Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. - Review - book review

MATTHEW BIRO Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 327 pp.; 109 b/wills. $79.95

LISA SALTZMAN Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 186 pp.; 40 b/w ills. $39.95

In October 1990, I joined thousands of other people at the official celebration of Germany's Wiedervereinigung. There, in front of the Berlin Reichstag, the crowd watched and listened to Helmut Kohl's predictions about the future of a country once again made whole, a choir enthusiastically singing Deutschland uber Alles (all verses of it), and the percussive explosions of state-sponsored fireworks answered by countless renegade firecrackers. Amid the staggering groups of partying adolescents and tourists, one could spot the occasional expression of concern, usually on an older face. At the time I convinced myself that these were expressions of conscience and reflection within the jubilation. I assumed that these might even be looks of worry, as some of the celebrants pondered the intimidating task that lay before them. For theirs was the task of not only integrating two sides of a country that had for decades been divided along political and economic lines, but also of initiating a new phase of remembering an d mourning. An entire country could now finally face in unison the horrific acts that had led to its division in the first place.

The public spectacle of the official Reunification had its art world counterpart at the retrospective exhibition of Anselm Kiefer's work the following spring in Berlin. Although organized before the Wall came down, by its opening the show had become a symbol for the ambivalent position in which Germany found itself that year. By then Kiefer had become, at least in part, the focus of national pride, as the high prices his work commanded internationally seemed a metonymy for West Germany's continuing economic miracle--a miracle from which some, perhaps naively, thought the East could eventually profit. At the same time, however, the difficult and often opaque messages delivered by Kiefer's lead planes and ash-covered canvases raised a more ambivalent set of concerns about the limits of memory and accountability for a society in a state of flux.

In the wake of this confluence of events, two American art historians began and have now completed studies that look at Kiefer specifically in relationship to the past and continuing complexities of German culture and history. Matthew Biro and Lisa Saltzman have both focused their monographs on the crisis of German subjectivity Kiefer's art exemplifies, although in strikingly different ways. Biro compares the art of Kiefer to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in a sustained attempt to locate deep cultural constants that have historically operated within German modernism. Saltzman, by contrast, nimbly approaches Kiefer's work from a variety of methodological standpoints, seeking to address the predicament of artistic production for a German male born after the Holocaust. For all their differences, both Biro and Saltzman agree that it is the instability of meaning in Kiefer's work that offers an index to Germany's ambivalent past and present.

While previous scholars have acknowledged the impact of Heidegger's thought on Kiefer's work, Matthew Biro's Anseim Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heideggeris the first book-length comparison between these two titans of 20th -century German culture. [1] The project is thus a heady attempt to summarize and apply Heidegger's work to that of Kiefer, though at times the precise nature of the comparison remains indistinct. One is hard pressed to recall the last time a mere conjunction carried such a burdensome methodological load. The "and" of Biro's tide prepares the reader for the compare-and-contrast struggle that is to come, a struggle that points not only to the specific similarities between a philosopher and a painter, but also to the more general exercise of comparing philosophy to painting. The ground of this comparison is sometimes finessed by linguistic shortcuts in the body of the text. At times Heidegger "anticipates" Kiefer's work, as Kiefer reciprocally "echoes," "evokes," or "departs from" Hei degger's points. But beyond these more superficial verb choices, Biro offers a more intricate set of explanations for the reciprocal action he charts between these two figures.

As Biro demonstrates, both Heidegger and Kiefer share positions of dubious notoriety in relationship to Germany's Nazi past. As an active supporter and beneficiary of Nazi power in the 1930s, Heidegger produced a body of work that legitimized the nationalist rhetoric of Hider's party. Even after the war he demonstrated an egregious lack of remorse for his Nazi collaboration. [2] His magnum opus Being and Time (1927), as well as his writings of the 1950s and 1960s, are, of course, far more than reflections of his Nazi sympathies. Nevertheless, Heidegger's work bears the enduring stigma of the intimacy the philosopher once felt between his jargon of "authenticity" and the Nazi cult of hero worship and racial supremacy. By contrast, Kiefer's art has seemed problematic in large part because the artist's exact purchase on the legacy of Nazism has remained vague. As an artist of the generation born just after the Second World War, Kiefer has frequently referenced Nazism and its impact on German culture, albeit in rather ambiguous terms. In his early work, Kiefer had himself photographed in his studio and outdoor locations as he raised his right arm in the "Heil Hider" gesture. In subsequent decades, he has produced "expressionistic" canvases of epic magnitude that, in both tide and pictorial content, evoke narratives of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. However, much of Kiefer's work, in all its Wagnerlust and return to the German soil, can seem Teutonic in the extreme, wavering between critique and complicity. Kiefer has thus been praised for his courageous attempt to recall wartime histories all too frequently repressed in Germany, even as he has been condemned for cavalierly reproducing pathos-laden scenes of wartime destruction without unequivocally condemning Germany's role in the conflict.