A Storm Blowing from Paradise

On a frigid December morning a decade ago, I wandered through the narrow streets of the old town in Vilnius, Lithuania, with the low, steel-grey sky spitting snow, the air smelling of the coal still used in the furnaces, looking for Lithuania’s Jewish museum. Although Vilnius had once been an important centre of Jewish learning, virtually every trace of that culture—its buildings, its books, its people—was erased by the German army during World War II. After a long search, I came upon what turned out to be the temporary location of the museum: a drab, poorly lit house just outside the old city, run by a pair of frail, elderly, and fiercely bitter sisters. Its collection catalogued Nazi atrocities in Vilnius and the nearby city of Kaunas, and mostly consisted of faded copies of documents and unframed photographs pinned to the walls. Encased in glass along one wall, however, were several fire-damaged Torah scrolls. They were blackened, their leather split open and twisted into wild shapes, and in places I could detect smears of the ink from the original Hebrew lettering.

There is something especially melancholic about ruined Torah scrolls, and ruined books in general—they represent the destruction of a civilization. Traditionally, the Torah is the link between heaven and earth, between the human and the divine, and when one is marred, even slightly, that link is permanently broken.

I immediately thought of those scrolls in Vilnius when I encountered Anselm Kiefer’s Meteorites (1998/2005) in the exhibition Heaven and Earth at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the first major North American survey of the German artist’s work since a retrospective that toured the United States from 1987 to 1989. Meteorites is a three-metre-high steel bookcase housing massive lead tomes, their warped and twisted pages interspersed with rough stones that tumble out onto the floor. While Meteorites undoubtedly alludes to the Holocaust and the destruction of Germany during the Second World War, Kiefer’s ambition goes beyond simply acknowledging the crimes of the Nazi era. The stupendous scale and weight of the books makes it clear that they are not addressed to humans, but to giants or gods or simply the sky. Other monumental, sculptural books in the exhibition include Book with Wings (1992-94), an open lead book set on a high lectern with ragged lead and tin wings spreading out from its sides, and 20 Years of Solitude (1971-91), five pallets of crinkled, oxidized sheets of lead on top of which are books spattered with twenty years’ worth of the artist’s dry, yellow semen. Both suggest that these are not only works of ruin and mourning, but also of regeneration.

Born in Donaueschingen in southwest Germany in 1945, a few months before the end of the war, Anselm Kiefer was the child of a devastated country. He initially studied law in Freiburg but changed over to art after a transformative stay at Sainte Marie de La Tourette, the French Dominican monastery designed by Le Corbusier. He is now living and working in the south of France. Kiefer rose to prominence in the 1980s alongside “neo-expressionist” painters such as Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff. Whereas the work of these latter-day German expressionists often relied on the cliché of the German soul tortured with guilt over the crimes committed under the Third Reich, Kiefer’s art is metaphysical rather than psychological, falling into the romantic, symbolist tradition of the painter Caspar David Friedrich and the composer Richard Wagner. Kiefer has said that he has always wanted to deal with large issues in his art and he has succeeded: his work is vast in scale, in theme, and in emotional impact.

Anselm Kiefer is a postwar artist by birth and temperament, and of his generation he may be the most attuned to the unprecedented conditions in Germany in the years immediately following the war. In his essay “Air War and Literature,” the novelist W. G. Sebald writes:

[O]f the 131 towns and cities attacked, some only once and some repeatedly, many were almost entirely flattened, that about 600,000 German civilians fell victim to the air raids, and that three and a half million homes were destroyed, while at the end of the war seven and a half million people were left homeless, and there were 31.1 cubic meters of rubble for every person in Cologne and 42.8 cubic meters for every inhabitant of Dresden—but we do not grasp what it all actually meant.

It is difficult for us to even imagine life in those cities—the mountains of rubble, the stench of decaying corpses, the clouds of flies and the armies of rats, the dazed, half-starved survivors camping out on the ruins. The destruction and trauma brought about by the area bombings of German cities in the last years of the war appear to have given rise to a strange form of amnesia. Upon returning from exile in 1945 to a town in southwest Germany, for instance, novelist Alfred Döblin wrote that people walked “down the street and past the dreadful ruins, as if nothing had happened, and the town had always looked like that.” The psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich published a study of this phenomenon in 1967 and regarded it as a collective “inability to mourn.”

It is this need for mourning and communal melancholy, which according to the Mitscherlichs Germans could not psychologically confront, that forms the deep background of Kiefer’s work. And for Kiefer the only way to approach this is to return to the kind of primordial, mythic history familiar from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle. “Our stories always begin in the forest,” Kiefer has said, and indeed the forest is crucial to both German history and mythology. It is part of the resonance of the great tree with a sword embedded in it that serves as the central image of Die Walküre, the Ring’s second opera.

In one of the earliest paintings included in Heaven and Earth, Man in the Forest (1971), the artist stands in a loose nightshirt holding a burning branch, surrounded by the narrow trunks of soaring pines. Clearly a dream image, the figure is dwarfed by the trees. He is small, barefoot, and helpless, and yet he has an aggressive air—he seems to be competing with, even threatening, the giants that surround him. Man in the Forest is an ambivalent allegory of the power of the imagination to invent and also to destroy, a reminder that power is always seductive and dangerous.

In Resurrexit (1973), a snake takes on the point of view of the artist, slithering up from the lower edge of the canvas into a road through a forest in late autumn under a fierce cerulean sky. Above is a pyramidal shape that replicates the stairway into the attic studio Kiefer occupied in Hornbach, a village near the Black Forest. In this painting, the studio is depicted as a heavenly realm but the artist himself is a demonic figure. In another painting from 1973, Quaternity, the studio appears again; three fires burn on its intricately rendered wooden floor as a snake enters their orbit. The conflagrations are named Vater (Father), Sohn (Son), and hl. Geist (Holy Spirit) respectively, and above the serpent is the word Satan. For Kiefer, the imagination, the places where it is given freedom, and the materials upon which it works, are at once volatile, conflicted, and demonic. Fire is, after all, a symbol of the spirit, an alchemist’s tool, and a basic element; it is also fire that reduced cities like Hamburg and Dresden to heaps of smoking rubble.