Christopher wrote:
>>Because he was so obsessed by Germany, Tactitus' text is a constant
>>reference point, as it is in Anselm Kiefer's work, for instance.
>That interests me. Could you elaborate the Kiefer point?
I can try - I'm no Kiefer expert, though I admire the work.
On reflection, the connection, which I've always assumed, is more
implicit than explicit. The explicit links are rather with Tacitus'
_Annals_ - all the paintings Kiefer did about Hermann/Arminius, the
story of the first German hero, which culminated in the slaughter of an
entire Roman army under the leadership of Varus in the Teutoburg Forest
in 9AD. The one that sticks in my mind is "Varus", a horrific painting
of a forest which seems itself slaughter, the trees bleeding like the
ones in Dante's Inferno; but he did quite a few others ("Piet Mondrian
_Arminius' battle", "Hermann's battle", and others).
I was thinking of Germania in the context of Kiefer's ongoing critique of
Germany's nationalism, which is naturally a fairly agonised
deconstruction of identity (both personal and national) and history.
Kiefer started that early and provocatively with works like "German's
Spiritual Heroes" (a book like a scrapbook containing image after image
of Kiefer in various stages of undress and in various locations making
the Sieg Heil salute. plus patriotic statues &c). Central to that - as
it is in so much of Kiefer's work - is the object of the Book.
For those who don't know - Germania is seen - and was certainly seen so
by the Nazis after 1920 - as the ur-text of German national identity.
(There's the amazing story of Himmler's obsessive desire for the Codex
Aesinas, the 9th century "original"). The text is Tacitus' description
of the Germanic peoples as found by the Romans, and was central to the
development of the "blood and soil" ideology developed by the Nazis. In
particular where Tacitus backs up "the opinions of those who hold that in
the peoples of Germany there have been given to the world a race unmixed
by intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people and pure, like no
one but themselves". This was the basis of the historical justification
for the eugenic theories of Nazism. Tacitus formed a picture of the
Germans as wood-dwelling barbarians who worshipped the forest and the
tree, and were, unlike the Romans, uncorrupted by luxury and decadence;
for the Nazis the text was a crucial legitimisation of their bizarre
history/myth making.
The German forest mythos begins with this text, and the forest/tree is a
theme Kiefer returns to again and again in his work - "Tree with Pallet",
putting art and nature ambiguously and somewhat sinisterly together, say;
and there's the woodcut of the empty wooden hall called "Germany's
spiritual heroes": an ironic and unpeopled and apocalyptic image of the
primordial forest humanised. But I also see the connections in Kiefer's
references to text/history, in his constant use of the book. Say, in
something like "Shulamith", a lead book open with a woman's burnt hair on
the page (one of many works he did drawn from poems by Paul Celan). The
lead book has been seen as a reference to the Nazis' habits of
meticulously recording the details of their victims; I also can't but see
an echo of the ur-text in it, the poisonous weight of history (also in
those incredible sculptures he made of shelves of giant lead books).
Best
Alison
