Celan's poetry, inextricably linked with the memory of the Holocaust, has haunted Kiefer's work for more than twenty-five years and has influenced him on every level, from the naming of works and exhibitions to the incorporation of symbolic materials from Celan's imagery- sand, straw, hair and ashes- into the physical reality of his paintings.

The art of Anselm Kiefer is rich with references to writers,philosophers and poets, and his relationship with Paul Celan has been the most complex and intense of these dialogues with the past. Celan's poetry, inextricably linked with the memory of the Holocaust, has haunted Kiefer's work for more than twenty-five years and has influenced him on every level, from the naming of works and exhibitions to the incorporation of symbolic materials from Celan's imagery- sand, straw, hair and ashes- into the physical reality of his paintings.

Like other German artists of his generation, Kiefer began by questioning his own artistic heritage, focusing on the iconographic and mythological elements of German culture which had been taken over by Nazi propaganda,and subsequently repressed and buried deep in the collective unconscious. It was his encounter with Celan's work in the early 1980s that first enabled him to escape from the vicious circle of fascination and disgust at the cultural ties that bound him to the Third Reich, and led him to confront the subject of the Holocaust and Jewish memory as a whole, and to embrace this body of traditions within his art.

Magnificently illustrated throughout with reproductions of Kiefer's best-known works, this book explores the intricate web of associations between the poet and the painter, a network that is extended to embrace other artistic and literary figures such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Joseph Beuys. Through Celan's linguistic innovations and Kiefer's intense explorations of past and present, artistic creation becomes both an expression of horror and an act of commemoration.

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I: MEMORY OF MYTHS

  Loss of Memory, Lack of Imagery

  Occupations: The Myth of Zero Hour

  The Myth of the 'German Spirit'

  The Wagnerian Myth and the Artist's Responsibility

  Beuys and the German Myth of the Artist-Redeemer

  The End of the Heroic Tradition

  Destroying Myths

  Paul Celan's Nibelung Nausea

  Kiefer's Nibelung Misery

  Siegfried's Difficult Way to Brunhilde

CHAPTER 2: SISTERS OF MEMORY

  The Poem Death Fugue

  Margarete and Shulamith

  Sbulamith's Body

  Shulamitb's Hair

  Margarete, Woman of Straw

  The Mastersingers

  A Dual Virtuosity

CHAPTER 3: THE UBIQUITY OF ASHES

  The Palimpsest Landscape

  Cauterizing the Landscape

  Landscapes and Mass Graves

  Decoding Shulamith

  Ash Flower

  Passing the Baton

  In Bohemia: In the Storm of Roses

  In Egypt: The Sand from the Urns

  Poetry on Show

  The Rite of the Book

  Notes

  Bibliography of Cited Works

  Further Reading

  Exhibitions

  Awards and Distinctions

  Index

  Acknowledgments