Simon Schama in his magisterial opus Landscape and Memory describes Kiefer as an exorcist intent on tracking down the ogres of myth that from time long past appear to connect the German landscape with militant nationalism and its recent ignominious history. Certainly the current exhibition, despite showing recent works that testify to Kiefer’s concern with a far wider remit, is dominated by the painter’s attempts to confront and understand Germany’s troubled past. Born in March 1945 when the allies were reducing town and country to rubble and ashes, he was brought up in the time of Adenauer’s economic miracle which effectively entombed the all too recent Nazi past in order not to remember its fascist legacy.

These were the years of the Stunde Nul, Ground Zero, when post–war art retreated into abstraction for fear of facing the remembered horror, a voluntary collective amnesia which Kiefer, having given up his law studies to study art in Freiburg, took it upon himself to challenge by taking a series of photographs of himself, sometimes clad in his father’s military uniform, making the forbidden Nazi Sieg Heil salute. In Occupations, Kiefer positions himself facing the horizon or against a famous European monument such as the Roman Coliseum. One photo based on Caspar David Friedrich’s Traveller Looking over a Sea of Fog strongly suggests a cultural matrix between the German Romantic tradition and what was to form the psychological underpinnings of the Nazi mentality. It was this mentality that Kiefer was intent on examining from the inside, so to speak, specifically focusing on its interconnection with a native German identity whose family tree, rooted in the Teutonic forests, was to give rise over the centuries to a pantheon of German spiritual and cultural heroes. Kiefer depicts these as flawed heroes, the consequences of their greatness often skirting disaster, so it is no accident that in his series of woodcuts Paths of Wisdom of the World, Hermann’s Battle the poet Hölderlin and the enlightenment philosopher Kant are placed alongside a cultural mythmaker such as Fichte and the armament maker Krupps. The fact too that Kiefer chooses as his medium woodcut prints based on existing portraits and photos, the printing technique most associated with German identity, is not merely circumstantial. Occupations then constitutes Kiefer’s first attempt to ask the taboo question of whether a Nazi mind-set was not already inscribed in Germany’s mythical and cultural past, which has as its logical corollary that Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich was not just some historical aberration. Kiefer repeatedly used this pantheon of flawed spiritual heroes to pose the prohibited question and challenge the German people’s amnesia. Their names appear in Varus and in Germany’s Spiritual Heroes 1973, where suggestively the torches in their honour in the sombre timber hall are in danger of setting it alight. An early painting, Man in the Forest 1971, deals with the same theme, depicting the artist in the garb of a Norse god (or a night shirt suggesting dream material) holding aloft a burning branch that could either light the way through the dense forest or, conversely, burn it down. That is the core of the existential dilemma Kiefer finds himself dealing with and for which art making represents an act of confrontation and overcoming. The next step would be to set alight his actual paintings as he does in his book The Burning of the Rural District of Buchen in which photographed landscapes of fields are gradually transformed into pitch black monochromes as artistic violence is turned against suspect aspects of himself. The element of fire figures prominently in Kiefer’s art practice and is often aligned with his interest in alchemy and the use of lead as a basic transformative material. A whole cluster of his ideas revolves around alchemy: ascent or descent, heaven and earth, melancholia and mourning. Alchemy was to be the theme of his breakthrough exhibition at the 1980 Venice Biennale.