 Alice Miller, The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood
Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness (Der gemiedene
Schlussel, trans. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum) (New
York: Doubleday, 1990), 6.
6 Alice Miller, Prisoners of Childhood: How Narcissistic Parents
Form and Deform the Emotional Lives of Their Talented
Children, trans. Ruth Ward (New York: Basic, 1981), 8.
7 Lloyd deMause, “The Child as Poison Containter,” Internet,
available: http://www.bconnex.net/~cspcc/crime_prevention/
poison.htlm,December 16, 1998,1.
8 Ibid,1.
9 Ibid.,1.
10 Volker Friedrich, “The Internalization of Nazism and its
Effects on German Psychoanalysts and Their Patients: The
Taboo of Nazism,” American Imago v. 52, no. 3 (1995): 262.
11 Ibid, 263.
12 Miller, Untouched, 167-169.
13 Alice Miller, “Twenty-One Points,” Internet, available:
/alice_miller/twenty-one.html http://naturalchild.com/alice_
miller/twenty-one.html, December 17, 1998, 1-2.
14 Miller, Untouched, 43,12.
15 Steven Henry Madoff, “Anselm Kiefer: A Call to Memory,” Art News
(Oct 1997): 126.
16 Miller, Untouched, 73.
17 Madoff, 126.
18 Compare Osiris and Isis (Philadelphia Museum of Art), in which a
similar per spectival system is usted.
19 Friedrich, 270.
20 Miller, Prisoners, 10,19.
21 Madoff, 128.
22 Friedrich, 270.
23 James Hall, “Anselm Kiefer: the Generalized Image of Authority
(High Priestess),” Apollo no. 130 (Oct 1989): 269.
24 Ibid, 270.
25 Miller, Prisoners, 78-79.
26 Ted Mooney, “Anselm Kiefer: Nurnberg, 1982,” Artforum 36, no. 8
(April 1998): 100.
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