Opening the wounds of history: Anselm Kiefer’s war on forgetting

Although Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany just before the end of World War Two and grew up among bombed-out buildings, he learned little about the conflict during his childhood. The Third Reich merited just a few weeks of study while he was at school.

But Kiefer discovered a record, distributed by Americans to re-educate the Germans about the war, while he was at art school. Its recordings of the voice of Hitler and other key figures of the Nazi regime "so repelled and fascinated" the aspiring artist that he felt compelled to fully research his country's history.

Kiefer’s first major work was 1969's Occupations: a series of still controversial photographs depicting the artist in his father’s military uniform and performing the Nazi salute, a gesture banned in Germany since 1945. Kiefer visited places across Europe that had experienced blitzkrieg operations by the Panzer divisions of the German armed forces, and captured himself saluting the scenery.

For Simon Schama this combination of performance and photography create "satirical poses designed to pierce the conspiracy of forgetting, a wound-opener".

These are among the people honoured in a building which sought to make physical a sense of German national identity - the Walhalla. This bombastic mausoleum was commissioned by Ludwig I, King of Bavaria; located east of Regensberg, the vast neoclassical structure was completed in 1842.

For the Walhalla, Ludwig germanised the Norse concept of Valhalla, a final resting place for great warriors killed in battle. He filled it with portrait busts of heroes of German culture. In the 1930s, Schama says, it became “a place of cultural pilgrimage for all good Nazis”.

Kiefer used the name Walhalla for a major exhibition which opened in London in November 2016. It featured a dormitory reminiscent of a hospital ward with empty, unmade beds created entirely of lead, as well as large-scale landscape paintings and sculptures made from refuse such as ragged old clothes and rusty bicycles.

Art writer William Cook found echoes of World War Two in his work: "Kiefer’s paintings evoke the barren landscapes of bombed-out cities. His sculptures evoke the horrors of the concentration camps. Yet although his work is harrowing, like all great art it is exhilarating – even when the subject matter is so bleak."

For Schama, Anselm Kiefer's ability to keep the past present in our minds is his great power: "I've always been moved by Kiefer's work because it seems to share the historian's version of the Hippocratic Oath, to wage war against forgetfulness."