Anselm Kiefer and art after Auschwitz

This book examines the possibilities and limits of painting in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Positioning Kiefer as a deeply learned artist who encounters and represents history in painted rather than written form, Lisa Saltzman contends that Kiefer´s work is unique among postwar German artists in his persistent exploration of the legacy of fascism. Formally, thematically, and philosophically, Kiefer´s work probes the aesthetic and ethical dilemma of representing the unrepresentable, the historical catastrophe into whose aftermath the artist was born. Kiefer´s work mediates the relations between a deeply traumatic history that he, as a German born after the Second World War, and we, his post-Holocaust spectators, cannot fully know but to which his work bears witness and provides access.