Explaining Germany in art

A rusty machine gun bearing the name Ulrike Meinhoff, one of the founders of Germany’s Baader-Meinhoff Group, is at the centre of the Anselm Kiefer retrospective in the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

“On Germany” is the title of the work, part of a retrospective created by Kiefer himself, an artist who has made the very German idea of coping with the past (Vergangenheitsbewael-tigung) a leitmotiv of his art.

The 70-year-old artist was the subject of a major exhibition at London’s Royal Academy in autumn 2014. The current show in Paris of 150 works contains different material, says curator Jean-Michel Bouhours.

Meinhoff, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin in 1970 formed what was known in Germany as the Red Army Faction. The machine gun named for her is mounted on an old military hospital bed and surrounded by cardboard mushrooms inscribed with |the names of German writers and philosophers.

Kiefer borrowed the title from the book “De l’Allemagne” by Germaine de Stael, a Swiss-French author of the Napoleonic era. De Stael described a country she admired for its writers and thinkers but despised for its “vulgar, bestial” people.

“I try to show the other side of the land of the romantics,” says Kiefer, who regards Germany as dangerous because it’s a “delayed nation”. German sociologist Helmuth Plessner coined that phrase in 1934 in attempting to explain how Adolf Hitler won the support the middle class.

“On Germany” may be seen as the quintessence of Kiefer’s ideas and creative energy. In his images formed from acrylic, ash, lead, clay and straw, Kiefer is primarily concerned with processing German history and literature.

“Paths: Sand of the March of Brandenburg” and “O Stalks, Your Stalks, O Stalks of the Night” confront the viewer with landscapes of the End of Days, the scorched earth of a darkened world.

The exhibition is arranged chronologically, leading from Kiefer’s once-controversial “Heroic Symbols” from the 1970s – self-portraits with Heil Hitler salute – via his monumental “Osiris and Isis”, “Big Freight” and “Lilith”. Finally there are 40 works in glass showcases with gilded ears of corn and leaden books.

Kiefer is a bibliophile. The literary references in his works to Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, among others, bear witness to this. “I once read somewhere that philosophers and writers collected magic mushrooms to turn on,” he says. That’s what gave him the idea of philosophers as |mushroom heads.