Anselm Kiefer and his "Todesfuge" Paintings

Anselm Kiefer, a German artist born in 1945, developed a series of works based on Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge.” These paintings bear the names "Margarete" and “Sulamith.” I first saw images of a couple of these works in an essay by Lisa Saltzman in Barbie Zelizer’s Visual Culture and the Holocaust called “Lost in Translation: Clement Greenberg, Anselm Kiefer, and the Subject of History.” I'd like to spend a little time discussing the essay, but I'd like to say right away that I am having serious trouble with the premise and the reasoning.  On the other hand, I did find the paintings seemed to give themselves up to me in an exciting way and to lead me to a wide range of accompanying thoughts. Let me explain a little of what’s going on in the essay, along with my own responses to it, and then on to the art work.

The essay itself works inductively. Saltzman circles her subject quite a while before finally showing her intent. She expresses a belief that Kiefer ultimately takes a page from Greenbergian criticism and removes historical and biographical concerns from the "Todesfuge" paintings, particularly the cryptlike “Sulamite” which functions for her “as sepulcher…then, as a space not of mourning and memorialization, but of melancholia and forgetting, where the remains of history give way to ashen remainder”(85). Saltzman comes to the convoluted conclusion that Kiefer's "Todesfuge" paintings are removed from history.  Sulamith exists in the painting, not as image, according to Saltzman, but only as a name in the corner of the canvas.  Saltzman goes on to ask, "[D]oes this mean that [Sulamith], and with her, history, is missing as well, that all are, indeed, lost, irrevocably, in translation?"(83)  She comes to this conclusion in a syllogistically-challenged way:  given that Clement Greenberg established an important reputation in the world of art history by eschewing interest in historical reference in artworks to establish a standard in modernism and given that Clement Greenberg translated and published Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” in 1955, therefore an artwork, such as Kiefer's, that takes that poem as subject must also have removed a historical nature from the work.

Saltzman can’t reconcile Greenberg's act of translating such a historically charged piece with his visual art criticism which rejected historical and biographical reference in favor of high modernism. His essays and sponsorship helped build the careers of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko who had left referential art behind. Saltzman can’t seem to get her head around the possibility that Greenberg’s translations of Celan came from a different place in his brain or heart. Therefore, she argues that Anselm Kiefer may well have left history behind, too. Her essay is over-intellectualized and, in ways, unfortunate.

Kiefer’s work from the beginning has explored the ambiguous experience of being a German artist after Auschwitz, after the Holocaust.  The work that first brings him to the attention of the art world is the series of controversial photographs in which he has himself photographed in various locations doing the Nazi salute.  Often as subject for his work he incorporates Jewish mysticism or an interest in the Kabbalah.  Probably a good argument can be made that he works with a symbolic, perhaps personal vocabulary.  Clearly he is not working in a representational manner.  Kiefer was born in 1945.  As he comes to understand anything about the Holocaust, he arrives to the images, often photographs that present the atrocities of the camps.  Those have taken on symbolic valence.  Kiefer seems to incorporate this symbolic mythology into the "Todesfuge" paintings.  All of that argues for me that this series does not abandon historical reference, but uses it to express the never-again imperative.  Despite Saltzman's theory, there is no "lost in translation" sense to these powerful paintings.

All this said, I am excited that Lisa Saltzman’s essay carried me to a new place personally by introducing me to the "Todesfuge" paintings. Anselm Kiefer has been on the edge of my radar with works such as his “Seven Heavenly Palaces.” As I viewed Saltzman’s images from the Todesfuge work, I felt their power.

Above is one of the Margarete paintings.  Kiefer has used straw to stand in for her golden hair.  Fires light the strands.  Below is the Sulamith image that Saltzman imagines has left behind historical reference. Never mind the crematorium-like structure, or crypt with its possible references to a menorah in the structure of the columns.  Kiefer uses ash as material.  That's not even representational.  Ash is ash.

The relationship between Celan's poem and Kiefer's paintings lines up with a long held interest I have had in ekphrasis or the translation of one work of art into another medium. I began thinking about ways that Celan’s “Todesfuge” manifests in visual art, music, and architecture. I turned to John Felstiner’s book, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, with his detailed description of his own experience translating “Todesfuge” to “Deathfugue,” which has become the standard English translation of the poem. The poem and its descendants opened various avenues for me. I am interested in exploring in a future journal entry how “Your ashen hair Sulamith” in the poem transmigrates to the painting.  Also, I am taking a look at Sir Harrison Birtwistle's use of "Todesfuge" in an avant-garde, musical composition Pulse Shadows.  Of course, Daniel Libeskind's use of "Todesfuge" plays an important role in his architecture in the Jewish Museum in Berlin.  Lots to think about here.