Margarete (1981) by Anselm Kiefer

Background

As mentioned in the previous blog post, Kiefer has reflected his feelings and ambivalence about the German history through his paintings. Margarete is one of the most significant paintings of his series about the Nazi rules.


Relevant to the poem Death Fugue and Faust

The painting Margarete was based on a painful poem, "Death Fugue" by a Romanian poet Paul Celan when he was imprisoning in the Nazi concentration camp. He was the only survivor of his family in the death camp. In the poem, two figures act as the central metaphor: Margarete, with her cascade of blonde Aryan hair and a Jewish Semitic woman, Shulamite with black hair.

Kiefer has done a series of work about Margarete and Shulamite. In this painting, Margarette in the main character concluded. Back to Goethe's work,  in Faust, Margarete is a pure and innocent woman. But love leads to a series of tragedies and she kills her own baby. She lays on a bed of straw, meanwhile Faust kills her brother and her innocence is tainted. This story inspired Kiefer using straws in this painting to depict Margarete. Yellow straws represent her blonde hair and the tangled areas of the black lines imply the erased presence of Shulamite.

Link to the Holocaust 

Margarete has a complex relationship with the German history, especially the horrors of the Holocaust and its aftermath. It uses Margarete as a metaphor of Germany. The tendrils of straw like smoke from death-camp chimney, ruining the innocence of her. On the other hand, in his work of Shulamite, a metaphor of the Holocaust, he added straws to show Margarete's golden tresses. The paintings of Margarete and Shulamite were paired together. Kiefer tried to show Germany and Holocaust are always linked. He searched for the restoration of wholeness in the German history.

My thoughts 

Margarete may seem to be enigmatic and has no common ground like other contemporary artworks, but it is very thought provoking and deep. This painting links to history and counter-memory.  Kiefer uses Margarete from Death Fugue and Faust as a base to illustrate the deplorable Holocaust during Second World War. Kiefer did not only use his significant dull and destructive painting style to depict the reverberation, but also use a central metaphor "acts" as Germany to inscribe the story. The yellow straws represents the blonde hair of Margarete, meaning Germany itself was originally pure but it had been destroyed by the fascism; it also refer to the Nazi blonde ideal from grotesque. The painting has complex contexts in showing Kiefer's patriotic thought of facing and acceptable the German history as a whole. This painting is a very significant one of Kiefer to intersect the history, counter-memory and aesthetics in one single work. Some people may want to evade from their shameful history, but this painting suggests there are always tangle areas that can never be erased, just like the ruthless Nazi rule. From this painting, I start asking myself - What is history? How do we face the fugitive moment in our history? Should we recognize the temporal movements or just pretend nothing had happened? Maragarete is certainly a masterpiece and I hope by sharing this in the blog(or presentation in the future), more people will know about Kiefer and this great work.


References

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/margarete-1981-by-anselm-kiefer-saatchi-collection-970630.html
http://www.answers.com/topic/anselm-kiefer
http://www.judithwinther.dk/emner/niveau_3/visual_culture/margarete.html
http://www.siue.edu/~ejoy/KiernanBarcilonText.htm