Dein Goldenes Haar, Margarete

“Kiefer makes such work... not in order to quiet the consciences of the guilty, but in order to let justice be done to the dead, and to set an image in the stars.” Hans Egon Holthusen

Barren stalks, flowers drooping, a field scorched by vertical black striations that rhyme with the leaden skies, Anselm Kiefer’s evocative Dein Goldenes Haar, Margarete seems nearly an anthropomorphic landscape of bowed heads and streaming tears. The strong pathway leading from lower left to right is streaked with Kiefer’s signature cursive that mirrors the strong grid-like black cross-hatching above, on which actual straw is bunched on a sacrificial funeral pyre. As a motif in Western European art, wheat fields proliferate, from the politically-tinged renderings of Jean-François Millet’s Gleaners, 1857 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), to Claude Monet’s hay stacks and the variations within a series by Vincent Van Gogh. Dein Goldenes Haar, Margarete is among Kiefer’s most poignant works. The title is taken from the Romanian poet Paul Celan’s Todesfuge on which Kiefer based more than thirty works. Published in 1952, Celan, a Holocaust survivor, wrote the work as an incantation of his experiences in the death camps, drinking black and mild and digging graves for those who had died. Todesfuge is notable for the interlacing of the couplet, which also closes the poem, “Your golden hair Margarete/your ashen hair Shulamite,” through which Celan evoked the contrast between the so-called Aryan German population and the Jewish people, manifested in the dark hair of King Solomon’s beloved immortalized in the Song of Songs, Shulamite. Margarethe, Shulamite’s opposite, is protagonist of this moving canvas and Celan’s couplet is desecrated, embedded in the burnt landscape, nearly encased and confined by the wheat field and the low horizon line above it.

The visual trope Kiefer chose for these thematically linked works is straw set into oil paint, which mimes the blond hair of Margarethe, yet often within the tangled mass of black lines, as here, where interpretations move between the ideas of desiccation, structuring (the “pyre”), and reference to the black hair of Margarethe’s opposite, Shulamite. The metaphor of straw is a powerful one, for it too is brittle and can easily be turned to ash, almost as easily as Margarethe, the symbol of moral values as much as racial purity, was herself exploited, tainted, and the cause of death both of her brother and of her own baby by the end of Goethe’s epic. And yet, she also symbolizes womanhood, the repository of fertility and hope, and the intertwining of straw and black strokes could almost speak to the reunification of Germany and further, of humanity, against divisiveness and evil.

Born in 1945, Kiefer studied first studied law before deciding to become an artist. As a Catholic, devout and penetrating, he was naturally drawn to philosophical issues undergirding the larger questions of life’s meaning after so much devastation. Kiefer’s scaffolding of oppositions—light and dark, blonde and black, heaven and earth—suggests his interest in mythologies and symbolic representations. Among the “Neo-Expressionists,” those German artists—among them Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff—who looked back to the history of German Expressionism and seemed to embrace representation and figuration, Kiefer’s charred, laden surfaces, with textures built from embedded lead, sand, tar, ands straw have placed him apart from other artists of his generation. The epic canvases laden with iconography whose visual sources have proved at once elusive and obvious, have made works like Dein Goldenes Haar, Margarete fascinating and compelling visual and visceral experiences. The overarching theme or question Kiefer explores is, as Dorothea Dietrich has made clear, “how a culture constructs its own identity” (D. Dietrich, “Decoding Kiefer,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter, vol. 19, no. 4, September-October 1988, p. 156). Dietrich suggests, too, that Kiefer’s work follows literature of the period in its evocation of archetypes or “images of ruins, crashes, or even the glacial epoch as metaphors for the period of National Socialism (Ibid.). The many layers of meaning here and in Kiefer’s other works, is mirrored deftly by the laying of materials used to convey the impact his message, the manner in which materials and processes mirror the densely layered history and myth underlying the works’ material expression.

A German who survived the ravages of war, Kiefer was also an artist in search of a visual and spiritual uplift for the guilt and shame of past sins against humanity. Margarete is also a symbol of the redemptive power of art. As was true for Celan’s poem Todesfuge, so is it true of the present work. Kiefer makes such work as Celan composed his poem, “not in order to quiet the consciences of the guilty, but in order to let justice be done to the dead, and to set an image in the stars” (H. E. Holthusen, Merkur, April 1952).

Kiefer’s refusal to bury Germany’s past, to as he states, continually “dig it up again,” is reflected in his own commitment to creating visual equivalents to the emotional impact of Celan’s poetry. Through the breadth of elicited associations and the emotional and visceral charge of historical memory translated into visual excitation, Dein Goldenes Haar Margerete offers hope even at the nadir of human civilization, liberating traumatic memories through commemoration and homage.