Abstract
The West German student movements, the student generation of Anselm Kiefer, were a part of the West German awakening as to their collective guilt for the atrocities committed in the Second World War – the Germans-as-perpetrators debate. They entered this debate with a proclamation of innocence, which Anselm Kiefer did not share. In this article I use the empirical lens of biography and the artistic performances of moral self-incrimination in order to understand the collective moral dilemmas posited by the West German students’ proclamation of innocence, their position to maintain a moral high ground in their struggle. Kiefer provoked the German Left by recovering the horror of the Holocaust that the Germans in the post-war period (the 1968 students included) mostly wanted just to go away. Movement artist scholars not only challenge the wider society with their truth-claims, they challenge the movement itself, extending the cognitive boundaries for what can be acknowledged at a given moment in the movement’s history.
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