Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, and the Memory of the Holocaust

5HSUHVHQWDWLRQDQG(YHQW$QVHOP.LHIHU-RVHSK%HX\V DQGWKH0HPRU\RIWKH+RORFDXVW 0DWWKHZ%LUR The Yale Journal of Criticism, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2003, pp. 113-146 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/yale.2003.0001 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/yale/summary/v016/16.1biro.html Access provided by University of Michigan @ Ann Arbor (26 Mar 2016 16:55 GMT) Matthew Biro Representation and Event: Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, and the Memory of the Holocaust Between and , German artist Anselm Kiefer explicitly re- ferred to the Holocaust in a number of his artworks.1 Kiefer’s com- plex 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 consid- erable 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 en- vironmental 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. Holo- caust memory is what Primo Levi calls “the memory of offense,” a The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume ,number (): 113–146 © by Yale University and The Johns Hopkins University Press matthew biro 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: deter- mined by past events that will to some extent always control their ex- istences. 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 re- press 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 Ger- man 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 t he yale journal of criticism 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,fas- cism, monarchy.”10 To prevent this, West Germans continued to need democratic education; their schooling needed to include a confronta- tion 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 interna- tionally, and had just achieved representation in New York.12 The New Left’s utopianism—its belief that education and the critical un- veiling 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 Jew- ish 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 terri- fied 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 sub- matthew biro Figure . Photographer unknown, Warsaw Ghetto (). From the Stroop Report. 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 (empha- sized 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 op- pressed 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.

Load more