In the shadow of atrocity

It's a battle post-war German artists are still fighting: frowned on for mentioning Nazism, yet unable to find myths that are not tainted by it. Andrew Graham-Dixon considers the plight of Anselm Kiefer

In the late 1960s a young German called Anselm Kiefer, an artist of no great repute at the time, took a series of photographs of himself performing the Nazi Sieg heil in several locations scattered across Europe. A forlorn and absurd figure, pictured at a distance which aptly diminished him, Kiefer's Fascist alter ego was to be seen variously dwarfed by the Colosseum, lost in the ancient city of Paestum or standing ramrod straight in the main city square of Montpellier scaring a few harmless passers- by with his goose-stepping antics.

These bitter, mock-heroic parodies of the figure of the all-conquering National Socialist were, predictably, much misunderstood and much reviled when Kiefer first published them under the sardonic title of Occupations. His mocking re-enactments of militant Nazism as sad farce were misread as clarion calls to Fascist revival. The heavy irony that lay behind them was ignored by those in post-war Germany (and they have been the majority) who like to believe that a willed amnesia is the best form of national atonement for atrocities perpetrated under the Third Reich.

After the Second World War, the German artist with a sense of history has, with depressing regularity, been accused of stoking up a fire whose ashes he has only wanted (and needed) to rake over. Kiefer, who is now one of the two or three most celebrated living German painters, has probably done more than anyone else to clarify the predicament of the post-war German artist - and also, for that matter, novelist or poet or film-maker or philosopher or musician. He is the epitome of the creative mind working under the burden of a nation's guilt.

Born in 1945, the year when the world learned the full extent of what had gone on at Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, Kiefer has persistently, even bookishly, waged war on those who like to think of Nazism as an inexplicable aberration in the history of German nationhood - as the equivalent, in the life of a political state, of a terrible drunken mistake. Kiefer's art has constantly argued from precisely the opposite position, insisting on the close links between the founding myths of the German state and the ideology of Hitler and the National Socialists.

His pictures are formed from echoes and memories of other and older forms of art - echoes intended among other things to work as exposs. The Sieg heiling Kiefer seen from behind, futilely saluting the sea, echoes that famous icon of the early Romantic German sensibility, Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Clouds. The echo is also an insinuation - a way of pointing out that the German Romantic's creation of a mythically idealised Germany, a land of whiteness and purity, of spreading virgin forests, snow and mists, could easily become another idealisation, militarised and politicised and altogether more dangerous. German myths and icons lost their innocence when the dream of a densely afforested Eden, a spreading land carpeted with snow, became a dream of conquest and purification - when forests became armies and trees became soldiers; when the whiteness of snow became Aryan ethnic purity; when an abstract ideal became the dreadful concrete of the death camp.

The poet Paul Celan, who survived Auschwitz, knew full well that his life had been turned into a living hell not by simple-minded aberrants but by sophisticates who had been seduced by the power of a myth of national origin. Celan (a great influence on Kiefer, incidentally, who has painted many pictures alluding to Celan and his poetry) wrote about it in his Todesfuge (Death Fugue):

"death is a master from Gemany his eye is blue he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete

he sets his hounds upon us he grants us a grave in the air

"your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Shulamite

death is a master from Germany

he calls out more darkly as smoke you will rise into the air"

Every mythology contains within it an actual or potential demonology. Golden-haired Margarete, the pure-bred Aryan goddess of Celan's bitter poem, has a twin sister called Shulamite, the Jewess who will be burned.

Responsibility for the darkest period in the history of German nationalism, as Kiefer has well understood, is to be laid at the door of those who, in the second half of the19th and first half of the 20th centuries, politically appropriated ancient Germanic myths and sharpened them into deadly weapons. Nazism may not have been a cultured political movement in any generally acceptable sense of the word "cultured", but it was certainly a political movement steeped in the cultural past. Hitler cared enough about art to stage the century's most heavily attended exhibition of modern painting. He called it "Entartete Kunst", or "Degenerate Art", and it was a demonstration of all that the Nazis hated in the art of the 20th century. It contained modern paintings of extremely various origin, many of which were hung upside down or otherwise ridiculed in the display, and many of which were burned afterwards. This was a concentration camp for art, and the propaganda that surrounded the show even made the startling claim that all forms of modernist degeneracy were ultimately traceable to the cultural influence of The Jew.

Part of Nazism's insidiousness lay in the breadth with which Nazis sought to apply their ideas. It was a politics that was also a genetics and an aesthetics; a politics that spawned all sorts of theories about all sorts of things, so that the Nazi love of the pure Germanic forest would lead to the Nazi idealisation of woodland activities like hunting and shooting, which would in turn be reflected in the Nazi love of paintings of true types of Aryan manhood in pastoral settings.

The implications of Nazism's spread into every corner of German culture are difficult for a non-German to grasp. Imagine an England in which Winston Churchill as dictator has presided over appalling genocidal crimes in the name of an ideology that invested tremendous positive value in fresh air and mountain walks and the Boy Scout movement. Then, perhaps, it becomes easier to understand why, after Nazism, it becomes very hard to paint pictures of mountain scenery that do not seem somehow complicit, tinged with associations of backpacking Hitler youth, of mountain boots destined to become jackboots. This is the defining peculiarity of the post-war German artist's historical inheritance. Having known the terrible potential power of myth, it is hard to believe in or to create one fully, ever again.

The one mythology that has been politically acceptable has been a myth of personal recovery, of healing and regeneration - dreamed up most notably by Joseph Beuys and, most beautifully, in his drawings: those slight, anti-monumental reproofs to Fascist gargantuanism, objects with the frail beauty of flower stems, or tiny chips of stone kept for sentimental reasons. Beuys' determination to preserve the role of artist as seer and visionary, bloodied but unbowed, and the success with which he did it, have made him a huge moral example to German (indeed all) artists of the post-war period. But few have actually been able to follow his example.

Many German post-war artists have avoided the knotty issue of subject matter altogether by turning to abstraction. But abstraction, in post- war German painting has too often seemed like a pictorial form of convenient forgetfulness. The past cannot be buried as easily as the rubble of war under the concrete of a 1950s housing development.

Perhaps the most common approach has been recourse to a disenchanted, ironic, critical stance - to make art that seems forever wary of art's own power to enchant or spellbind. Georg Baselitz's sour, upside-down paintings of an upside-down world are exemplary of this strain of artistic thinking at its most nihilistic. The notion that modern Germany is actually defined, as a state, by the scars of its own past and by the ruination of its former nationalistic mythology, has itself become a sort of national myth - one conjured with startlingly effective literalness by Hans Haacke at the Venice Biennale a few years ago, when his exhibit consisted of the German Pavilion itself, with its floor dug up, made to resemble a ruined piece of Fascist architecture.

Which brings me back to Kiefer, who is perhaps the leading exponent of this correct but bitter form of artistic response to the German creative predicament. Kiefer has painted scores of landscapes, but their subject has always been ruin. They are disenchanted, barren, blasted landscapes, landscapes of desolation and of aftermath. Kiefer has been a perpetual ironist, a wry, embittered anatomist of the misuse and the misappropriation of myth, which suggests that he still feels the need to keep his distance from myth's power to bewitch, inebriate and mislead. Germany, he feels, needs to keep its own distance from such a thing.

But this is also his weakness, as an artist, and it has told with time, as he has gradually subsided into a mannerist of his own ironic devices, a mass-reproducer of the same, repetitive forms of discontent and historicist melancholia and guilt - a maker of large (and very expensive) pictures of bleak, pitted wastes, a creator of bathetic icons of ruin, drained of feeling because feeling is the one thing a German artist like Kiefer cannot afford to allow too easily into his work.

Irony, and a perpetual reluctance to allow oneself anything as extreme and as deeply felt as a vision - these are the punishments suffered by the German artist with a strong sense of historical responsibility, because he still fears that, one day, the old myths might return in their most extreme and dangerous form. Kiefer's one, incidental compensation has been that Americans - perhaps because America has become itself such a guilty, discontented culture - have been prepared to pay huge sums of money for his moping megaliths. At least disenchantment pays, for some.