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Representation and Event: Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, and
the Memory of the Holocaust
Article  in  The Yale Journal of Criticism · January 2003
DOI: 10.1353/yale.2003.0001
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Matthew Biro
Representation and Event: Anselm Kiefer,
Joseph Beuys, and the Memory of the Holocaust
Between  and , German artist Anselm Kiefer explicitly referred
to the Holocaust in a number of his artworks.1 Kiefer’s complex
Holocaust representations—which appeared during a decade in
which West German politics was rocked by intense debates having to
do with a citizen’s relationship to the collective past—evoked considerable
critical response both for and against his ability to authentically
represent his country’s history.2 At the heart of the critical debate
around Kiefer’s art and German politics in the s, in both West
Germany and the U.S., was the question of how textual, visual, and
televisual cultures mediate an individual’s relationship to the past, and
thus how cultural representations reshape lived human events. For this
reason, as was the case with much German art and visual culture since
the mid- to late-s, the cultural imperative or normative principle
was still, in Theodor Adorno’s words, “coming to terms with the
past”—and, more specifically, coming to terms with national socialism.3
In the s, however, the terms of the debate had shifted; the
imperative was no longer just to remember, but rather, how and what
to remember. This essay explores the relationship between representation
and event in Kiefer’s multimedia artworks and examines the
problem of Holocaust memory in relation to West German art and
visual culture since World War II.4 It focuses on the ways in which
Kiefer’s art engages an evolving constellation of problems, discourses,
and representational strategies that developed in West German culture
and abroad in response to the events of the Holocaust. In particular, it
will examine Kiefer’s relationship to Joseph Beuys, the controversial
West German artist, who, between the s and the s, was one
of the first German visual artists to deal with issues of Holocaust representation
in a number of significant performative,sculptural,and environmental
works.5
The central problem of Holocaust representation with which Kiefer
had to grapple in the s and early s was an intensification of
the fundamental predicament inherent in Holocaust memory. Holocaust
memory is what Primo Levi calls “the memory of offense,” a
mat th ew b i ro   
TheYale Journal of Criticism, volume , number  (): 113–146
©  by Yale University and The Johns Hopkins University Press
wound that can never heal. Anchored by this wound, and frozen in
time, the victim and the perpetrator retain their original relationship
in memory until both die.As Levi puts it,the“oppressor remains what
he is, and so does the victim.”6 In other words, they are united: determined
by past events that will to some extent always control their existences.
For Levi, it is imperative that the memory of the Holocaust
be preserved, both by the oppressors and by the victims. Yet, as Levi
correctly points out,“a memory that is recalled too often and that is
expressed in a verbal form tends to set as a stereotype—a form tested
by experience, crystallized, perfected, and adorned—which settles in
the place of the raw record and grows at the expense of the original
memory.”7 In other words, by filtering and stereotyping their memories
through representation and repetition, both the perpetrators and
the victims shield themselves from their own original experiences. In
the case of the victims, the trauma of oppression causes them to repress
their past hurt—to substitute a screen-experience for it, or to
otherwise filter out their bad memories of too great intensity. In the
case of the perpetrators,guilt and fear cause a defensive reconstruction
of the past—false memories that often emphasize the perpetrator’s
powerlessness in the face of the Nazi state. Nonetheless, in each case,
the result is the same: either consciously or unconsciously, the subject
falsifies his or her memories of the original events, and, through repetition,
eventually accepts these falsified memories as true. Holocaust
memory thus potentially destroys the event by putting a substitute in
the place of the actual experience.
This problem of Holocaust memory was relevant, as Adorno
pointed out in ,to the postwar West German situation as a whole.
The problem of the falsification of memory—i.e., the repression of
history on the level of the individual subject—was something that, in
post- German society, could potentially cause the population to
reject their new democratic government.8 A weak, postwar West German
subject, Adorno thought, was potentially fascist, and this subject’s
authoritarian elements lay in his or her “immaturity.” Average West
Germans possessed psyches,in other words, in which personal feelings
of powerlessness were combined with a damaged “collective narcissism”—a
repressed but still potentially strong identification with the
collective body or nation as a whole.9 Therefore, because adult West
Germans were not being encouraged to come to terms with their history
on either an individual or collective level during the first twenty
years of the Federal Republic, true commitment to one form of society
over another—for example, democratic capitalism as opposed to
national socialism—could not be developed.If a new non-democratic,
nationalist form of government could appear within the context of
the cold war ideology promoted by the U.S. and Western Europe—a
government that appealed to this damaged collective narcissism—the
th e yale journal of c ri t i c i sm  
German population might collectively switch allegiances. Democracy,
as Adorno put it,“has not domesticated itself to the point that people
really experience it as their cause, and so consider themselves agents
of the political process. It is felt to be one system among others, as if
one could choose from a menu between communism, democracy, fascism,
monarchy.”10 To prevent this, West Germans continued to need
democratic education; their schooling needed to include a confrontation
with anti-Semitism as well as a strengthening of their weak sense
of selfhood.
When, in the early s, Anselm Kiefer began to represent the
Holocaust from a postwar West German perspective, Adorno’s project
of democratic education had long since been taken up in multiple
fields of science and culture. Kiefer was born in  and started university
in —a time when the German New Left was beginning
to popularize its ideas.11 In  he was , already showing internationally,
and had just achieved representation in New York.12 The
New Left’s utopianism—its belief that education and the critical unveiling
of the past would allow people to finally found a “true” society—had
run aground over the course of the s. Moreover, any
sense that “coming to terms with the past” was simply a question of
confronting one’s personal history was long since over. It was not
Kiefer’s personal history—a history that he could actually remember—with
which he had to come to terms. Rather, it was his country’s
history that he had to confront—a history he could only come to
know from the verbal and written accounts of others and from other
forms of visual representation such as photography, sculpture, and
film—representations he experienced in the lifeworld around him.
One such representation is the well-known but unauthored documentary
photograph that depicts the deportation of a group of Jewish
men, women, and children from the Warsaw Ghetto in  (see
Figure ). This photograph appeared consistently over the course of
the first thirty-five years of West German visual culture.13 Not only is
it similar to the often more brutal photographs shown to German
non-participants after the war as evidence of German crimes, it also
appeared in Alain Resnais’s documentary Night and Fog () and in
Ingmar Bergman’s fiction film Persona (), both of which achieved
wide international circulation after their releases.The photograph presents
a good example of the problem of Holocaust representation as it
breaks beyond the sphere of memory of the participants and into the
minds and worlds of people like Kiefer, who did not take part in the
actual events. On the one hand, the photograph preserves the particular
event in all its brutal realism. By showing the round-up of terrified
women and children by armed and uniformed German soldiers,
it is in some ways the clearest and most unambiguous documentation
of the Holocaust.Because of its indexical relation to its murdered submat
th ew b i ro   
jects, its detail, and its unrehearsed documentary character (conveyed,
for example, by the somewhat haphazard organization of the human
figures as well as the multiple directions of their gazes), it suggests the
truth or actuality of these events. Moreover, because of the clear
power discrepancies between the victimizers and the victims (emphasized
by the prominence of Jewish women and children in the photograph),
it (still) provokes outrage at Nazi atrocities. By selecting the
most innocent victims of the Holocaust—the children, who in no
way could be considered combatants—it shows the utter senselessness
and viciousness of the Nazis’ projects. Furthermore, as Marianne
Hirsch has argued, the image of the child encourages viewer identification
and projection.14 Such images, she argues, can open up spaces
for “postmemory,” acts of spectatorial identification with the oppressed
other, which do not either stereotype or fully assimilate him
or her, and that help those who were born after the events develop an
open and ethical relationship to the past.15
The photograph, however, also presents a number of dangers to its
viewers. The first is the power to desensitize: by looking at such images,
we become accustomed to them. Photography generally distances
its spectators from the event; through repeated viewings, this
separation is increased.16 In addition, documentary representations of
the Holocaust have the potential to exploit their human subjects.The
terrified women and children depicted in the photograph did not
consent to have their picture taken. At that moment in , in the
extremity of the deportation situation, they were defenseless—a fact
th e yale journal of c ri t i c i sm  
Figure . Photographer unknown, Warsaw Ghetto (). From the Stroop Report.
that their thinness,the“unguarded”nature of their body language,and
their frightened expressions show very well. By representing their
powerlessness, the photograph can thus be seen to victimize them for
a second time, repeating (albeit in a less violent form) the violation of
the Jews’ autonomy initially perpetrated by the Germans. Furthermore,
although the photograph can produce creative and responsible
forms of spectatorial identification, ones that are split between an
awareness of self and an awareness of the victimized other, it can—
through its realism—also produce a feeling in the spectator that he or
she has understood the past. In this way, the photograph can promote
a sense that this traumatic moment of human history has been “mastered”
and that it no longer needs to be confronted.
Although it still bears traces of its original ontological context, an
isolated photograph of the Holocaust is thus even more severed from
the past than a memory image.17 Although Holocaust participants can
repress and distort their memories, they cannot get rid of them fully
or alter their character entirely. Repressed trauma continually threatens
to break through in human experience in a multiplicity of everchanging
forms. A photograph, on the other hand, despite its ontological
connection to past events,18 can be made to signify a number
of radically different historical “realities.”19 Depending on cropping
and contextualization—that is, juxtaposition with other forms of imagery
or text—the same photograph can be used to indicate a number
of fundamentally different states of affairs. Thus, although documentary
photographs can seemingly represent in a truthful way the
terrifying brutality of the Holocaust, they can also be used to distort
events, and their too frequent reproduction and exhibition can also,
perhaps, begin a process that leads to a toleration of such actions.The
necessity of using photographic records to remember the Holocaust
must be tempered by an awareness of the limitations of the medium
and the tendency that many people have to overestimate the veracity
of photographic evidence.
Before Kiefer, Joseph Beuys was another West German artist who
attempted to confront problems of Holocaust representation. His
Auschwitz Demonstration () stands in the Hessisches Landesmuseum
in Darmstadt (see Figure ).20 Beuys’s conceptual “sculpture” is
significant for Kiefer’s art, and not just because Kiefer, who was a student
of Beuys in the early s, would have been familiar with it.
Rather, it is significant because it succeeds in evoking a particular
combination of hermeneutic undecidability and reflexivity in the aesthetic
experience of its various viewers, a conjunction that is central
to Kiefer’s works as well.“Hermeneutic undecidability” is the ability
of a cultural representation to generate not just ambiguity but a conflict
of interpretations: radically contradictory readings of the same set
of signifiers.21 As is exemplified by the works of Kiefer and Beuys,
mat th ew b i ro   
such representations often juxtapose different historical time frames
and forms of signification—juxtapositions that provoke their spectators
to compare and contrast different temporal and spatial contexts.
“Reflexivity” here means physical and existential viewer selfconsciousness
evoked by a particular set of visual and linguistic signifiers—a
self-awareness that asks the viewer to engage with the artist’s
representation and its relationship to the environments and life contexts
to which it refers and through which it passes. As such, reflexivity
is connected to the attempt to dissolve art into life and, thus, potentially,
has political consequences.
In the context of the development of West German art as a whole,
Beuys’s vitrine could properly be said to belong to the middle phase,
a moment that has often been characterized as that of the international
“neo-avant-garde.” A number of art historians and critics have
used this term to characterize the work of artists, like Beuys, who appropriated
early-twentieth-century artistic strategies initially developed
by Dada, constructivist, and surrealist artists in order to partially
negate the aesthetic object and thus empower their audiences.22 Often
the term carries pejorative connotations,suggesting,as it does,that
the recycled strategies employed by the neo-avant-garde artists produce
none of the critical and destabilizing effects characteristic of the
th e yale journal of c ri t i c i sm  
Figure . Joseph Beuys, Auschwitz Demonstration [Auschwitz Demonstration] (). Vitrine with
sculpture and objects ( to ). Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt. Copyright 
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
“original” negations carried out by the artists of the historical avantgarde,the
Dada,constructivist,and surrealist producers who wished to
end the production and consumption of art as a specialized practice
separate from the course of everyday life.23 Instead, in the hands of
neo-avant-garde artists, recycled art-negating gestures become simple
means of making seemingly new instances of contemporary art, products
that do not seek to overturn the institution of modern art as a
specialized sphere focused on its own history and means of expression,
but rather that continue modern art’s traditional function as a privileged
and fetishized commodity within the capitalist market economy.
Although clearly commodified (Beuys sold the vitrine before its final
assembly), the object still managed to inspire social and political
critique. Beuys’s apparently non-artistic vitrine negated the two dominant—and
much more conventional—concepts of modern sculpture
in effect in West Germany until the s: the biomorphic-abstract
sculpture of Karl Hartung, the forms of which were derived from natural
objects, and the more abstract metal and wire works of Hans
Uhlmann and Norbert Kricke, who used industrial materials and linear
forms to define non-objective shapes in space. As was the case
with earlier American neo-avant-garde artists during the late-s
and early-s—the pop art painter Andy Warhol, for example, and
the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre—Beuys used readymade images
and objects to undermine postwar expressive and constructive models
of abstraction.Like Warhol and Andre,whose forms seemed“new”
or “shocking” in relation to Piet Mondrian (the pioneering abstractionist
who continued his practices in New York in the s) and
Jackson Pollock (the premiere American neo-avant-garde artist of the
s and the early s, a painter who suggested continuities with
the prewar period by amplifying the expressive strand of abstraction
that became more and more prominent in the middle third of the
twentieth century), Beuys appeared radically different and destabilizing
in relation to Hartung, Uhlmann, and Kricke. Thus, although he
was actually repeating earlier prewar strategies (transmitted to him by
both prewar and postwar sources),Beuys’s art was initially experienced
as highly provocative in his West German context and, therefore, for a
time,possessed shock qualities and distancing effects that were in some
ways comparable to that of the historical avant-garde.24
The Auschwitz Demonstration is a vitrine containing a collection of
objects dating from  to  and assembled by Beuys in .25
They include a cast metal relief image of a fish, a faceless clay figure
of the crucified Christ and an old wafer carefully positioned in a discolored
white soup dish, a desiccated rat on a bed of dried grass in a
round wooden sieve, a bent and broken carpenter’s ruler in another
grass-lined sieve, a drawing of a starved girl with a sled, a folding photographic
map of Auschwitz ripped from a book or a brochure, four
mat th ew b i ro   
rings of blood sausages with plus or minus signs painted on either end,
sun-lamp goggles, more moldy blood sausages and sausage fragments
arranged on a corroded metal disc with a discolored mirror in its center,
two round medicine vials containing fat, a brown bottle containing
iodine, a blank aluminum tag on a string, and two rectangular
blocks of wax on top of a double-burner electric hot plate.26 Because
of the complex set of meanings and representational relations these
glass-enclosed objects embody, Beuys’s vitrine potentially produces a
hermeneutically undecidable experience when spectators attempt to
assemble the vitrine’s elements into larger, more overarching interpre-
tations.
On the one hand, Beuys’s work is successful in evoking the shocking
brutality of the Holocaust without instrumentalizing the victims
through direct photographic representation. The existence of the
death camps is very clearly indicated by the aerial panoramic photograph
of Auschwitz showing its fence, its rows of barracks, and the
train tracks leading to the gas chambers and crematoria—a photograph
that details the functions of the various structures that it depicts
in cold bureaucratic language printed on its reverse side. In addition,
the violence and horror of what transpired in the death camps is indirectly
(but pointedly) suggested by the hairless, mummified rat,
which seems to have curled in a fetal position as it died, as well as the
blocks of wax on the burners, which suggest the Nazis’ instrumental
and utterly inhuman reduction of their victims’ bodies to soap, skin,
hair, and other materials that could be reused. The vials of fat, which
through their titles suggest the transformation of bodies from solid to
liquid states, and the sausages, which are tied up in a manner that suggests
both confinement and the securing of materials against complete
disintegration, continue this theme of the Nazis’ monstrous appropriation
and destruction of their victim’s bodies.27 And finally, the pencil
drawing of the emaciated girl, her skeletal hands covering her
pelvis in a pathetic attempt to hide her nakedness, literalizes the
shocking connotations of the assembled materials by tying the objects
back to familiar images associated with the history of the death camps,
namely the naked and starved victims who populate numerous photographs
of the camps taken after their liberation.
On the other hand, Beuys’s Auschwitz Demonstration also seems initially
quite sinister and perhaps even historically misleading.The vials,
goggles, measuring stick, and burner, for example, suggest a technological
ground or basis underlying the “final solution.” By emphasizing
the undeniably important relationship between the Nazi state, rationalization,
and industrial technology, these elements perhaps imply
that the National Socialists were blinded and misled by the tools and
technologies they employed.28 The technological components, in
other words,might suggest that the Germans who wielded them were
th e yale journal of c ri t i c i sm  
unavoidably separated from their victims due to the distancing nature
of much industrial technology. Because the executioners no longer
had to see, hear, or select their victims in order to kill them, and because
the numerous “ordinary” Germans who participated in the destruction
of life did so only in ancillary roles (driving and scheduling
trains, participating in deportations, manufacturing and transporting
materials that were then used in mass murder, etc.), the magnitude of
the Nazi horror could, through this interpretive strategy, be deflected
upon the industrial means that were used to carry it out. In addition,
within the interpretive context set up by the vitrine, the Jewish victims
are potentially associated with dead rats, blood sausage, blocks of
wax,and vials of fat—comparisons that suggest the Nazis’anti-Semitic
propaganda and dehumanizing language of hate. Because of their radically
ambiguous presentation, it is unclear if Beuys is criticizing such
stereotypes in his art or giving them new life. Finally, both the crucified
sculpture of Christ and the wafer—which together symbolize the
commemoration of Christ’s sacrifice in Christian ritual—suggest a redemptive
aspect to the Nazis’ slaughter of innocents. Like the JudeoChristian
term “Holocaust” itself, these symbols of Christian religion—such
as the fish, the secret symbol of Christ, which suggests the
suffering of the early Christians under the Romans—can, in the overall
context of the vitrine, imply that the destruction of the Nazis’ victims
could result in a higher good.29 Given Beuys’s role as a pilot in
the Wehrmacht or German air force in World War II, a role that he also
represented in his heterogeneous art, a number of objects in the ambivalent
Auschwitz vitrine could potentially suggest a strong element
of revisionism.30
Longer contemplation of Beuys’s vitrine, however, produces nonrevisionist,
critical readings as well. The ugliness of the work (in particular,
the rat and the sausages) conveys the inability of the German
artist to create anything beautiful after the Holocaust. It thus suggests
Beuys’s meditation on the horror of these events, and it implies that
to him German art after Auschwitz could never be the same. In addition,
Beuys’s vitrine constructs a context in which the viewer is encouraged
to imagine multiple connections and analogies between the
actions of various technologies (suggested by the machined elements),
human drawing and shaping practices (suggested by the sketch of the
emaciated girl, the sculpted crucifix, and the fish relief), and multiple
processes of organic development and decay (suggested by the rat, the
sausages, the grass, and the fat elements). By provoking the spectator
to think about relationships between these different types of processes,
it possibly gets him or her to speculate on how to overcome stereotypical
barriers between science,art,technology,and nature created by
the drive towards specialization characteristic of modern societies.
Creating a context in which the spectator is encouraged to rethink
mat th ew b i ro   
the interrelations between these supposedly separate “spheres” of human
endeavor, Beuys’s work potentially projects a radical utopianism—a
sense that late Western capitalist societies are ready to be
transformed and their divisions healed through the collaboration of an
artistic neo-avant-garde with a politicized and engaged populace.31
Finally, two of the objects collected in the vitrine—the hot plate
and the sculpted figure of the crucified Christ—were first used in two
artistic “actions” or performances carried out by Beuys in the mids,
which dealt with physical and spiritual transformation and the
circulation of energy between material and conceptual realms. In the
first action, which took place during a Fluxus performance at the Festival
of New Art in the Technische Hochschule Aachen on July ,
, the hot plate was used to help ritually introduce Beuys’s signature
material of fat, a substance that suggests both the bodies of the
Nazis’victims,and—through Beuys’s life story,which was slowly publicized
over the course of the s—a material that can help promote
healing. A performance that inspired a violent audience reaction (in
part because it took place on the twentieth anniversary of an unsuccessful
attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life), the action marks Beuys’s emergence
as a media-personality, and it is often cited as an example of
how Beuys’s early performances inspired reactionary responses on the
part of contemporary German audiences, and thus how his work
could expose problematic impulses within his own society.32 In the
second action, which was entitled “Manresa,” and which took place in
the Gallery of Alfred Schmela in Düsseldorf on December , ,
the soup-plate-crucifix was connected to an electrical generator. In
this action, which referred to the spiritual and physical regeneration
of Ignatius of Loyola and interconnections between the spiritual, the
natural, and the technological worlds, Beuys appeared to advocate
transforming Christian impulses into secular socially-responsible
ones.33 For spectators who could recognize the performative contexts
from which these two objects in the Auschwitz Demonstration emerged,
these elements might suggest the need for a critical social engagement
in contemporary German society and for the transformation of traditional
belief systems into more open and politically-engaged conceptual
approaches.34
In addition to producing undecidability through its conjunction of
formal and material elements, Beuys’s Auschwitz Demonstration vitrine
attempts to engage the contemporary art-going public by shocking its
viewers and promoting reflexivity on art and vision in the modern
world. In the first place, Beuys’s vitrine is ugly—its presentation of
slowly rotting meat and dried out rat flesh actually repels the viewer.
It causes the spectator to ask,“How can this be art?” and thus to reflect
on the role of the postwar German artist and how and why his
or her materials have changed since the war. In addition, although
th e yale journal of c ri t i c i sm  
some of Beuys’s objects are actually sculpted—specifically the figure
of Christ and the fish relief—most are simply selected and assembled.
In this way, the structure of the work has become more fragmented or
“open” than is the case with more traditional forms of twentieth century
sculpture; the work’s parts have greater independence from the
whole and thus retain more elements of meaning from their previous
states or contexts. The assembled elements thereby bring with them
traces of German history—traces that the spectator is encouraged to
incorporate when interpreting the work. Furthermore, although very
complexly arranged,Beuys’s work seems to simplify—or de-skill—the
art-making process by making it less dependent on traditional technical
proficiencies. Its spectators, in other words, are initially made to
feel that they too could have made Beuys’s vitrine. In this way, the
work promotes what Beuys termed“direct democracy”—his complex
call to his beholders to creatively remake themselves and their
society.35
The reflexive character of Beuys’s Auschwitz Demonstration, which
provokes its spectators to think about both themselves and their historical
context, is strengthened by the institutional nature of the vitrine
itself, which collects heterogeneous representations and connects
them to a larger exhibition that deals with Beuys’s identity as a postwar
German artist. The vitrine exists as part of an installation that is
intended to be taken as a whole. It is a single element within the
“Beuys Block,” a seven room permanent exhibition, acquired by the
Hessisches Landesmuseum in  from the industrialist Karl
Ströher.36 Consisting of sculptural works and drawings from  until
the late s, selected and arranged by Beuys himself, the “Block”
is a retrospective collection of many of his most important “sculptures”
and “relics.” It is a multi-room experience with different forms
of display—some of the sculptures and objects lie exposed against the
floor or wall, others are encased in glass or arranged in vitrines. As a
whole, the Block, which takes up more than a third of the top floor
of the Landesmuseum, invites comparison with the permanent installations
on the two floors below. All of these installations focus on the
natural sciences—more specifically, paleontology, geology, and zoology—and
tell the story of the earth’s broader development.In contrast
to these other exhibits, which present narratives of natural history,
Beuys’s installation presents a retrospective history of his own personal
development as a West German artist. Many of the objects and sculptures—like
those contained in the Auschwitz Demonstration—were first
used in Beuys’s actions in the early and mid-s. They thus carry
traces of Beuys’s public persona as a self-defining individual and as an
artist who is self-consciously trying to heal psychic wounds and project
a new form of German collective subject in the late-s and
early-s.37 To a neo-avant-garde audience that had followed
mat th ew b i ro   
Beuys’s career—or a more everyday audience who might have known
something about his art through the newspapers—the Auschwitz
Demonstration could thus appear as a necessary “stage” in the development
of German identity: something that had to be conceptually experienced
by the individual as part of his or her psychic or moral
development.
Beuys’s vitrine corporeally emphasizes or “embodies” this idea of
reconceptualizing what it means to be a “German” on both an individual
and a collective level in light of the Holocaust by its position
within the Block as a whole. The Auschwitz Demonstration is situated
near the middle of the Block’s seven rooms—an extended temporal
experience during which the spectator is frequently encouraged to
think of the works in existential and embodied terms. The vitrine
marks the beginning of the most claustrophobic part of the installation:
rooms five through seven. After the Auschwitz Demonstration,
there is almost no space to pass between the multiple rows of vitrines,
and the spectator is simultaneously threatened and provoked by the
fragile assembled elements. The beholder moving between the vitrines,
in other words, is made to feel transgressive by the fact that it
would be easy to disturb or destroy the art in this section of the Block;
the spectator potentially has power over the art and at the same time
fears being punished for hurting it. In this way, the work refers the
spectator to his or her own physical experience of the environment at
the same time as—through its qualities of ugliness, openness to history,
and de-skilling—it makes the spectator aware of his or her intellectual
contribution to the aesthetic experience. By connecting the
spectator’s body and physical perceptions to sculptural representations
and traces of Beuys’s actions both before and after World War II, the
vitrine promotes historical reflection on German identity in relation
to the Holocaust as a comparison of artifacts from different time periods,a
play of undecidable interpretations,and reflexive self-awareness
about the social and historical construction of human identity.
As both Beuys’s vitrine of  and the documentary representation
of the Holocaust of  suggest, the problems besetting Holocaust
memory are greatly exacerbated when these events reach the level of
objective cultural reproduction. Like Holocaust memories, cultural
representations can often distort or disguise events. In addition, they
can also desensitize, dulling the spectator to the vision of human pain.
Finally,they are potentially exploitative because they use the sufferings
of others as raw materials. As Beuys’s neo-avant-garde vitrine demonstrates,
these difficulties could be negotiated around —but not
easily, and certainly not without an audience who knew something
about Beuys’s art from the news media or other publications.38
The situation confronting Kiefer in the early s was much
worse. With the proliferation of depictions of the Holocaust, critics
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began to denounce an increase in reactionary representations—depictions
that blocked understanding as opposed to developing it.39 In addition,
the terms of the debate on memory and the Holocaust had
shifted since the late s. Now, the question was no longer simply
education but whether such education had overstepped its bounds.
There was an increasing backlash against Holocaust representation and,
with it, a sense that certain aspects of the past needed to be forgotten.
Moreover,like the rest of his generation (and unlike Beuys),Kiefer had
no personal experience of World War II, and thus no direct existential
connection to the events of mass murder.40 He had no “memories”—
distorted or otherwise—upon which to base his historical representations.
Finally, Kiefer’s aesthetic situation was different. Beuys’s neoavant-garde
dismantling of “traditional” modern art forms had long
since lost its ability to shock the art-going public.As Beuys had already
shown in detail by the mid-s, traditional forms of art could be expanded
to include books,environments,performances,films,even public
protests and political activity. By , such neo-avant-garde artmaking
strategies were becoming significantly overused. With the
growing perception of Beuys’s “neo-ness” (a sense that he was repeating
prewar avant-garde strategies), it seemed as if no new forms of art
could appear in Germany that would provoke—and, thereby, promote—critical
historical reflexivity.41 Instead,a highly debated and historically
self-conscious return to representational painting and sculpture
began to gain institutional and critical attention and support—a
style of art making that attracted the names “neo-expressionism” and
“postmodernism” for its return to an earlier, supposedly bankrupt,
twentieth century style and its presentation of the specter of German
fascism.42 According to many critics, both social and aesthetic, a “new
conservatism” appeared to be taking form—both in art and in West
German society at large.
As this “postmodern” atmosphere transformed German aesthetics
and society during the s, the representation of the Holocaust in
the context of German history became an issue of great interest as
well as a site of much contention. As is well known, the West German
“historians debate” was begun by the philosopher and social theorist
Jürgen Habermas when he accused the historians Klaus Hildebrand,
Michael Stürmer, Andreas Hillgruber, and Ernst Nolte of variously
promoting a “new revisionism”—a form of history writing that identified
with the German participants and represented them as victims,
that relativized the Holocaust by comparing it to other events of
genocide, and that partially excused it by suggesting that German
crimes were reactions to earlier “Bolshevist” threats of annihilation. In
addition, Habermas criticized the conservative historians’ call for a
form of history writing that would endow “higher meaning” to historical
events and integrate the West German community along namat
th ew b i ro   
tional—as opposed to international—lines.As he put it in an article entitled,“A
Kind of Settlement of Damages: The Apologetic Tendencies
in German History Writing,” published in Die Zeit, on July , :
There is a simple criterion that distinguishes the people involved in this dispute.The
one side assumes that working on a more objectified understanding releases energy
for self-reflective remembering and thus expands the space available for autonomously
dealing with ambivalent traditions.The other side would like to place revisionist history
in the service of a nationalist renovation of conventional identity.43
As the example of Beuys suggests, Habermas’s call for self-reflective
remembering and his insistence on the necessity of autonomously
dealing with ambivalent traditions were concerns to which at least
some West German artists had given visual form for the past twenty
years. However, in order for public and inclusive memory work to be
realized, what was needed, according to Habermas, was free and noncoercive
discourse and an interpretive commitment to the “unavoidable
pluralism of modes of understanding.”44 Significantly, it is Kiefer
who,over the course of the s,manages to promote precisely these
discursive and pluralistic practices in his art—in part by adapting the
strategies that produce hermeneutic undecidability and reflexivity in
Beuys’s Auschwitz Demonstration. In other words, by adapting Beuys’s
neo-avant-garde strategies to the self-consciously anachronistic practice
of “postmodern” history painting, Kiefer continued to keep the
Holocaust alive in West Germany, and, moreover, managed to do so in
a critical and historically specific way. For this reason, although the
“neo-expressionist” return to a seemingly more traditional form of
painting and sculpture was termed “regressive” by a number of critics
(and Kiefer was considered to be one of the primary exponents of this
return), closer examination of Kiefer’s work in the s suggests a
different story. Kiefer’s work could promote critical discourse and reflexivity
because he was also engaged in a transformation of painting
through the production of a highly material and metaphoric painterly
surface—a surface upon which a number of different types of signifiers
were generally combined. Although Kiefer—much more than
Beuys—recognized the fundamentally repeating and recycling nature
of modern art and culture, he continued to negotiate this problem by
increasing the citational possibilities of his representations: their multiple
references to different forms of social and cultural “texts.” After
a few false starts, Kiefer could, in other words, shock his audiences,
first,by giving neo-avant-garde strategies an outmoded disguise drawn
from a supposedly repudiated and discarded past and, second, by expanding
the metaphoric possibilities of his formal elements: the lines,
painting, photographs, texts, and raw and produced materials that
form the various strata of his multilayered representations.
Kiefer’s early attempts to represent the Holocaust occur in a series
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of paintings completed between  and . In these works, Kiefer
refers to the Holocaust intertextually through the appropriation of
names and phrases from Jewish poet Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue”
[Todesfuge] ()—a poem about the death camps by a Holocaust survivor.45
In Celan’s poem, an anonymous Jewish narrator, speaking in
the third person,describes the violent day and night experience of living
under the domination of Death,“a master from Germany.” Death
is an anonymous German man, presumably a concentration camp
guard, who lives in a house, writes to his beloved in Germany, plays
with a snake, and periodically emerges from his domicile in order to
mistreat his Jewish prisoners, order them to dig graves, and eventually
shoot them.“Margarete” stands for the idealized German woman—
the “golden haired,” absent partner to whom the man writes. Using a
fragmented and repetitive language suggesting the breakdown of rational
experience, Celan pairs and contrasts Margarete with Shulamith,
Margarete’s Jewish counterpart, whose “grave in the air” the
Jewish slave workers are forced to dig. At the end of the poem, after
the Jews are apparently shot, Celan concludes with a synecdochic verbal
image of the two absent women:“your golden Hair Margarete/
your ashen Hair Shulamith.”In this image,German and Jew are linked
by a mutual longing for their absent beloveds—a mutual longing that
perhaps suggests a desire for a different relationship between the two
races than the violent one represented in most of Celan’s poem.
Central to the poem’s overtone of moral advocacy—the hope it
holds out that human relations could and should be different—is a set
of metaphoric transformations that link the stanzas into a whole.The
first metaphor in this series is the “black milk of daybreak,”46 with
which the poem opens and of which the Jews are said to drink at different
moments over the course of the “action.” According to the various
recitations of the times of the day that repeat over the course of
the poem, the Jews’ drinking of the black milk is linked to the constant
circulation of time between morning, noon, and night. As the
poem continues, the image of black milk becomes both ashen smoke
and a burned corpse—images that are first suggested by the metaphor
“a grave in the air,”47 which the Jews must dig. Over the course of the
poem, the oscillating image of the cloud-corpse is at moments further
transformed into images of living (golden) and dead (ashen) hair,
which in turn evoke and refer back to the earlier poetic images.
Through this set of metaphoric transformations—milk,smoke,corpse,
and hair—Celan’s poem links nourishment with death and the lover’s
address to his absent beloved with the cruel orders of a demonic,technologically-estranged
murderer. Particularly through the undecidability
of hair—which stands for both the living and the dead—Celan’s
poem suggests the essential reciprocity of all human relationships: the
fact that the world is in a constant state of transformation and that,like
mat th ew b i ro   
the world itself, hierarchical relations between humans are constantly
being refigured.48 In other words, in conjunction with the poem’s occasional
switching of subject position (between the collective Jewish
gravediggers and the singular death-dealing “master from Germany”)
and its constant contrasts of loving and murderous relationships, the
metaphoric transformations of “Death Fugue” suggest that the evil
one commits upon one’s “enemies” can easily rebound on oneself and
those that one loves.
In comparison to the complexity and power of Celan’s poem,
Kiefer’s first attempts to represent Celan’s “Shulamith,” in Your Ashen
Hair, Shulamith (), an oil painting on canvas, are less than entirely
successful.49 The work depicts a naked woman with a mane of dark
hair.“Your ashen hair Shulamith” is written along her back and head,
and dark phallic skyscrapers thrust upward in the background. Here,
although the canvas plays between image and text (and thus possibly
promotes self-consciousness about the nature of representation),
Kiefer’s decision to directly represent or illustrate the Jewish victim—
something that Celan avoids—results in a neo-expressionist stereotype:
an image that sexualizes her, and thus identifies her too unproblematically
with nature. Shulamith is depicted seated, with her ankles
crossed, and her arms held rigidly by her side in a captive position. In
addition, in the context of Kiefer’s image field, the phallic-humanoid
buildings become stand-ins for the absent Germans of Celan’s
poem—despite their numbers, because of the technological mastery
that they evoke,the skyscrapers seem less likely to represent the absent
Jewish men.This identification of Shulamith’s captors with the modern
city and technology does nothing to undermine the unequal gendering
of the nature-culture distinction set up by Kiefer’s handling of
his lush female nude. Furthermore, by representing Shulamith bound
and naked, Kiefer also reinforces the stereotype of Jews as defenseless
and easy to kill.The representational content of the work does not, as
a whole, produce enough undecidability. Moreover, Kiefer’s first
painted Holocaust representation is not particularly interesting in
terms of form.Although working in a radically different medium than
Beuys, and thus avoiding the danger of simply repeating the older
artist, Kiefer cannot produce the formal and conceptual self-reflexivity
and play of different identities characteristic of both Beuys’s and
Celan’s Holocaust representations. As demonstrated by his later work,
Kiefer’s primary formal strengths lie in his inventive juxtapositions of
painted forms with materials such as sand,straw,lead,clay,and ash.Because
he cannot yet communicate the memory of the Holocaust
through a set of metaphoric formal transformations similar to those
created by Celan’s poem—metaphoric formal transformations that are
hinted at by Beuys through his use of unconventional materials in the
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Auschwitz Demonstration—Your Ashen Hair, Shulamith seems to fail its
subject.
Margarete (), on the other hand, another oil painting on canvas,
avoids the various problems that compromise Kiefer’s painted Shulamith
(see Figure ). In this larger work, Kiefer combines straw and
paint to create a flat but ambiguous landscape image with multiple
vertical axes that rise up out of a broad horizontal band covering the
bottom quarter of the surface. Out of this partially overpainted straw
bottom, which suggests a natural ground, straw tendrils—evoking
plant stalks,snakes,and squiggles of energy—emerge from below,penetrating
and losing themselves in the grayish, gesturally-painted oil
surface above. These trace representational elements are further augmented
by suggestions of painted flames on the tips of the straw tendrils
and the name “Margarete,” written by Kiefer across the center of
the canvas. In this work, Kiefer juxtaposes gestural, linguistic, material,
and mimetic elements that semantically resonate with his apparent appropriation
of an abstract expressionist style (suggested by the straw
and the gestural passages of painting on the canvas)—an appropriation
that has been noted by a number of American critics and supported
by Kiefer himself.50 Recalling Pollock’s  drip canvas, Blue Poles,
yet deliberately changing Pollock’s much more fluid way of creating
activated line on canvas, Margarete highlights questions having to do
mat th ew b i ro   
Figure . Anselm Kiefer, Margarete [Margarethe] (). Oil and straw on canvas.  × 5⁄8
inches. Private Collection. Copyright  Anselm Kiefer.
with the artist’s actions and his mental state when confronting the image
field. Although Kiefer’s activated straw does not directly encourage
a psychoanalytic reading in the way that Pollock’s flung skeins of
paint do, the twisting tendrils nevertheless draw meaning from the
history of Pollock’s critical reception—a history that often reads Pollock’s
drip canvases as arenas within which he acted, or tablets upon
which the indexical traces of his conscious and unconscious activity
were inscribed.51 This interpretive history is supported by the painting’s
heavily-worked surface, which reveals not only Kiefer’s slashing
gestures,but also how natural materials can resist such gestural activity.
As is the case with Pollock’s drip paintings, the spectator focuses on
the artist’s application of his material, and thus on the question of the
artist’s actions. Also evocative of associations having to do with the
artist’s own existence is the fact that, instead of directly representing
the victim as he did in Your Ashen Hair, Shulamith, in Margarete, Kiefer
seems to pick the subject position of the German victimizer. This is
the case because “Your golden hair, Margarete” is one of the few lines
in Celan’s poem that appears to be uttered from a German perspective,
and by identifying his representation with one of the few subjective
images attributed to the victimizer in “Death Fugue,” Kiefer
seems to connect a Jewish representation of the German perpetrator
to his own person.
Through the central material of straw, Kiefer’s work produces a
sense of spiraling transformation similar to the development of
metaphors in “Death Fugue.” Recalling the ambiguous character of
the hair in Celan’s poem, the straw in Margarete represents both something
that is dead and something that can be used to help produce
more life.52 In addition, through its juxtaposition with the handwriting
and the representational imagery, the straw suggests the production
of both language and likeness out of abstract line: the emergence
of various types of identifiable and meaningful representation out of
“pure” graphic phenomena. Moreover, in conjunction with the
painted flames, the straw evokes an intermingling or a play between
likeness and reality,picture and world.According to Kiefer’s depiction,
the actual straw is about to be consumed by the painted fire—something
that implies that both reality and different forms of representation
interact with and affect one another. In Margarete, Kiefer avoids
direct representation, attempts to learn about himself from a victim of
his parent’s generation, blends different cultural horizons, and keeps
the Holocaust alive by evoking comparisons between the actions of
the German perpetrator in the death camps and his own contemporary
act of painting. In addition, by producing a materially and conceptually
rich, painted surface—one that suggests passages between
different representational systems—Kiefer expands the potential of
representational painting in the late twentieth century by showing
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how it can transform itself into an entire range of opposites, including,
but not limited to,“abstract surface,”“drawing,”“language,” and
“natural object.” And in this way, the formal and existential reflexivity
produced by Kiefer’s work interacts with its undecidable citations
to suggest both the difficulties and the necessity of remembering and
depicting the past. Historical trauma, Margarete suggests, cannot be
represented unequivocally or even statically. It can—and must—
change over time. By working through the dense network of cultural
representations that connect the present day with the past, however,
those who come after may remember and commemorate monstrous
and largely unrepresentable events of historical trauma through representations
that acknowledge—and thereby contribute to—a process of
continuous dialogue and investigation.
Kiefer develops the self-reflexive, existential strategy characteristic
of his treatment of the Holocaust in Margarete in his next Holocaust
representation, his second version of Shulamith () (see Figure ).
This massive canvas, which is based on a  photograph of Wilhelm
Kreis’s Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers, constitutes a spectator
through its massiveness,emptiness,and strong recession into depth.The
canvas’s huge scale,lack of human figures,and exaggerated single point
perspective, in other words, help make the spectator self-conscious—
mat th ew b i ro   
Figure . Anselm Kiefer, Shulamith [Sulamith] (). Oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, and straw on
canvas, with woodcut. 3⁄16 × 11⁄16 inches. Saatchi Collection, London. Copyright 
Anselm Kiefer.
aware of his or her own particular position vis-à-vis the painting’s fictive
space. The work’s formal structure thus creates a situation in
which the spectator is prompted to read his or her selfhood reflexively
out of the encompassing world that the artist presents—a movement
from the world to meaning-projecting acts to a world-constituting
ego that recalls the method of phenomenological analysis.53 “If this is
my physical world,” the painting prompts the beholder to ask,“then
who am I? And what are my possibilities for action?”
By producing reflexivity in this way, Shulamith () gives its varied
audiences the possibility to identify with its “point of view” or, by
literally and figuratively stepping to one side of the point upon which
the work’s perspective converges, the possibility to disagree—to reject
or disown the vision the canvas presents. By avoiding direct representation
and connecting the spectator’s lived bodily experience to the
ambiguous and claustrophobic hall, Kiefer fashions a representation
that once again manages to recall the Holocaust in a way that recognizes
the problems of individual and perspectival distortion to which
its events are subject. In fact, the work produces irreconcilable interpretations.
It juxtaposes, for example,German and Jewish victimhood:
the space is a tomb for Shulamith as well as a memorial hall for fallen
German soldiers.The painting provokes the spectator to ask,“Exactly
who has lost more?”—a question whose shocking obscenity can produce
historical labor, attempts to reimagine the collective with which
future generations would wish to identify after the events of mass annihilation.
Kiefer’s representation is thus inclusive (it blends cultural
horizons), while still remaining undecidable and productive of debate.
As was the case with Celan’s poem, Kiefer’s painting sets members of
different cultures in dialogue. And in conjunction with the work’s
projection of a perspective through which the artist and the work’s
various spectators can momentarily share a common point of view—
a possible “we” or provisional collective identity—Shulamith’s address
to spectators from different cultures evokes a potential community
whose conversation can keep the significance of the Holocaust alive.
Like the second Shulamith, Kiefer’s dark canvas, Iron Path () (see
Figure ), manages to grapple powerfully with the problems of Holocaust
representation. One of the many variations during the s of
the field and field path imagery that Kiefer developed in the early
s, Iron Path depicts a bleak landscape upon which a pair of railroad
tracks recede sharply into the distance. At the top of the painting,
just below the horizon, the two tracks diverge, and directly above
them Kiefer marks the sky with an irregularly shaped piece of gold
leaf. A third of the way up the painting, one on each track, cast iron
replicas of climbing shoes are attached to the oil, acrylic, and emulsion
surface—shoes resembling a type once used by repairmen to ascend
and descend telephone and electrical poles.Each shoe is adorned with
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olive branches, and a lead rock hangs from the one on the right. Read
in the context of World War II history, Iron Path represents the Holocaust
as an anonymous journey into death—just as the sound of the
railroad had suggested the transports in German radio plays of the
s.54 In addition, the anonymity of the image—Kiefer’s refusal to
depict the suffering of particular individuals—adds a powerful,
mournful quality to the work.
Iron Path is also highly reminiscent of one of the central repeating
images from Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (): a frontal and radically
foreshortened tracking shot of moving landscapes and empty
rails leading to various death camps.55 Like Lanzmann’s shot, which
can put the viewer in the same position as the train engineer driving
his victims to their deaths,Kiefer’s large image draws its power directly
from its banality or prosaic character, as well as its ability to pull the
spectator into its representational space. By concretizing the horror of
annihilation in the form of empty tracks and a slight gold glow on the
horizon, Kiefer manages to depict an event that could be trivialized
or exploited by a more literal presentation. Initially disturbing, however,
is the way in which Kiefer chooses to grab his viewers. Recalling
the second version of Shulamith (see Figure ), which lacks human
figures, has a radical one-point perspective, and possesses a film-like
scale, Kiefer here employs emptiness, perspective, and a film-like format
to drag the viewer into the picture, at the same time as he asserts the
painting’s flat surface through the build-up of material and objects on
the canvas. Through the suggestion of rushing movement toward a
layered material surface, the canvas sounds an overtone of violence:
mat th ew b i ro   
Figure . Anselm Kiefer, Iron Path [Eisen-Steig] (). Oil, acrylic, and emulsion on canvas, with
olive branches, iron, and lead. ⅝ × ⅝ inches. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David Pincus,
Wynnewood, PA. Copyright  Anselm Kiefer.
Iron Path invites its spectators to collide head first with a seemingly
solid object. Unlike the first Shulamith, but like Margarete (see Figure
) and the second Shulamith (see Figure ), Iron Path once again presents
the spectator with the opportunity to identify with the subject
position of the victimizer, namely, the railroad engineer. Through his
deployment of an emphatically-drawn perspectival space,Kiefer makes
each and every spectator party to his own, highly self-critical existential
questioning.“Can I,” the painting causes one to ask,“occupy the
same place as those humans who participated directly in the horror of
the Jewish annihilation?” In this way, the violence of Kiefer’s formal
strategy can be registered as a representation of German self-criticism,
and thus the work seems a convincing and apropos response to some of
the ethical problems entailed by the representation of historical trauma.
Iron Path also produces undecidable interpretations. Speaking in
 on postwar West German historical consciousness, Kiefer notes
that,“We see train tracks somewhere,and think about Auschwitz.This
will last for a long time.”56 Yet, despite Kiefer’s public statement about
the mournful meaning of train tracks, the fact that their forms signify
loss and horror beyond belief, Iron Path also produces disturbingly redemptive
readings, interpretations that suggest that something good
has emerged as a direct result of mass murder. As Mark Rosenthal
notes, Kiefer also encodes alchemical lead-iron-gold symbolism into
the work through the lead rock, the iron shoes, and the gold cloud of
smoke. These materials recall the alchemist’s project of turning base
matter—such as lead and earth—into iron, then silver, and finally
gold:a transformation that was understood to prefigure humanity’s ultimate
spiritual redemption. Thus, according to Rosenthal, Iron Path
can also be interpreted as representing a movement to
a higher plane of existence . . . . [T]he vertical effort begins in the human, earthly
realm and rises compellingly toward a horizontal . . . . [T]he railroad tracks emphasize
both the idea of moving across the land and a vertical posture . . . [and the] combination
of the shoes and track suggest horizontal and vertical movement at once . . . .
Kiefer at first called this painting Heavenly Jerusalem, but his new title accords better
with the image in emphasizing the way, rather than the goal . . . . In this case, iron is
the key to producing a concrete manifestation of the ‘path.’ By literally forging fundamental
materials, it is apparently possible to surmount the given, horizontal movement
and take an ascendant, vertical path. Following the long, black night depicted
earlier in his career, the artist-alchemist is showing that gold and a New World may,
indeed, be attained.57
This disturbing conflict of interpretations between the mournfulcritical
and the falsely-redemptive readings of Iron Path reveals the
central interpretive problem that faces the various spectators confronted
by the intentional undecidability of Kiefer’s Holocaust representations:
How can the beholder avoid reducing their multiple and
contradictory significations? What to one viewer can appear as an unth
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settling—quasi-victimizing—memorial to the victims of German
atrocity may to another appear as the artist’s successful achievement of
a new world. Although Kiefer consciously works with alchemical imagery,
and encourages such interpretations of his work, it is clear that
alchemy is not the only symbolic system that underlies Iron Path.58
The historical record—which is also always present in Kiefer’s art—is
an equally legitimate system for interpretation. Kiefer’s various spectators
must thus recognize the need for any interpretation of Kiefer’s
art to carefully and consistently generate multiple and contradictory
readings—something that can be achieved by focusing on the many
binary oppositions inherent in his works as well as the multiple social
and cultural contexts to which they may refer.
Indeed, upon closer examination, every element in Kiefer’s painting
seems to be caught up in a rich network of contradictions—antitheses
that draw Iron Path’s spectators into producing additional interpretations.The
climbing shoes are not “real world” objects but rather cast
iron reproductions—a transformation that robs them of their traditional
properties, namely, the movability and lightness central to their
function. Thus, they ambiguously imply movement both upward
(their climbing function) and downward (because of their weight and
clumsiness). In addition, the tracks diverge, and potentially offer the
spectator two different possibilities, travel to the right or travel to the
left—a doubling that resonates with the historical idea of the Nazi selections
of death camp victims.Furthermore,in light of Celan’s poem,
the gold leaf “cloud” on Iron Path’s horizon seems to put Margarete in
the place of Shulamith—a substitution that emphasizes the fundamental
reversibility of violence.These various contradictions encoded
in the work challenge the spectator—pushing him or her to reflect on
the activities of genocide in changing ways by searching for additional
points of reference from which to produce new readings.
The idea of the ubiquity of technology suggested by the climbing
shoes and train tracks, for example, directs the spectator’s attention to
the context that makes these instruments possible—a context that is
not the natural world, but rather the cold, well-functioning instrumental
world of electricity, transportation, photography, and technologies
of long distance and mass communication. When looked at
from this point of view, traces of technology appear all over Iron Path’s
rough surface. In addition to the cast shoes and the industrial “subject
matter,” the painting’s reproductive photographic base shows through
in its quasi-mechanical one-point perspective, and the work as a
whole also asserts its technologically augmented power through its
large scale and its ability to bear the weight of the heavy materials that
are attached to its surface. By evoking the technological background
conditions that made the “Final Solution” possible (the idea that technology
produces an enabling“framework,”a context that is both physmat
th ew b i ro   
ical and conceptual), Kiefer’s work also suggests that technology is not
neutral or value free and that its rapid development in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries may have changed human behavior for the
worse.59 Through its support of these multiple frames of reference,Iron
Path shows the memory of the Holocaust to be alive as a creative and
discursive practice.
Given the fact that Kiefer’s works emphasize the fundamental polysemia
and productivity of works of culture (the idea that the “meaning”
of such works lies in the further activity—both cultural and social—that
they produce),it is not entirely surprising that Kiefer would
turn to the form of the book to create his third and fourth versions of
the Jewish victim, Shulamith I (see Figure ) and II (). As a symbol
of the spiritual striving and highest achievements of many human
beings—a form in which the abstract concepts of law, religion, philosophy,and
science can be embodied—the book is common to a vast
range of figures and cultures. It is, as a popular dictionary of iconography
suggests,“too widely used to be by itself a useful aid to identification.”60
Nearly omnipresent for long periods of Western history
yet radically indeterminate, the book form thus embodies many noble
aspects of human striving and, moreover, stands as a sign of the
th e yale journal of c ri t i c i sm  
Figure . Anselm Kiefer, Shulamith I [Sulamith I] (), pp. –. Book,  pages. Soldered lead
and woman’s hair. ¾ × ¾ × 5⁄16 inches. Private Collection. Copyright  Anselm Kiefer.
need that most people have to go beyond themselves, to communicate,
to form larger communities, and to connect themselves to one
another across space and time. It was in certain ways to radically contradict
this fundamentally “spiritual” character of the book that Kiefer
appears to have created these two “unique,” yet “identical” works.
Kiefer produced the two Shulamith books by gluing black hair between
soldered pages of lead—pages he had previously allowed to oxidize
in large sheets before he cut them into book form. Here, by
“preserving” black hair between poisonous metal plates (hair that suggests
that of the Holocaust victims in Celan’s poem), Kiefer mimics
past German crimes and the Nazis’ habit of keeping material and scientific
records of their horrifying “accomplishments.” In this way,
Kiefer seems to invert the noble connotations of the book form—
something that is emphasized by the material meanings of the two
books’ elements (their contrasts of poisonous lead with organic hair)
as well as the fact that Kiefer here appears to coldly and instrumentally
use the body of the female, “racial” other as an object in his
works. In addition, by making two works that are constructed according
to the same semi-automatic process, Kiefer appears to “mass
produce” the victim’s representation. In other words, by inexplicably
doubling Shulamith, Kiefer perhaps suggests her replaceable nature
and lack of individual importance.
At the same time, however, because of the complex contradictions
between their literal, figurative, and abstract aspects, the Shulamith
books powerfully embody the contradictions of Holocaust representation.
A mass of delicate lines and washes, they seem expressively
painted—and thus highly subjective.Yet, upon inspection, the “painting”
and the “washes” on the surfaces of the books reveal themselves
merely to be traces of the effects of time on the rolled lead—representative
of objective historical decay. As books that cannot be read,
the Shulamith series appropriately suggests the self-destruction of reason
through their lack of text as well as their violent bifurcation of reality
into subject and object, victim and victimizer. In addition, by returning
to Celan’s central metaphor of “ashen hair” while at the same
time avoiding almost all signs of language,61 Kiefer creatively acknowledges
his enormous debt to the past.This past, as the Shulamith
series of  suggests, is both a highly metaphoric cultural tradition
which is exemplified by Celan’s poetry and which forms the inspiration
for Kiefer’s emphatically material surfaces, and a set of historical
events, which, as a child of the victimizers, Kiefer feels compelled to
complexly remember and represent.The past, as Kiefer’s works imply,
gives the present inspiration and charges it with responsibility.
The paradox of Holocaust representation that emerged over the
course of West German history revealed itself in the conflict between
the moral imperative to remember and the impossibility of representmat
th ew b i ro   
ing a past that by its singularity, incomprehensibility, and horror
evaded clear representation. Developing Beuys’s example, but without
Beuys’s personal experience and in very different media, Kiefer’s best
Holocaust representations managed to confront this paradox directly.
They are memorial images that initiated their spectators into the issues
of Holocaust memory and representation,connecting these problems
to the lived experience of the postwar German artist as well as
to that of the work’s various audiences and, very importantly, to the
subject positions of both the German victimizer and the Jewish victim.
In relation to Beuys’s example in the s and s, Kiefer’s
representations were significant because they marked a moment of
translation of neo-avant-garde strategies into a seemingly anachronistic
genre that the neo-avant-garde had largely avoided: namely, a form
of large scale representational “history painting”—one that, in the
s, was often characterized as “postmodern” for its appropriative
and ambiguous nature. Although the postmodern, neo-expressionist
representations of German history made by Kiefer and a number of
other German artists in the s were called “cynical” and even
“Nazi kitsch,”62 and despite the fact that many forms of postmodernism
fit mythologizing and conservative positions,63 Kiefer’s best
Holocaust representations demonstrated that this did not have to be
the case. By evoking hermeneutic undecidability and reflexivity in
conjunction with a highly material and metaphoric painterly surface
(one that implied the constant reproduction and transformation of the
world and, thus, the world’s status as representation), history painting,
Kiefer’s work suggested,could be continued in the s in a way that
was critical, historically specific, and convincing. Kiefer’s best Holocaust
representations make memory an existential and creative act—a
process that circles between the self, others, the world, cultural representations,
and the original events these representations still indicate.
In this way,Kiefer’s art suggests that the memory of the Holocaust will
remain—even after the original participants are no longer able to bear
witness.
Notes
 Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the University of Chicago, the University
of Michigan, Harvard University, the College Art Association Annual Conference, the
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, and the Denver Art Museum. I am indebted
to my various commentators and interlocutors at these talks for their help in thinking
through the issues examined here;they include Norman Bryson,Edward Dimendberg,Julia
Hell, David J. Levin, Geoff Manaugh,W.J.T. Mitchell, Peter Nisbet, and Scott Spector.
In addition, I would also like to thank Christine Mehring for her careful reading of this
essay in manuscript form, and Lisa Bessette for her rigorous copyediting. Finally, I am
grateful to Lisa Saltzman, whose book-length examination of Anselm Kiefer’s art in relation
to the Holocaust, Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (New York: Cambridge University
Press, ), inspired this investigation.
th e yale journal of c ri t i c i sm  
 For strong criticisms of Kiefer’s ability to represent history see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,
“A Note on Gerhard Richter’s October , ” in October (Spring ): – and Isabelle
Graw’s interview with Buchloh,“View: Gerhard Richter:‘ Oktober ’” in
Artscribe International  (September/October ): –. For accounts of the debates over
the representation of German history both in German and American politics, see: Richard
J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow:West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi
Past (New York: Pantheon Books, ); Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural
Criticism and the Historian’s Debate, ed. and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, ); Geoffrey Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective
(Bloomington:Indiana University Press,);Charles S.Maier,The Unmasterable Past:History,
Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
); and Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy
Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates
(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, ).
 See Theodor W. Adorno,“What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” () in
Hartman,ed.,Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective,–.See also Alexander and Margarete
Mitscherlich,The Inability to Mourn:Principles of Collective Behavior (New York:Grove
Press, ).
 Today, thanks in part to the heterogeneous forms and materials of so much twentieth century
art, the term representation can be used to refer to a number of different types of signifying
relation.“Representation” can consist of a mimetic connection between a visual
likeness produced in a nonlinguistic medium—for example, a realistic painting or sculpture—and
the real world object that this copy signifies. Charles S. Peirce called this connection
an iconic relation, emphasizing that such a signifying relation makes no assertion
about the actual existence of that which it represents:“The icon has no dynamical connection
with the object it represents; it simply happens that its qualities resemble those of
the object, and excite analogous sensations in the mind for which it is a likeness” (Charles
S. Peirce,“Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Justus Buchler, ed., Philosophical
Writings of Peirce [New York: Dover, ], ). In addition,“representation” can also be
used to name the arbitrary or symbolic connections between linguistic signs—either words
or phrases—and their denotative and connotative meanings: connections that are far more
conventional and abstract than those of realistic painterly or sculptural representations, although
they are just as disconnected from the actual object. Peirce called the symbol a
“conventional sign, or one depending on habit” (Peirce,“Logic as Semiotic,” ).“The
symbol,” he noted,“is connected with its object by virtue of the idea of the symbol-using
mind, without which no such connection would exist” (Peirce,“Logic as Semiotic,” ).
Furthermore, as exemplified by photography, film, and video,“representation” also occurs
as an indexical relationship between a cultural copy and its real world referent, one in
which the likeness is connected to its original as an effect is connected to a cause.“An index,”
Peirce wrote,“is a sign which refers to the object that it denotes by virtue of being
really affected by that object” (Peirce,“Logic as Semiotic,” ). In reference to photography,
Roland Barthes called this indexical character of certain representations, their “thathas-been,”which
is ultimately a corporeal relationship between signifier and signified,one,
moreover,that was always mediated by an awareness of death.“The photograph,”he wrote,
“is literally an emanation of the referent. From the real body, which was there, proceed radiations
which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant;
the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed
rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to
my gaze:light,though impalpable,is here a carnal medium,a skin I share with anyone who
has been photographed” (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.
Richard Howard, [New York: Hill and Wang, ], ).Through its indexical characteristics,
in other words, a representation potentially reminds the beholder of something that
existed and that has subsequently ceased to be. I here emphasize the most famous of
Peirce’s three triadic definitions of the sign to remind the reader at the outset of the multiple
forms of signification through which meaning is communicated by representations.
Indeed,throughout the twentieth century,most—if not all—representations communicate
mat th ew b i ro   
in multiple and hybrid ways. Furthermore, in the wake of the readymade strategies of the
Dada and surrealist artists,“representation” can also be used to indicate the situation that
occurs when a fragment of reality—either a mass produced object or one that is produced
by nature—is used to evoke sets of meaning that fall outside the object’s everyday significance
and that, consequently, have been given to it by a social, historical, scientific, aesthetic,
or literary tradition. As will be shown, this “symbolic” or “allegorical” use of the
readymade strategy, which often communicates its meaning through all three types of signifying
relation,became one of the central strategies that West German artists used to confront
the Holocaust. Finally, in addition to being employed in the above senses,“representation”
will also be used here to name the construction of an embodied perspective or
“point of view”—a visual form that promotes both self-reflexivity and openness to the
world.
 Gene Ray has made a convincing case for the centrality of the Holocaust to the art of
Joseph Beuys. See Gene Ray, The Use and Abuse of the Sublime: Joseph Beuys and Art After
Auschwitz (Ph.D.dissertation) (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami,); see also Gene
Ray,ed.,Joseph Beuys:Mapping the Legacy (New York:D.A.P.,),in particular,pp.–.
 Primo Levi,“The Memory of Offense,” in Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective,
.
 Levi,“Memory,” –.
 Adorno,“Past”, .
 Adorno,“Past,” .
 Adorno,“Past,” .
 After making his Abitur in , Kiefer began to study Law and French at Freiburg University.
After three semesters, he quit and began, in , to study art at the Freiburg Art
Academy under the conceptual painter Peter Dreher. Kiefer remained at the Freiburg
Academy until , when he graduated with his “Occupations” work. In , Kiefer
moved to Karlsruhe, where he began to study at the Karlsruhe Art Academy under the
figurative painter Horst Antes; he then switched to Joseph Beuys’s class at the Düsseldorf
Art Academy in . In , Kiefer moved to Hornbach, but continued to visit Joseph
Beuys at the Düsseldorf Academy for critiques and discussions. Kiefer stopped these visits
in late  or early . See Anselm Kiefer,“Selbstbiographie” in Anselm Kiefer: Bilder
und Bücher (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, ), . A translation of Kiefer’s autobiography appears
in Mark Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer (Chicago and Philadelphia: The Art Institute of
Chicago and The Philadelphia Museum of Art, ), , –. For other accounts of
Kiefer’s biography, see Hecht and Krüger,“Venedig : Aktuelle Kunst made in Germany,”
Art: Das Kunstmagazin  (June ): –, and Kynaston McShine, ed., An International
Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art,
), .
 For an account of Kiefer’s dealer history, see Paul Taylor,“Painter of the Apocalypse,” The
NewYork Times Magazine (October , ): –. Kiefer’s fame as an artist grew considerably
in , when he was one of the two featured artists at the German Pavilion of
the Venice Biennale, and was strongly criticized by a number of German critics. For the
debate that Kiefer inspired at that time, see Werner Spies,“Überdosis an Teutschem: Die
Kunstbiennale von Venedig eröffnet,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung  (June , ): ;
Peter Iden,“Die Lieben der Kommissare: Zur Eröffnung der diesjährigen Kunst-Biennale
von Venedig,” Frankfurter Rundschau  (June , ): ; Petra Kipphoff,“Die Lust an der
Angst—der deutsche Holzweg,” Die Zeit  (June , ): ; Klaus Wagenbach,“‘Neue
Wilde,’ teutonisch, faschistisch?,” Freibeuter  (): –; Bazon Brock,“Avantgarde
and Mythos,” Kunstforum International  (April ): –; and Rudi Fuchs,“Die Kritik
reicht Blut und greift an,” Der Spiegel  (June , ): –.
 Perhaps the most important source for this photograph in West Germany was“The Stroop
Report,” first published in  and reprinted numerous times in the s. See Juergen
Stroop, Es gibt keinen jüdischenWohnbezirk inWarschau mehr (Neuwied: Luchterhand, ).
The image also appeared in art catalogues. See, for example, Faschismus: Renzo Vespignani
(Berlin: Elefanten Press, ).
 “Less individualized, less marked by the particularities of identity, . . . children invite multiple
projections and identifications. Their photographic images elicit an affiliative and
th e yale journal of c ri t i c i sm  
identificatory as well as a protective spectatorial look marked by these investments” (Marianne
Hirsch,“Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy,”
in Mieke Bal, et al., eds. Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present [Hanover and
London: University Press of New England, ], ). See also, Marianne Hirsch,“Surviving
Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” TheYale Journal of
Criticism . (): –.
 Hirsch,“Projected Memory,” –.
 The idea of using photography to produce psychic distance, for example, was already an
important issue in German culture in the early s. It is central, for example, to Ernst
Jünger’s thinking on the medium. For Jünger, the distancing effects of photography enable
humans to both withstand and commit an ever-increasing amount of violence. See Ernst
Jünger,“War and Photography” (), trans. Anthony Nassar, in New German Critique 
(Spring/Summer ):–;Ernst Jünger,“On Danger”(),trans.Donald Reneauin,
in New German Critique  (Spring/Summer ): –; and Ernst Jünger,“Photography
and the ‘Second Consciousness’” (), trans. Joel Agee, in Christopher Phillips, ed.,
Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings (New York: Aperture,
), –.
 Detailed comparisons of photographic images with memory images appear in Germany
already in the s. See Siegfried Kracauer,“Photography” () in Siegfried Kracauer,
The Mass Ornament:Weimar Essays, trans. and ed.Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, ), –. Kracauer radically distinguishes photographic and
memory images. For him, memory images preserve the truth of a person’s history:“Truth
can be found only by a liberated consciousness which assesses the demonic nature of the
drives.The traits that consciousness recollects stand in a relationship to what has been perceived
as true, the latter being either manifest in these traits or excluded by them.The image
in which these traits appear is distinguished from all other memory images, for unlike
the latter it preserves not a multitude of opaque recollections but elements that touch
upon what has been recognized as true. All memory images are bound to be reduced to
this type of image, which may rightly be called the last image, since it alone preserves the
unforgettable. The last image of a person is that person’s actual history” (Kracauer,“Photography,”
). Photographic images, on the other hand, destroy history:“The photograph
is the sediment which has settled from the monogram, and from year to year its semiotic
value decreases. The truth content of the original is left behind in its history; the photograph
captures only residuum that history has discharged” (Kracauer,“Photography,” ).
Walter Benjamin, however, argues that this dichotomy between (false) photography and
(true) memory cannot be maintained as a radical opposition. See Walter Benjamin,“A
Short History of Photography” (), in Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Essays on Photography
(New Haven: Leete’s Island, ), –. Indeed, according to Benjamin, the separation
of a photograph from its “original” ontological context is the precondition for its
production of historical truth through captioning.“The camera will become smaller and
smaller, more and more prepared to grasp fleeting, secret images whose shock will bring
the mechanism of association in the viewer to a complete halt. At this point captions must
begin to function, captions that understand the photograph, which turn all the relations
of life into literature, and without which all photographic construction must remain
bound in coincidences”(Benjamin,“A Short History of Photography,”).For Benjamin,
photography can thus be used to produce both historical truths and historical falsehoods.
 On the ontological character of the photographic image, see Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.See
also André Bazin,What is Cinema?,trans.Hugh Gray (Berkeley:University of California
Press,),–.Rosalind Krauss explores the shifting ontological character of the
photographic image—its continual play or movement between signification and reality—
through the concept of the “index”; see Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the AvantGarde
and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), .
 The idea that the same photograph could be used to represent entirely different states of
affairs was one of the foundational assumptions behind much photographic theory and
practice in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century. See, for example, the
crass retouching of photographs in Walther Stein, hrsg., Um Vaterland und Freiheit:Wirklichkeitsaufnahmen
aus dem grossen Kriege nebst einer Einführung (Siegen und Leipzig: Hermat
th ew b i ro   
mann Montanus Verlagsbuchhandlung, ), a book that purports to be “objective” war
reportage.See also Ernst Jünger,“Einleitung”in Edmund Schultz,hrsg.,Die veränderteWelt.
Eine Bilderfibel unserer Zeit (Breslau:Wilh. Gottl. Korn Verlag,).The propagandistic use
of photographs characteristic of Nazi and Communist visual culture also reflects this cynical
understanding of the radical polyvalence of photographic images.
 The work is more commonly dated –—a dating that is derived from the years of
origin of its constituent parts. I date it  here, because  was the year in which the
Auschwitz Demonstration was first assembled as a whole. See Mario Kramer,“Joseph Beuys:
‘Auschwitz Demonstration’ –,” in Eckhart Gillen, hrsg., Deutschlandbilder: Kunst
aus einem geteilten Land (Köln: DuMont, ), .
 On the concept of hermeneutic undecidability, see Matthew Biro, Anselm Kiefer and the
Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), –.The
extremely strong positions that critics often take—either for or against Kiefer’s art—reflect
this characteristic of Kiefer’s works. In literary theory, the distinction drawn between ambiguity
and undecidability is often made in terms of the distinction between ambiguity
and indeterminacy. See Timothy Bahti,“Ambiguity and Indeterminacy: The Juncture,”
Comparative Literature . (Summer ):–.Andreas Huyssen is also extremely responsive
to the hermeneutic undecidability of Kiefer’s art. See Andreas Huyssen,“Anselm
Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth,” October  (Spring ): –;
in particular pp. –.
 On the concept of the neo-avant-garde, see Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, ), in particular pp. –. See also Benjamin
H. D. Buchloh,“The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the
Neo-Avant-Garde,” October  (Summer ): –, and Donald Kuspit, The Cult of the
Avant-Garde Artist (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), in particular pp. –.
 Beuys mentions being exposed to Dada art through their magazines around  or ,
although he claims that Dada art didn’t affect him very much.See Georg Jappe,“Interview
with Beuys About Key Experiences” (September ,), trans. Peter Nisbet, in Ray,ed.,
Joseph Beuys, –. As Benjamin H. D. Buchloh argues, however, the initial strategic
models that Beuys drew upon were not taken from examples originating in the prewar
context. Rather, because of the vast appetite of West German collectors and museums for
contemporary art from the United States and France after the war, the initial models of
avant-garde art-making came to Beuys from foreign neo-avant-garde movements—specifically
American abstract expressionism and French Nouveaux Réalisme. (According to
Buchloh, Jackson Pollock,Yves Klein, and Arman are the main paradigms for Beuys.) See
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,“Reconsidering Joseph Beuys: Once Again,” in Ray, ed., Joseph
Beuys, –. At the same time, as Beuys’s art developed in the s and s, it constructed
a dialogue, not only with the prewar “historical” avant-garde, but also with other
neo-avant-garde movements such as American pop and minimalism. Beuys’s relationship
to American minimalism is particularly interesting. American minimalist art actually began
to be shown in West Germany around . Carl Andre’s works, for example, were
first shown in Düsseldorf at the Konrad Fischer Gallery between October  and November
, ; in addition, Minimal Art, an important traveling exhibition that included
the works of Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris, among others, opened
at the Haags Gemeentemuseum in The Hague on March , , at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
on January , , and at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin on March , .
However, sculptures by Beuys made in the late s (for example, Rubberized Box [])
anticipate Beuys’s “minimalist” works of the late s and s—works that were
thought to respond to the American mode of sculptural production. See, for example,
Georg Jappe, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (February , ), quoted in Caroline Tisdall,
Joseph Beuys (New York: Thames and Hudson, ), . Thus, although the scale of his
more abstract works from the late s and s (such as Fond III []), as well as his
selection of certain types of industrial materials, appears to have been influenced by the
American minimalists, Beuys’s “minimalism” is not simply an adaptation of a foreign style.
Instead, it is a creative refiguration—one, moreover, that is done with an awareness that
American minimalism itself had historical antecedents.Thus, by the late s, Beuys was
engaged in a simultaneous dialogue with an international group of contemporary and past
th e yale journal of c ri t i c i sm  
artists.(Beuys,for example,struck up a friendship with Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer
in . See Götz Adriani,Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys: Leben und
Werk (Köln: DuMont, ), , , –.) One could therefore say that, by the time
Beuys created the Auschwitz Demonstration, he was simultaneously engaged with both
avant-garde and neo-avant-garde paradigms.
 For press documentation proving that Beuys’s art could continue to provoke outrage and
debate well into the s, see Johannes Am Ende, et al., Joseph Beuys und die Fettecke: Eine
Dokumentation zur Zerstörung der Fettecke in der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Heidelberg: Edition
Staeck, ).
 The vitrine—which consists of objects and artworks that Beuys previously exhibited separately
or used as props in his Fluxus-inspired performances during the early and mids—was
first assembled in its current form in the summer of  for the exhibition
“Collection  Karl Ströher” in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich. It was reassembled
in its final form and current location in Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt
in April,.See Kramer,“Joseph Beuys:‘Auschwitz Demonstration’–,”,.
 Following the order of my inventory, the titles and dates of the objects are as follows: Fish
(),Cross (),First Rat (),Lightning (),Sick Girl with Ambulance in Background
(), Auschwitz (), + – Sausage (), Sun Lamp Goggles (), Akku [Battery]
(Sausage) (), Bottle with Fat (Solid) (), Bottle with Fat (Liquid) (), Iodine (Bottle)
(), Non-IdentificationTag (Aluminum) (), and Heat Sculpture (). See Eva Beuys,
et al., Joseph Beuys: Block Beuys (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, ), . For the fullest discussion
of the titles and identities of all the objects in Beuys’s Auschwitz Demonstration, as
well as their previous usage in his actions, see Kramer,“Joseph Beuys:‘Auschwitz Demonstration’
–,” –. According to the editors of Joseph Beuys: Block Beuys, the
Sun Lamp Goggles also appeared in Beuys’s Aachen action.
 On the titles of the two bottles with fat, see note  above.
 On the relationship of Nazism to rationalization and technology, see Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary
Modernism:Technology, Culture, and Politics inWeimar and theThird Reich (New York:
Cambridge University Press, ). On the relationship of genocide to rationalization and
technology, see Detlev J. K. Peukert,“The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit
of Science,” in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds., Reevaluating the Third Reich (New
York: Holmes and Meier, ), –.
 As Walter Laqueur notes,“‘Holokaustein’ means to bring a (wholly) burnt offering; it was
not the intention of the Nazis to make a sacrifice of this kind, and the position of the Jews
was not that of a ritual victim.” Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth
about Hitler’s‘Final Solution’ (Boston:Little,Brown,and Company, ),n.See also Geoff
Eley,“Holocaust History,” London Review of Books (March –, ): –.
 Beuys introduced a new version of his life story that was more firmly grounded in historical
fact around , the year that the Auschwitz Demonstration was installed in Darmstadt.
In an effort to tie his art more directly to German politics, and in particular to the
events of World War II, Beuys began to connect his use of felt and fat—anti-art materials
that he began to employ in the early-s and that reflected his interest in depicting
warmth in plastic terms—to his wartime experiences, specifically, to a wintertime plane
crash in which he almost died during the war.According to Beuys, after his plane was shot
down over the Eastern Front, his unconscious body was discovered in the snow by
Crimean Tartars, who covered his wounds in fat, wrapped his body in felt to preserve its
warmth, and took him down from his mountain-top crash site on a sled. The materials
that he used in his art were thus meant to signify this experience, their autobiographical
meaning interacting with their difficult, anti-art forms in such a way as to get his audiences
to reflect upon the destruction that Germany had both experienced and wrought,
and the ways in which it might begin to better reformulate and rebuild itself. For an excellent
discussion of the history of the development of this story as well as an extremely
evenhanded account of the historical events upon which it was based, see Peter Nisbet,
“Crash Course” in Ray, ed., Joseph Beuys, –.
 On the concept of the historical avant-garde as politically engaged and able to break down
the distinction between art and real life, see Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, in particular
pp. –.
mat th ew b i ro   
 See Adriani, et al., Joseph Beuys, –. See also Uwe M. Schneede, Joseph Beuys, Die Aktionen:
KommentiertesWerkverzeichnis mit fotografischen Dokumentationen (Ostfildern-Ruit bei
Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, ), –.
 See Adriani, et al., Joseph Beuys, –. See also Schneede, Joseph Beuys: Die Aktionen,
–, and Kramer,“Joseph Beuys:‘Auschwitz Demonstration’ –,” .
 In , while discussing his Auschwitz Demonstration and related works with Caroline Tisdall,
Beuys stated,“I do not feel that these works were made to represent catastrophe, although
the experience of catastrophe has certainly contributed to my awareness. But my
interest was not in illustrating it . . . .The human condition is Auschwitz, and the principle
of Auschwitz finds it perpetuation in our understanding of science and political systems,
in the delegation of responsibility to groups of specialists and the silence of intellectuals
and artists. I have found myself in permanent struggle with this condition and its roots. I
find for instance that we are now experiencing Auschwitz in its contemporary character.
This time bodies are outwardly preserved (cosmetic mummification) rather than exterminated,
but other things are being eliminated. Ability and creativity are burnt out: a form
of spiritual execution, the creation of a climate of fear perhaps even more dangerous because
it is so refined.” See Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, –. Although an overstatement for
which Beuys has rightly been criticized,this declaration confirms the general thrust of this
particular interpretative trajectory suggested by the Auschwitz Demonstration vitrine. Unable
to transform the past or redeem his own involvement in it, Beuys used his art to produce
critical awareness about the aspects of his contemporary society that he believed
could potentially lead to similar catastrophes. Although his statement risks relativizing the
Holocaust, it suggests the moral imperative behind his ambiguous evocation of this monstrous
moment in German history.
 On Beuys’s aesthetic-political activities and his concept of “direct democracy,” see Joseph
Beuys, Energy Plan for the Western Man:Writings by and Interviews with Joseph Beuys (New
York: Four Walls Eight Windows, ).
 Ströher bought  works, Beuys’s entire exhibition at the Städtisches Museum,
Mönchengladbach in September and October of . See Heiner Stachelhaus, Joseph
Beuys, trans. David Britt (New York: Abbeville, ), . On the Mönchengladbach exhibition,
see Adriani, et al., Joseph Beuys, –.
 On Beuys’s introduction of biographical elements drawn from his experience of World
War II into the horizon of interpretive concepts that surrounded his work, see Nisbet,
“Crash Course.” As Nisbet notes, these concepts were introduced during the s, and
when they grew too dominant in the s, Beuys began to distance himself from his biographical
experiences as the primary interpretive framework in which to understand his
work.
 Beuys’s popularity grew with the rise of the German student movements in the late s,
and his committed environmentalism and his pedagogic reform efforts identify him as a
left wing critic of the state until his death in .Yet Beuys has been accused of fascism
throughout his career. For criticisms of Beuys, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,“Twilight of
the Idol,” in Artforum . (January ): –, and Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette
Michelson,“Joseph Beuys at the Guggenheim,” October  (Spring ): –.
 See,for example,Saul Friedlander,Reflections of Nazism:An Essay on Kitsch and Death,trans.
Thomas Weyr (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ).
 Beuys was a radio operator and bomber pilot on the Eastern Front, and thus he is not directly
connected to the events of genocide. At the same time, however, since he was alive
at the time that these events occurred—and because he struggled unwittingly for their
continuation—Beuys does have a certain existential connection to the events that Kiefer
does not possess. On Beuys’s experience during the Third Reich, first as a Hitler Youth
and then as a soldier, see Adriani, et al., Joseph Beuys, –.
 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh was the most articulate and vehement in this regard, see
Buchloh,“Twilight of the Idol” (), –.
 “Neo-Expressionism” was a term used by both German and American critics to describe
a very loosely-associated international art movement that originated in Germany in the
late s and early s and that became dominant in the s. A reaction against what
was perceived to be the stark and sterile character of minimalism and conceptual art, the
th e yale journal of c ri t i c i sm  
neo-expressionist artists returned to the figure and to representation in general, making art
in an expressive and gestural manner that was perceived as intentionally citing past artistic
movements such as German expressionism, French fauvism, and American abstract expressionism.
The principle artists associated with neo-expressionism included Georg
Baselitz, A. R. Penk, and Anselm Kiefer in Germany, the Italians Sandro Chia and
Francesco Clemente, and Julian Schnabel in the United States. Other German neo-expressionists
included K. H. Hödicke, Markus Lüpertz, Bernd Koberling, Rainer Fetting,
Helmut Middendorf, and Salomé (Wolfgang Cilarz) among others. See Klaus Honnef,
Contemporary Art (Benedikt Taschen, ), Kynaston McShine, ed., Berlinart –
(Munich: Prestel, ), and Thomas Krens, et al., eds., Refigured Painting:The German Image
– (Munich: Prestel, ). On Kiefer’s postmodernism see Donald B. Kuspit,
“Archaeologism: Postmodernism as Excavation,” Dialogue (January/February ),
reprinted in Kuspit, The New Subjectivism: Art in the s (Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, ), –; see also John C. Gilmour, Fire on the Earth:Anselm Kiefer and the PostmodernWorld
(Philadelphia:Temple University Press, ).
 Jürgen Habermas,“A Kind of Settlement of Damages:The Apologetic Tendencies in German
History Writing” (Die Zeit, July , ), translated and reprinted in Forever in the
Shadow of Hitler, .
 Habermas,“A Kind of Settlement of Damages,” .
 Paul Celan, GesammelteWerke, Bd. , Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert, eds., (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, ), –.
 Schwarze Milch der Frühe (line )
 ein Grab in den Lüften (line )
 Benjamin remarks on the undecidability of hair in the baroque Trauerspiel and on the centrality
of this undecidability to one of the fundamental paradoxes of allegory, namely, its
focus on the destruction of the body as a means of redemption. See Walter Benjamin, The
Origin of GermanTragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London:Verso Books, ), –.
 Shulamith is an intertextual reference to the“Song of Songs.”Margarete,her female counterpart
in “Death Fugue,” is also intended to refer intertextually to “Gretchen” in Goethe’s
Faust. In the context of Kiefer’s art in the early s, Shulamith becomes intertextually
related to another figure,“Lilith,” a female demon discussed in the Old Testament and in
Jewish myth.On Lilith,see Isa.: and Gershom Scholem,Kabbalah (New York:Meridian,
), –.
 On the connections between Kiefer and Pollock, see Peter Schjeldahl,“Anselm Kiefer,” in
Art of OurTime:The Saatchi Collection, vol.  (London: Lund Humphries, ), ; Nancy
Grimes,“Anselm Kiefer,” Artnews  (), –; Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer, ; Jed
Perl, “A Dissent on Kiefer,” The New Criterion (December ): –; and Corrinne
Robbins,“Your Golden Hair, Margarete: About Anselm Kiefer’s Germanness,” Arts Magazine
. (January ), –. For Kiefer’s own comments on Pollock see Rosenthal,
Anselm Kiefer, .
 For an existential reading of Pollock, see Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action
Painters” (), in David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro, eds., Abstract Expressionism:A Critical
Record (New York: Cambridge University Press, ) and Rosenberg,“The Concept
of Action in Painting” () in Harold Rosenberg, Artworks and Packages (; reprint,
Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, ), –. For psychoanalytic readings of
Pollock’s drawings and paintings, see C. L.Wysupth, Jackson Pollock: Psychoanalytic Drawings
(New York: Horizon Press, ) and especially, Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism:
Subjectivity and Painting in the s (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, ),
in particular, pp. – and –.
 Kiefer sees straw as a sort of “manure”—an energy source that keeps things warm in the
winter. See Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer, .
 On the significance of phenomenology for Kiefer’s art, see Biro, Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy
of Martin Heidegger. In the case of Shulamith (),“the world” is suggested by the
depicted hall with a fire burning in the back,“meaning-projecting acts” are suggested by
the handwritten title in the top left corner, and “the world-constituting ego” is suggested
by the point in front of the canvas at approximately the spectator’s eye level where its fictive
perspective seems to converge.
mat th ew b i ro   
 For example, Günther Eich’s Träume. See Günther Eich,  Hörspiele (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, ), –.
 Lanzmann’s shot often also puts the front part of the train into the image. See Claude
Lanzmann, Shoah (). Shoah had its premier in West Germany in February  at the
Berliner Festspiele, and it was first shown on West German television (ARD ) in the spring
of . See http://www.txt.de/trotzdem/titel/shoah.html (//).
 “Wir sehen irgendwo Bahngleise und denken an Auschwitz. Das wird auf lange Sicht so
bleiben.” Anselm Kiefer quoted in Christian Kämmerling and Peter Pursche, “‘Nachts
Fahre Ich mit dem Fahrrad von Bild zu Bild’: Interview mit Anselm Kiefer,” Süddeutsche
Zeitung Magazin  (November , ): –.
 Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer, .
 According to Kiefer, alchemy is “the acceleration of time, as in the lead-silver-gold cycle,
which only needs time in order to transform lead into gold. Previously, the alchemist accelerated
this process with magical means. That was called magic. As an artist, I do nothing
differently. I simply accelerate the transformation that is already inherent in things.”
[Das war ja die Ideologie der Alchemie: die Beschleunigung der Zeit, wie in dem BleiSilber-Gold-Zyklus,
der nur Zeit braucht, um Blei in Gold zu verwandeln. Der Alchemist
beschleunigte diesen Prozess damals mit Zaubermitteln. Das wurde als Magie bezeichnet.
Ich als Künstler mache nichts anderes. Ich beschleunige bloss die Verwandlung, die schon
in den Dingen angelegt ist.] Kämmerling and Pursche, “‘Nachts Fahre Ich mit dem
Fahrrad von Bild zu Bild,’” .
 On the concept of technology as a framework or mode of seeing, knowing, and acting in
the world,see Martin Heidegger,The Question ConcerningTechnology and Other Essays,trans.
William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, ). On the relationship of Kiefer’s art to
Heidegger’s late thinking on technology, see Biro, Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin
Heidegger, –.
 James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (New York: Harper and Row, ), .
 Writing only appears on the books’ covers—and there is only one word:“Shulamith”
 For devastating criticisms of Kiefer’s art in English, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,“Figures
of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European
Painting,”October  (Spring ): –,and Craig Owens,“Honor,Power,and the Love
of Women,” in Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, ), . (Originally published in Art in America [January
].) The reference to Nazi kitsch is from Perl,“A Dissent on Kiefer,” .
 On the idea of multiple postmodernisms and on the relationship of postmodernism to
conservatism, see New German Critique  (Fall ), particularly the essays by Andreas
Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, Hal Foster, Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser,
and Gérard Raulet. See also Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity:
Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), –,
–.
th e yale journal of c ri t i c i sm  
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