Genocide, Landscape, Beauty, Taboo: Reading Anselm Kiefer’s Der Morgenthau-Plan with Walther von der Vogelweide’s Lindenlied

Peter Davies

doi:10.3828/mlo.v0i0.151

Abstract

Anselm Kiefer’s 2012 exhibition, Der Morgenthau-Plan , courted controversy with its seeming willingness to equate Allied planning for post-Second World War Germany with the Nazi genocide. Taking as its cue German nationalist interpretations of the (unrealised) proposal in 1944 by the US Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., to deindustrialise and pastoralise Germany, the exhibition intervenes in debates about German victimhood by creating a counterfactual historical narrative in which a German landscape devoid of human life is returned to an exuberant state of nature. The exhibition appears to be playing riskily with Holocaust revisionism and the aestheticisation of genocide, but to what end? This paper proposes a way of looking at these images that bypasses critical approaches that concentrate on trauma, memory and debates about victimhood, which in this case seem to lead us to a dead end. Instead, it sets Kiefer’s Morgenthau paintings in the context of some remarkably similar works inspired by the medieval lyric under der linden an der heide by Walther von der Vogelweide. I take a detour via a reading of Walther’s complex and self-reflexive text as a meditation on how conventions of representation both bear witness to and efface their object, and on how play with taboos on representation can be a source of erotic pleasure for those in the know. When read alongside Walther’s text and Kiefer’s response to it, I suggest, the Morgenthau paintings reflect in a troubled way on longings for beauty and release from guilt, and on the codes and conventions of Holocaust representation. Most provocatively, Kiefer shows how an understanding of and engagement with the taboos of Holocaust representation – a viewer’s status as theoretically informed discourse insider – can itself be a source of a pleasure that potentially effaces historical reality while claiming to bear witness to it.

Highlights

Anselm Kiefer’s exhibition Der Morgenthau-Plan, which ran from May to June 2013 at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, presents a typically monumental series of works, both painting and installation, consisting mostly of landscapes.1 The title refers to the memorandum presented by US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., to US President Roosevelt in September 1944, suggesting the postwar dismantling of German heavy industry, the country’s division into demilitarised zones, the annexing of the industrial centres of the Ruhr, Saar area and Upper Silesia by neighbouring states, and the reduction of Germany to an agricultural and pastoral economy
This paper proposes a way of looking at these images that bypasses critical approaches that concentrate on trauma, memory and debates about victimhood, which in this case seem to lead us to a dead end
The most significant historical effect of the Plan was a gift for Goebbels, whose propagandistic interpretation still resonates amongst German nationalists, who continue to connect very real German memories of post-war starvation, expulsions and epidemics with the plan and its Jewish author

Summary

Peter Davies

Anselm Kiefer’s 2012 exhibition, Der Morgenthau-Plan, courted controversy with its seeming willingness to equate Allied planning for post-Second World War Germany with the Nazi genocide. This paper proposes a way of looking at these images that bypasses critical approaches that concentrate on trauma, memory and debates about victimhood, which in this case seem to lead us to a dead end. Instead, it sets Kiefer’s Morgenthau paintings in the context of some remarkably similar works inspired by the medieval lyric under der linden an der heide by Walther von der Vogelweide. I take a detour via a reading of Walther’s complex and self-reflexive text as a meditation on how conventions of representation both bear witness to and efface their object, and on how play with taboos on representation can be a source of erotic pleasure for those in the know. Kiefer shows how an understanding of and engagement with the taboos of Holocaust representation – a viewer’s status as theoretically informed discourse insider – can itself be a source of a pleasure that potentially effaces historical reality while claiming to bear witness to it

Introduction

Conclusion