Kiefer's "Next Year in Jerusalem' in New York

A few minutes into viewing "Next Year in Jerusalem," Anselm Kiefer's massive installation on the theme of Jewish history, a very unexpected thought came to this principled non-Zionist: Was a state of their own so much to ask for a people that has endured this much?

Israel's existence is a vexing question for many people of good will, not to mention many who bear Israel no good will at all. But Kiefer's meditation on Jewish suffering is such an overwhelming experience that, without raising the subject of Israel itself, it puts it squarely on the table.

Doubtless that was not his intention, and the show would be offensively exploitive if it had been. It begins with the legendary prehistory of ancient Israel and ends in 1945, the year of Kiefer's birth and Year Zero for Germany itself. "The ruins, the dust, this is where I begin from," Kiefer has said.

Such was literally the case. Hitler prophesied that World War II would be a death struggle between Germany and Judaism. Preposterous as such an assertion was, it seemed at the war's end that, indeed, Germany and the Jews might well have gone down together. For both, there could only be a new way forward; for each, there was no turning back.

Germany, at least in the Western zone of occupation, chose prosperity, amnesia and, belatedly, official remorse; some Jews chose a Zionist homeland. Kiefer came to maturity as the only German of his generation willing to unblinkingly engage the horror of his country's immediate past.

None of its poets did; none of its philosophers; none of its theologians. Thomas Mann had nothing to say. Richard Strauss had nothing to say. Martin Heidegger had nothing to say. Kiefer alone raked up the forbidden images.

Kiefer's Nazi salute

As a young man, he photographed himself giving the Nazi salute; these pictures, contained on long scrolls hung in a cattle car-like steel pen, are an integral part of the current exhibit. Kiefer wasn't a covert neo-Nazi; he took the pictures as an affirmation of personal guilt, and also as a way of defying the prevailing amnesia.

All manifestations of Nazism, and therefore all reminders of it, were banned in the new postwar German Federal Republic. History was thereby buried. Kiefer took the salute upon himself as a medieval flagellant might take the stigmata. At the same time, too, he undertook a vast project of excavation and reclamation in the many works that linked German history and the Holocaust.

Kiefer's stance hasn't been simple. As a self-exiled German Gentile (he lives and works in France), he interweaves German and Jewish history as a means of purging the former by ritual immersion in the latter. If Hitler sought to separate the two by destroying Judaism itself, Kiefer reverses the process.

German memories, and ours

Yet even this is an overly schematic view of his project. Postwar Germany turned its back on its own ruins as quickly as possible; as soon as they were removed, the memory of them was censored, and it was only with Kiefer's contemporary, the author and novelist W. G. Sebald, that the subject of the World War II Allied bombardment of Germany—itself an atrocity with which we Americans ourselves have scarcely begun to reckon— could become a subject of public discussion.

(A notable but isolated exception was Hans Erich Nossack's Der Untergang: Hamburg 1943, a first-person account of the firebombing of Hamburg published in 1948 and now available in English. But the book treated Hamburg's fate as a kind of natural cataclysm, reckoning neither with Allied nor Nazi guilt; it belonged to a literature of trauma, and was thus a further contribution to cultural amnesia rather than debate.)

Kiefer can't, then, be seen ultimately as a German nationalist trying to rehabilitate his country by personal witness; his art is, rather, closer to the work of ontological repair— the tikkun— spoken of in the classic texts of Jewish mysticism. That's a very large, one might almost say a world-defying task, and no one has accused Kiefer of excessive modesty.

Stretching aesthetic boundaries

The result must be judged by each viewer for herself. There is no privileged vantage point from which to assess it, since each of us brings a unique moral case to it, and to an extent it transcends aesthetic values, though it must remain rooted in them to avoid mere didacticism.

To state my own position, I think Kiefer's work is of the highest importance, and that, in formal terms, he has stretched the boundaries of the aesthetic more than any artist of the past 50 years.

A Kiefer exhibit doesn't occupy a gallery; it annexes it; and, even by his standards, "Next Year in Jerusalem" is daunting. You must walk around the installation first, taking in a general impression before attempting to concentrate on particular objects and elements. The steel pen is its longest structure, but also the most opaque, because few of its contents are actually visible.

Killing machines

There are 14 very large vitrines— you might view them as upended coffins— each enclosing a particular sculptural motif; these motifs overlap and repeat themselves, although each makes a discrete statement as well. Along with the vitrines are horizontal cases with forest landscapes, many with whitened twigs in which various artifacts are caught, and multimedia canvases that show broader vistas of mountains and seas. There are models (and in one case what appears to be a literal remain) of World War II airplanes and submarines; these are suspended, toy-like, in various positions.

The Holocaust was, of course, embedded in the killing machine of a great war, although the relationship of the two is difficult and problematic: both are radically inseparable yet clearly distinguishable on the historical plane. To leave these artifacts floating, as it were, in an uncertain element, dramatizes this condition; they are totem objects, both eroticized and sterilized at the same time, like war itself.

Book burning revisited

Other iconic forms from Kiefer's arsenal also appear. One is the book, winged and aflame with the ecstatic pieties of the Lutheran Bible but also charred and mangled as the symbol of cultural mutilation and collapse. This contains obvious relevance for the Jews as the people of the Book; it was by no accident that the public burning of books was the declaratory act of the Third Reich.

Another form is the ladder, whose locus classicus in Western cultural consciousness is Jacob's dream and whose dreadful reversal, again, was the human ash that rose from the crematoria.

Kiefer also plays with female costume, as in Lilith's Daughters, in which a long garment, spray-painted black, hangs downward with a dozen small pendants, a generational process that leads not to life but to death. A similar garment hangs in another vitrine, its pockets filled with shards of glass.

Hitler's Jewish museum

Aside from Kiefer's own images of himself, however, no human form appears, but for some indistinct stick figures on the large canvases, as if the Jews had in fact been exterminated, leaving behind only the tokens of their martyrdom. Hitler, of course, had plans for a Jewish museum once the Final Solution was complete, and on one level "Next Year in Jerusalem" is Kiefer's horrified representation of it.

But Kiefer also celebrates the living entity of Judaism through the rehearsal of its principal symbols, and his scholarship here is as penetrating as it is wide. If for Germans the Jew was posited as the reviled Other, then Germanness can only be recovered itself through a purgative encounter with Judaism— through taking on that identity and reenacting its experience. This can only be done through art, and it is not, of course, a task of redemption for Germans alone.

This is part of Kiefer's purpose in taking his story back to Babylonian and Roman times. The concept of the Jew as universal Other has been the self-inflicted curse of mankind; and to reflect that the modern state of Israel, for all its flaws and indeed its sins, is the only one of the more than 200 nations on earth to face unremitting existential challenge, is to confront, for Jew and Gentile alike, the most scandalous and melancholy of facts.

No one, Jew or Gentile, has confronted it more unflinchingly, more compassionately, and more probingly than Anselm Kiefer. "Next Year in Jerusalem" is more than a very impressive artistic event. It's a moral one as well.♦


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