Anselm kiefer: When germany buries its ghosts in lead

Kiefer does not paint history. He makes it bleed onto the canvas.

Born in 1945 in a Germany in ruins, he grew up in the deafening silence of a country that preferred to forget. But he, a child of the rubble, chose to dig. Not with words—too polite, too sanitised—but with earth, lead, ashes. His works are mass graves where Germany buries its crimes only to exhume them again. And if you listen closely before To the Unknown Painter (1983), you might hear the crackling of flames that consumed his studio… and with it, the illusions of a nation.

01The scars that time does not erase

The first time Kiefer exhibited Occupations (1969), a series of photographs in which he stages himself giving the Nazi salute in European landscapes, German galleries shut their doors. Too dangerous. Too raw. Yet this was no gratuitous provocation, but an exorcism. At twenty-four, Kiefer was asking: How do you represent the unrepresentable? Should you show the camps? The executioners? Or rather, as he would later do, the wheat fields that grew over mass graves?

His approach is radical: he does not seek to document, but to materialise memory. In Sulamith (1983), a leaden celestial vault collapses onto a crypt inspired by the Nazi-designed Memorial to the Fallen Soldiers in Berlin. The ceiling, once gilded, is now blackened, eaten away by time. Kiefer does not judge. He shows. And what he shows is a Germany that wears its crimes like a second skin.

Take Varus (1976), where a Germanic forest becomes a battlefield. The tree trunks, painted in thick impasto, resemble petrified soldiers. In the background, a sickly light pierces the clouds, like a concentration camp searchlight. Kiefer never directly references the Holocaust. He doesn’t need to. The violence is in the very texture of the paint, in that paste that clings to your fingers like dried mud.

02Lead, or the art of weighing history

If Kiefer had chosen traditional oil painting, his canvases might have remained elegant allegories. But he opted for lead. A heavy, toxic, malleable metal. The perfect material to embody the weight of history.

In his studio in Barjac, France, mountains of lead sheets pile up like cursed archives. Kiefer hammers them, folds them, welds them into giant books, aeroplanes, towers. The Lead Books (1980s) are not meant to be read. Their pages, welded shut, bear titles like Die Ordnung der Nacht (The Order of the Night). They look like relics of a vanished civilisation. And that is precisely what they are.

Lead has another peculiarity: it oxidises. Over time, it develops a white patina, like skin flaking away. Kiefer plays with this transformation. In Bohemia Lies by the Sea (1996), a wave of lead crashes onto a shore of sand and ashes. The metal, once gleaming, is now dull, sickly. Like Germany after 1945.

Why lead? Because in alchemy, it is the prima materia, the raw material to be transformed into gold. Kiefer, however, does not seek transmutation. He only wants Germany to bear its own weight.

03Straw and ashes: when poetry becomes matter

In 1981, Kiefer read Paul Celan’s Todesfuge, that poem where two women engage in a macabre dance: Margarete, with her "golden hair," and Shulamith, with her "ashen hair." One embodies romantic Germany, the other the Jewish victim. Kiefer decided to paint them.

But how to represent gold and ashes? With real straw and real ashes.

For Margarete, he glued straw onto the canvas, then set it alight. He extinguished the flames at the last moment, leaving traces of charring. Margarete’s hair was no longer golden: it was scorched, as if German beauty had burned with the books of the Bücherverbrennung. For Shulamith, he dusted the canvas with ashes, as if the bodies of the deported had been reduced to dust.

This obsession with organic materials is not mere stylistic effect. Kiefer believes matter has a memory. The straw, harvested from fields around his studio, carries traces of past harvests. The ashes, collected from disused crematoria, may contain atoms of those who perished there.

In Ash Flower (1983–1997), a giant flower emerges from a pile of ashes. A metaphor for resurrection? Not quite. Kiefer is no optimist. The flower is fragile, almost transparent. As if life, after horror, could only be fleeting.

04The books that do not open

Kiefer has a fascination with books. Not those you read, but those you contemplate.

In his studio, hundreds of lead books line the shelves like a forbidden library. Some are sealed forever, their pages welded shut. Others open onto emptiness, or strange objects: a lock of hair, a piece of coal, a yellowed photograph. These are anti-books, objects that refuse to reveal their secrets.

Why lead books? Because in alchemy, lead symbolises nigredo, the phase of putrefaction necessary for any transformation. Kiefer applies this principle to history. Germany must rot before it can be reborn.

In The Secret Life of Plants (1997), a giant book lies open on the ground. Its pages are covered with seeds and roots. As if nature had reclaimed culture. As if books, those symbols of human knowledge, were now mere supports for vegetation.

Kiefer does not believe in linear narratives. For him, history is a palimpsest: you write over old layers, but the traces remain. His lead books are the perfect metaphor for this idea. You cannot erase the past. You can only cover it up.

05The Tower of Babel, or the failure of utopias

In 2004, Kiefer installed The Seven Heavenly Palaces at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. Seven towers of raw concrete, fourteen to eighteen metres high, rise in an industrial space. The work draws from the Kabbalah, where the heavenly palaces represent the stages of divine creation. But in Kiefer’s hands, these palaces are in ruins.

Why towers? Because Germany has a history of megalomaniacal architecture. Gothic cathedrals, Ludwig II of Bavaria’s castles, Albert Speer’s mad projects for Berlin—all these constructions share a common trait: they sought to touch the sky. All failed.

Kiefer does not judge. He observes. In The Rhine (1982–1983), a German river flows between concrete banks, like a waterway imprisoned by industry. The landscape is both sublime and monstrous. Like Germany itself.

His modern Towers of Babel are not monuments to human glory. They are tombs. Reminders that every attempt to dominate nature or history ends in collapse.

06The studio as battlefield

To visit Kiefer’s studio in Barjac is to step into a post-apocalyptic landscape. Over thirty-five hectares, concrete towers stand beside abandoned greenhouses, collapsed tunnels, mountains of debris. Kiefer bought the land in 1993, when it was nothing but an industrial wasteland. He turned it into his Gesamtkunstwerk, his total work of art.

Here, there are no easels or fine brushes. Kiefer works with bulldozers, blowtorches, tonnes of earth. For Sternenfall (Falling Stars, 2007), he had a twenty-metre crater dug, then filled it with molten lead. The result? A shimmering surface, like a lake of mercury, reflecting the stars… and the ghosts of the past.

The studio is also a storage space. Thousands of objects pile up: Second World War aeroplanes, old books, animal skeletons. Kiefer calls them his "fossils of the future." To him, every object carries a story. A piece of coal? Perhaps a remnant of the factories that fuelled the crematoria. An old photograph? Maybe that of an unknown soldier.

Working here means accepting that art and life are one. That creation is an act of destruction, and destruction an act of creation.

07The legacy: when art becomes reliquary

Today, Kiefer is considered one of the greatest living artists. His works sell for millions, and his retrospectives draw crowds. Yet he remains an outsider. A man who prefers fields of ruins to glamorous openings.

His influence is everywhere. In Gerhard Richter’s torn canvases, which, like Kiefer’s, question German memory. In Christian Boltanski’s monumental installations, which, like Kiefer’s, turn archives into art. In Marlene Dumas’s paintings, which, like Kiefer’s, explore the border between beauty and horror.

But Kiefer has no disciples. His art is too personal, too tied to his own history. What he has bequeathed is a method: do not flee the past, but face it until it faces you in return.

In The Orders of the Night (1996), a man lies beneath a starry sky. His body is covered with lead books. Around him, withered sunflowers. The work sums up Kiefer’s entire philosophy: art as the last refuge against oblivion. As a prayer without God.

And if you look closely enough, you will see that the stars in the sky are actually holes pierced through the canvas. As if the light were coming from the other side. As if, despite everything, there was still hope.