Episode 48: Anselm Kiefer’s “Margarete” and “Shulamith” (1981)

Text of Todesfuge.

This poem undoes me.  A little more, I think, every time I hear it.

It’s called Todesfuge, Death Fugue, by the Romanian-German poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan.  It’s a hard poem, hard to hear, and even harder to read aloud.  It takes practice; the phrases lurch and pitch, getting in front of your tongue like an uneven sidewalk.  Its language deliberately unsettles and subverts – the sickening oxymoron of black milk, for example, repeated over and over.  The active voice in this poem is relentless: we drink and we drink, we’re simultaneously quenched and tortured.  And still, even as I hear this poem, and I viscerally react to it, I find myself losing the thread a bit – maybe in the repetition, the dreamlike stream of consciousness.  Or maybe, conversely, in the way language itself is treated like a pallet of construction materials just waiting to be tripped over.  Sometimes I feel a little embarrassed, like I maybe don’t really get it.  And so I listen again, and again, like maybe this time I can break it down, analyze it properly.  And then I find myself again, and again, pulled along by the march of the prisoners, into my own head, and into my own beating heart, which rhythmically mirrors the incessant drumbeat of language, we drink you at evening, we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at night, we drink and we drink.

And I think too about the enormous canvases created by Anselm Kiefer in direct response to this poem, hung in the airy galleries at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, kitty corner from one another, dwarfing the visitor, holding court.  They, too, are hard to read.  They, too, unsettle and subvert, and make me question if I really understand what they’re supposed to be communicating.  I’ll walk up close to them and, again, find myself unable to see the whole as I lose myself in the details of the uneven surfaces, these thick collages that are constructed and encrusted with layers and layers of paint and straw, clay and ash, and illuminated by flickers of burning white painted flames.  They’re called Margarete and Shulamite, after the two women named in Todesfuge; the titles are explicitly scrawled in cursive across the rutted terrain of the canvases.  And these are only two of the over 30 artworks that Kiefer created in response to Celan’s poem, which speaks to what a powerful impression it must have made on him.  Kiefer was born practically into the rubble in a small German town in 1945, and Todesfuge would have been required reading for him and every other German schoolboy; like the silent shadow of Nazism looming over his adolescence, it must have been inescapable.  And I find that thinking about Kiefer, and trying to imagine his story, is actually a welcome distraction from my own convoluted and disjointed thoughts about this art.  Given what I already know about the Holocaust, his story feels easier to process somehow.  I can imagine what his life was like, being born into that kind of national anguish.  Being born pre-cast into the role of villain.  I can imagine how much more difficult this already difficult poem would have felt like to read.

[07:48]

But, of course, I can’t imagine it.  Not really.  I can’t presume to get inside Kiefer’s head, or the heads of any first-generation postwar German and understand what it felt like to grow up born into unprocessed, impossible shame.  Just like I can’t presume to understand what Celan went through as a Jew during the Holocaust, the lone survivor of his family, experiencing the most staggering, impossible grief.  All I can do is all I could ever do: feel that active drumbeat in my own heart, pulling me along down the road of my own subjective response, and recognize that it’s paved a little differently from anyone else’s.  And that when you think about it, all of these responses accumulate and accumulate, like layers of paint and straw and ash and lead upon a canvas, until it’s so heavy that the walls of the gallery need to be reinforced - which, for Kiefer’s work, they actually do.  And that it is this amassing of individual experience that tells a story of a collective trauma in the only real way it can be told, which is to say, incompletely.

This is a beautiful idea.  But it’s also totally unsatisfying.  How are we supposed to understand something as historically monumental as the Holocaust this way, by being told that it’s incomplete, that we’ll never understand?  No one ever learned history like that.  We’re wired to want some objectivity, a story that we can hang our hats on, a well-defined moral universe with clear heroes to root for, and villains to condemn.  In other words, we don’t want black milk, we want black and white.

And I, for one, had no reason not to expect that the Holocaust could be learned this way, like it was a story I could process.  And not only because I was suburban Jewish kid in the 1990s and learned about the Holocaust when I was really young, well before I could have reasonably been expected to grasp the shades of gray of a traumatic historical event.  But because, in 1993, when I was nine years old, the movie Schindler’s List came out.  And almost instantaneously, it became our required schoolboy reading – not just for us Jewish kids but for everyone.  The Holocaust had only recently crossed a generational line where enough time had passed that we could see its well-defined historical arc; we could easily identify the heroes and villains.  Which meant, of course, that it was time for history to come alive in this sweeping Hollywood epic, Ben-Hur-style.  Schindler’s List was a cultural phenomenon, sweeping both box offices and the Academy Awards, leaving everyone in its wake equal parts gutted and exhilarated.  We all hitched our emotional wagons to Oskar Schindler’s hero’s journey from dashing war profiteer to a weeping savior who is so unselfish he can’t even accept the role of savior.  We all sobbed together – and I did, too; it’s a really powerful film, with an incredibly moving climax.

[audio from Schindler’s List – “I could have done more”]

If I had only sacrificed a little more, I could have saved just one more life.  It’s also a beautiful idea.  Maybe it lacks some nuance, maybe it’s a little historically disingenuous to have been spoken by a German factory owner, and maybe the film’s narrative signposts are glaring enough for the cheap seats in the back, but so be it.  The payoff is worth it.  It’s so cathartic, so complete, so definitive. 

[12:50]

But here’s the thing.  It’s definitive because it focuses on the part of the story that can be definitive.  We’re so taken with what Schindler’s List is that we never think about what Schindler’s List isn’t.  This is not a film about the countless bureaucrats and factory owners who looked the other way, or the history of systemic European antisemitism that laid the groundwork for Nazism.  And it’s not about the aftermath, when Jews and Germans alike were left to rebuild their shattered cultures.  It’s a film about the middle part, a world of clear right and wrong, presented in these broad, definitive strokes of black and white.

And this use of black and white was, of course, a critical part of what makes Schindler’s List iconic.  The way the monochrome captures the swirl of Liam Neeson’s cigarette smoke, or the way the light streams through ashes floating through the air like falling snow.  Filming in black and white is a strikingly effective aesthetic choice, and it’s also really manipulative.  Spielberg was vocal that he wanted Schindler’s List to resemble archival footage, to feel like we really were watching history come alive, with, he felt, all the authenticity and authority of a newsreel.  And you can’t say it ddin’t work, I mean, this does feel like a documentary.  But it’s not a documentary, it’s a Hollywood movie.  And any risk of conflating the two runs into some real problems about how the audience is going to react.  Black and white archival footage feels like it’s from another time, because it is, a time we’ve evolved past, like it couldn’t happen here, to us, today.  Like we’ve somehow earned a life in color.  And by filming in black and white, by aping this aesthetic, Spielberg is intentionally reinforcing this distance, and with it, though unintentionally, this complacency.

But there’s another element of archival footage that plays into this.  Because when it’s footage from the Holocaust, you already know that you’re going to see scenes of unspeakable horror.  The Holocaust is horror on a mass scale.  It’s bodies piled like firewood. It’s fingernail scratches on gas chamber walls.  It’s plainly impossible imagery to look at. And we respond to horror in curious ways.  We recoil from it, because it jolts our systems, sinks our stomachs, and needs to be pushed away with both hands, and of course, plenty of people turn away and never look back.  And others take some pleasure in that jolt.  It can be thrilling to frighten yourself, to see how close to the edge you can tiptoe before you need to slam the book closed again and hide it in the back of the closet.  But when you do this, little by little, your tolerance increases, your heartbeat normalizes, and critical distance builds a wall to protect you.  Bodies become objects; genocide becomes statistics.  And soon these disturbing images ultimately lose their urgent grip on you. 

And so, in watching Schindler’s List, three things become clear: first, black and white makes any story feel more distant, second, no one was actually harmed in the making of this Hollywood film, and, third, the more horror we see, the more we can tolerate.  All of this separates us from the subject matter at hand.  In other words, this is a beautiful, cathartic, well-told story that purports to tell us something definitive about the Holocaust while giving us every opportunity to maintain our distance.

Plenty of critics took Spielberg to task over Schindler’s List.  But some of the most pointed criticism came from a fellow filmmaker, the French documentarian Claude Lanzmann, who was exceptionally bothered by these two points we’ve just discussed: its visual tactics, and its “completeness”, and we’ll take these criticisms in order.  When it comes to treating visuals with care, Lanzmann knows from which he speaks.  His own documentary, Shoah, which was released in 1986, and was created from 11 years worth of interviews of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, was all but defined by its lack of archival footage.  And it’s all the more disturbing for it.  Because over the course of a documentary that’s nine hours long, all you see are haunted middle-aged people in their living rooms, or revisiting now-empty fields, all struggling to terms with the aftermath.  They’re so human, so like us, and it’s wrenching. 

[train whistle]

We meet a dazed train driver who drove into the camps and watched people unloaded to their deaths, and drank to forget what happened when he went to work each day. 

[man singing]

We meet a boy, now a soft-spoken man, who survived not because of any innate goodness, but for no good reason at all – a guard happened to like his singing voice.  These figures are interwoven with no-nonsense historians like this one:

[Audio: Hillberg going over the train documents]

There’s nothing Hollywood about this.  These interview subjects are not heroes, or villains, and, moreover, they are under no illusion that their stories are definitive.  Instead, they’re telling their singular experiences, just one of untold millions.  Each experience might be complete in itself, or maybe it isn’t, but each one is unequivocally a layer, one on top of another, telling a larger, collective story that will never be complete.

[20:47]

And this takes us back to where we started, and is also why Lanzmann found the “completeness” of Schindler’s List so frustrating.  If 350 hours of tape taught him anything, it’s that this story has no ending.  And to this point, it’s not an accident that one of the few recurring visual devices in Shoah is a train.  A train, as we’ve just heard, was of course a functional tool of bureaucratic genocide, but also a metaphor for this lack of completeness.  In fact, he ends Shoah with no ending, just an image of a train chugging along into perpetuity.  And this replacement of a closed narrative arc like Schindler’s List, with an incomplete, perpetual present like Shoah becomes a metaphor for the trauma experienced by the Holocaust’s victims.  Trauma is, after all, ongoing; it speaks with an active voice; it makes the past present, again and again. 

And think about what this means for historians, or for us, even, just trying to make sense of the Holocaust.  There are two consequences for using this lens of trauma: first, it obliterates the idea that the past is a story that can be told, and second, even if it could be, trauma is a notoriously problematic storyteller, because its fundamental paradox is that if you’ve never experienced something, you can’t really imagine it, and if you have, you can’t really articulate it.  This means that experience – and anybody who wants to respond with empathy – becomes locked away, unsharable, uncommunicated, unseen.  There’s no language that can describe the indescribable, no images that can portray the unimaginable. 

This seems like an abstract idea, but it led to some very real questions about the future of art and poetry in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, especially art and poetry about the Holocaust.  Numerous scholars questioned whether there was a place for it at all, most notably the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno, who famously argued that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”.  And though this was a statement that he never wanted or expected to be attached to him – and he tried repeatedly to walk it back – it spoke to a very real conundrum at the time.  So many people felt that the trauma of the Holocaust, a trauma at once so collective and so individual, has definitively destroyed art and poetry as we know it.  Scorched earth.  Definitively. So if you’re a poet, or an artist, how do you make art?  If you lived through it, how do you articulate your own experience?  What new forms, or new uses of language, or new uses of materials, can rise from the ashes?

And this brings us back to our canvases at hand, and the poem that they’re based on.  Paul Celan, a Jew who survived the war, and Anselm Kiefer, a German born into its aftermath, both shared the enormous burden of being the son of trauma tasked with speaking the unspeakable – Celan because he was the only voice left, and Kiefer because he came into world where, he felt, no one would talk about what had just happened.  And both shared the desire to give the Holocaust a voice with the understanding that treating history as the past will only act like a black and white newsreel, only reinforce distance with visuals so graphic that they’ll damage your eyes as badly as if you were looking directly into the sun.  They understood that to create art after Auschwitz required both a sidelong entry point and an active voice.  That you, as the reader, and the viewer, need to be encouraged to be empathic, an active participant involved in the work of comprehension, while still giving yourself over to the materiality of the artwork.  In other words, you have to feel the incessant drumbeat in your heart.  But you also have to critically understand how it got there.

[26:05]

Okay. So now go back and listen again to Todesfugue.  Do it now, I’ll be waiting for you here around the 26 minute mark. 

So this poem.  It’s the foundation of everything, so let’s unpack it together.  What might strike you first is this idea of a fugue, that there’s an innate musicality to the poem’s structure.  The syncopation, the repetition, the slow, plodding dirge of linguistic peaks and valleys.  As I said at the top, it’s an extraordinarily difficult poem to read aloud, because language isn’t used purely for meaning, but for form too; like bricks constructing topography and texture, starts and stops.  But the meaning is there too, and it’s ruthless.  We are introduced and reintroduced to the same characters, stanza after stanza: the prisoners, whose perspective we take, and who brutally occupy the active voice – we drink and we drink and we shovel our graves in the air in perpetuity, a perpetuity that is also driven by us the readers, since it is our reciting of the poem that perpetuates the drumbeat, we drink and we drink.  Meanwhile, the orders are issued by a man with blue eyes, a German, who is also defined by his verbs: he shoots us with shot made of lead, he whistles his hounds on us, he plays with his vipers, all of which make him unequivocally, murderously frightening; and yet also, we’re told repeatedly, he writes.  Writing about what it means to be German, when death is your new master, when what you thought was your identity is destroyed under your feet.  This detail about his writing acts as a rebellious bit of humanity, a spark of connection in spite of ourselves, which is reinforced by the fact that he's also writing, yearningly, about two women.  Your golden hair, Margarete, your ashen hair, Shulamith. 

These two lines are so simple, so tender, and also maybe a little lusty, a little shameful.  And moreover, they’re spoken not only by this blue-eyed man, but also maybe by us, the prisoners.  And all of this confusion – who is really speaking, who is doing the yearning, whom we should really be pitying – collapses the narrative thread enough to make us, the readers, suddenly take notice of these women, who are so specific and yet so mysterious, and, in just a few lines, who have also quietly shifted to become the epicenter of the poem.

But they’re actually not all that mysterious.  They’re literary references.  Margarete is the heroine from Goethe’s Faust, a warm, innocent, golden-haired idealization of femininity, a gentle icon of the Germany of Goethe, that is, Germany at its Romantic, intellectual 18th and early-19th century peak, before it was ruled by death.  Shulamith, meanwhile, is King Solomon’s beloved from the Song of Songs: beautiful, dark, soulful, the subject of erotic, reciprocated passion, the sexiest the bible gets, really.  And both women effectively become these metaphorical stand-ins for what it means to be German, or Jewish – the two cultures the Holocaust was poised to destroy.  They are the universal female objects of desire, so yearned for, nostalgic, shameful, yet also described so specifically by their hair, which in turn becomes fodder for even more metaphor: golden hair becomes gleaming Bavarian wheat fields before the war; ashen hair becomes a burnt offering, after.

And so we can understand why Margarete and Shulamith serve as such a layered and captivating foundation for Anselm Kiefer’s massive, complicated canvases, which are themselves so layered, so thick and three-dimensional, that they cross over into our realm, their heavy materiality weighing down gallery walls, inviting our fingers to read them like braille.  And this idea of reading them, both the materials and the metaphors, gets to the heart of Kiefer’s work. 

His art is defined by layers of texture and text, of the visible and the invisible, of the thing itself and how it’s understood.  And this is a lifelong preoccupation for him; he anecdotally describes how early his worldview was formed when he received a bicycle for his first communion, and how the material reward felt so totally inadequate and disappointing for a little boy expecting, you know, spiritual transcendence.  He was that kind of kid, and he’s that kind of artist, one who explores all the myriad ways that what we can and cannot see intertwine.  What do I mean by this?  Think about how we experience the physical world but describe it with metaphors.  Think about how inert objects can take on enormous spiritual significance because of how we use them – we have talismans, we have sentimental value and juju.  And think about how inert objects like steel and straw maybe aren’t even inert, and can possess the ability to change and evolve.  But we’ll come back to this.

Overall, we’re talking, of course, about some very abstract concepts, but for Kiefer, they’re as real as concrete.  Given that he was born in 1945, Kiefer has described his own biography as being the biography of Germany herself – that is, Post-War Germany.  And Post-War Germany was defined by a very, very large elephant in the room that, he believed, no one was acknowledging, at least not to his satisfaction.  It felt to him that Germany was to moving forward, away from the Holocaust, willfully wiping out the collective memory of its past, but still off gassing this quiet shame into the air.  A shame he was choking on. And this inspired both him and a group of artists and writers to make the invisible highly visible.  Kiefer’s first major art series that made him famous – or, rather, infamous – when he was a taboo-smashing 24-year-old, was called “Occupations.”  It consisted of photographs of Kiefer wearing, among other things, his father’s Wehrmacht uniform, and giving the Nazi salute in front of various manmade and natural monuments, all outside of Germany, since doing it there would get you arrested.  He didn’t consider these photographs self-portraits; instead, he was the material, like paint, engaging in Germany’s Germanness, attempting to both confront and explode its mythologies, its silence, and its shame.  Death is a master from Deutschland.  In one photograph, he’s shot from the back, saluting the churning sea, mirroring the famous painting, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” by the celebrated German Romantic landscape painter, Caspar David Friedrich.  This conventional Romantic pose, known as the Rückenfigur, or figure seen from behind, serves to generate empathy with the thoughtful wanderer, which, when conflated here with a sieg heil, feels not only shocking but sacrilegious – which is exactly Kiefer’s point.  Nazism didn’t just inflict indelible damage onto the world, but onto Germanness itself, appropriating, propagandizing, and deeply misusing its own mythology – just think back to the ill-conceived Great German Art Exhibition that we looked at in episode 9.  And it wasn’t just Germany that Nazism tarnished.  In another Occupation photo, he stands in front of French equestrian statue, calling out the Vichy government, and in another, Nazism tarnishes nature itself, as he salutes tree branches that has been planted in a line in a promenade, trees unnaturally whistled into rows, stiff as soldiers. 

In “Occupations,” Kiefer exposes the myth that nations tell themselves to assume and maintain power, a myth they’ve even wholesale robbed from themselves.  And his use of this physical action, the salute, is the perfect material to get at all this metaphor.  What is more frightening than an echoing, electrified rally of saluting Nazis?  What is more hollow and pathetic than one person saluting alone, after the fact?  It’s the same salute, whether it’s fully empowered or completely emptied of its meaning.

But of course, it’s never totally emptied of meaning, which is why it could get you arrested in Germany, and which is why this photo series was, as you can imagine, deeply polarizing, and in the eyes of many, ended Kiefer’s career just as soon as it began.  But those who took the time to consider the nuance beneath these subversive visuals saw a bit of genius.  Here was a German who was willing to speak the unspoken, to acknowledge that both material things and myths - especially material things infused with myth - can both destroy a culture and be the first step in rebuilding it.

I know this is a serpentine back and forth: materials charged with meaning, meaning given material form; it’s a millefeuille of the tangible and the intangible, but bear with me as we look at one more element: the actual materials that he’s using. 

Kiefer delights in using materials that, in his mind, both highlight their own raw materiality, and also throb with metaphysical life – those inert materials that maybe aren’t so inert after all.  Kiefer describes “extracting the spirit that already lives within [these materials],” as he takes what already exists – paint, clay, straw, and lead – and does whatever he can to activate their transformation from one thing into another.  He dips metals into corrosive acid baths, he burns the straw into ash, he pounds crusty paint loose with sledgehammers and tears layers away with a palette knife.  And he’s particularly fascinated by lead, a material that is both so deadly in one context – “he shoots you with shot made of lead” – and also such a wonderful material for metaphor: he describes lead as strong enough to carry the weight of human history, and as continually in flux as ideas themselves.  And his awareness of lead’s mutability came completely by accident: he was repairing aging pipes in an old house, and was struck by the way that lead changed its colors over time, greens and coppers and golds, and how it continued to change even once it was fixed on the surface of a canvas.  It was like this simple renovation project gave him the opportunity to put his finger on alchemy itself.  And from there, this sense of alchemy and the constant renewal of materials made them, to him, feel endless – part of a perpetually incomplete cycle of death and rebirth, like a phoenix.  Like traumatic experience.  Materials are cyclical; straw burns into ash, it releases energy along the way and provides him with a whole new medium to work with.  His studio is full of piles of rubble, of discarded, hacked-off bits of painting detritus, which he describes as “a painting in different states.”  And for this reason, his materials have no ending. He never throws anything away.  “People think of ruins as the end of something,” he says, “but for me, they’re the beginning.  When you have ruins you can start again.  It’s always construction, demolition, reconstruction, all the stars will die and some others are born.  We can’t know who’s responsible for that, and it’s quite desperate.  Because we have the intellect to want to know, but we cannot.” 

And as you’re probably realizing right now, Kiefer can be a difficult guy to keep up with.  We’ve gone from rubble to the cosmos to humanity’s intellectual desperation in one protracted thought.  But then you realize, also, how relatable this is, especially in extreme circumstances that we know we’ll never be able to entirely understand.  Think of a day in the life inside this pandemic, going back and forth between balling up clean socks and beating back existential thoughts of everything we can’t control, from top-down systems to microscopic droplets.  It is quite desperate, all this not knowing.  And this is why we turn to art and especially poetry, which has permission to toggle so freely between the irrational and the rational, the micro and the macro in a single line.  And it helps us understand Kiefer’s exploration of, even obsession with, the poetry of Paul Celan.  Poetry was his lifeline, “like buoys in the sea,” Kiefer wrote.  “I swim to them, from one [poem] to the next: without them I am lost.” Kiefer was clearly working something out with Celan’s help, riffing on a variety of motifs and references – again, Margarete and Shulamite are only the best known of a much larger series – and in doing so, creating these whole textured universes as a means of understanding both what the Holocaust meant to Paul Celan in Celan’s moment, and, subsequently, what the Holocaust means to him, in his moment.

So let us now, finally, explore these paintings.  We’ll start with Margarete, which is a blueish gray painted surface covered with thick stalks of straw that grow up from the bottom, each shoot capped with a flame that is painted so brilliantly you almost feel the heat singe your eyes.  The way the flames sit is reminiscent of a field after a fire, with the darkened burned bits of ash on the ground, and the remaining flames peppering what’s still standing.  And it’s also reminiscent of a menorah, the iconic candelabra that’s used by Jews at Hanukkah, and a metaphor: a hopeful symbol of what remains after destruction.  There’s a condensed sense on this canvas of before and after on this canvas – your golden hair, Margarete, yearning for something that’s gone, that existed before, and what’s left over, to be rebuilt.  It’s beautiful, and it’s calm; it’s warm and it’s sad.  It’s a canvas that invites you to both grieve and yearn, simultaneously acknowledging loss, and also, maybe flickering with hope. 

But Shulamith takes you somewhere else, somewhere much bleaker.  The anxiety and austerity of this canvas is much more visually representative of what we consider to be typical Holocaust imagery, both in the fact that the space itself mirrors the massive fascist design for the Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers by the architect Wilhelm Kreis - who was a student of the infamous Nazi architect Albert Speer - and in the fact that this cavernous, windowless space that we enter from an exaggeratedly low perspective feels like a giant crematorium.  The bricks appear blackened with fire and soot.  Your ashen hair, Shulamite.  The architectural plans for glorious fascist architecture have become a haunting memorial to its victims.  It also feels like something that remains, but there’s no life left, no hope, only emptiness, created from layers and layers of residue, paint, and actual ash.  And though you could argue that there’s still a trace of light, still a flicker of tiny flames that dance atop what seems like a funeral pyre, they’re placed so deeply in the center of this overwhelming space that approaching this blackness would swallow you whole.

So it’s pretty clear that once you know what you’re looking at, you can recognize Anselm Kiefer’s bit of genius in these canvases.  But this begs then the question: how many people actually know what they’re looking at?  Finding a good translation of Todesfuge, and then hearing it read aloud, and then doing some background research on Paul Celan, and then digging into the literary and biblical references of these two women, and then reading a quick bio of Anselm Kiefer’s exploration of post-WWII Germanness is a lot to ask of your viewer.  I’d even argue it’s too much to ask.  So can you appreciate these canvases without all of these layers of text?  Personally, I’d argue that you can. 

Kiefer knows that viewers are going to miss references, and even takes pleasure in creating enigmatic work, hoping that his audience will “linger over it, try and fathom it out.”  After all, he argues, it’s still an active interaction.  He’s providing a richly layered platform upon which to project your own emotions.  Even if you never heard of Todesfuge, you can’t deny that you’re confronted with some truly enthralling works of art that invite you to get lost in the vastness, the void, the materials, the frenetic energy, the meditative stillness.  They’re like a kitchen sink, a magazine horoscope, you can always find something to fasten your eye onto, to relate to.  There’s enough that’s representational to conjure up emotions and experience of your own; there’s enough that’s abstract to give yourself over to those feelings.  No matter where you are, they catch you in the moment.

And isn’t this the aim, to be caught in our moment?  Isn’t this how we generate empathy with something we haven’t experienced?  This is what makes these objects present, not a story of the past.  Kiefer even describes his works as “a theater for memory,” a place where the past is always live onstage, always an ongoing performance.  And of course, it’s not his own memory he’s talking about, but ours.  In the same way our reciting of Todesfuge keeps the action moving forward, our experiencing of these paintings bring them into our space, activates them with our own emotional response.  History becomes clay, he says, molded by different hands, taking on the subtle relief of each individual’s fingerprints.  And this individual response is itself mutable, unfixed, oxidizing like lead, perpetually incomplete.  “Art is longing,” Kiefer writes, inadvertently crossing paths with Claude Lanzmann’s train.  “You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.”

This, maybe, is the closest we can come to understanding.  And by understanding that we’ll never entirely understand.  No more than Paul Celan did at the end of a life he took by his own hand; no more than Kiefer did after thirty canvases.  And it’s not satisfying.  In fact, it’s quite desperate.  We’ll never arrive.  But we keep going in hope that we will.  It’s simply how the heart of trauma beats.

[49:08]

But like a heart, it can’t actually keep beating on its own forever, at least not inside of its original body.  Metaphors require active interaction; they require someone to know the references.  And without someone to reading and interpreting them, even just by projecting their own emotions onto them, it will die on the wall if we’re not the ones continually pumping life into it.  Art, and especially art like this, is so dependent on its beholders. And art flirts with death all the time.  After all, if Kiefer’s work is meant to be a theater of memory – our memory – then we need to account for the fact that people forget.  That memories fade as time and generations pass.  And this changes the very substance of the art.  Kiefer’s work is not going to read the same way to a Holocaust survivor as it does to me, as it will to my children, as history fades into the past.  To be honest, it doesn’t even read the same way to Kiefer today as it did in the 1980s, when he was so consumed by Celan’s poetry.  When he talks about Margarete and Shulamith in more recent interviews, you can sense his own distance from them, how they function as pillars from another time in his career.  He uses the same, somewhat rehearsed talking points.  Clearly both he, and his art, have moved on.

Which is entirely their prerogative.  It’s exhausting to stay perpetually present, perpetually vigilant and empathic.  It’s active work.  And there’s no shame in admitting that it’s so much easier to be told a good story that we can process.  And this isn’t just because we’re lazy, or too historically removed, or want to move on with our art careers.  It’s human nature.  This desire to retreat into passive, black and white moral clarity is incredibly strong.  Growing up my family had a dear friend named Ilona, who survived Plaszow concentration camp, and once remarked, with the same subversive bravery as an “Occupations” photograph, that every now and then she missed the camps.  There was something reassuring about such stark moral clarity, such a clear, black and white demarcation between good and evil that just doesn’t exist in the real world.

And when it’s put that way, we realize that living in the real world, exhausting though it may be, is an enormous privilege.  We’re so fortunate to live in the shades of gray, that is, in color. To his credit, even Steven Spielberg acknowledges this in the colorized coda to Schindler’s List, where survivors and actors memorialized Schindler, hand in hand.  And moreover, we’re privileged to live surrounded by tactile materials of daily life that become all the more evident after spending time with Kiefer’s work, and with them their layers of meaning and memory, metaphor and experience. And living this way – being so open to what the rubble can tell us – means that we need to finally let go of the black and white expectation that history, comprised as it is of human experience, is knowable.  It isn’t.  And, yes, it makes us feel quite desperate.  Because when people die – from the Holocaust, from a pandemic, in the routine every day – their experience dies with them.  And this is a desperate loss.  And so how else can we really respond than to try to accept the unknowable, and to keep this drumbeat active?  To find satisfaction not in distance, but by fully submerging ourselves in this textured world and its many mutable, prismatic shades, green and coppery and golden, and to embrace the incompletion that allows us to perpetually construct our rebirth, like a phoenix, from the ashes.

CREDITS:

Special thanks to Bernard Avishai and Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, whom you heard reading Todesfuge at the top over an original recording of Paul Celan, and to Erin Fleming at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for her support with this episode, which is dedicated, with so much love, to the memories of Ilona Karmel and Professor Jacques Kornberg.

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