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Margarethe

Oil and straw on canvas (1981) by Anselm Kiefer. Depicts a field of golden straw and hair in broad horizontal bands of gold and brown. Responds to Paul Celan's Holocaust poem 'Death Fugue' (Todesfuge, 1945), in which 'golden-haired Margarethe' and 'ashen-haired Shulamith' represent German and Jewish womanhood, and life and death, respectively.

Scholarly Significance

Kiefer's Margarethe (1981) is one of the two paintings responding to Paul Celan's 'Death Fugue.' The golden straw landscape represents Margarethe — the German woman of the poem — and Germany's pastoral mythology, shadowed by the Holocaust.

Notes

  • ·The poem 'Todesfuge' (Death Fugue) by Paul Celan (1945, published 1947) is among the most significant Holocaust-era poems; Celan, a Romanian-born Jewish poet, lost his parents in the Nazi extermination camps.
  • ·The poem's refrain — 'dein goldenes Haar Margarete / dein aschenes Haar Sulamith' (your golden hair Margarethe / your ashen hair Shulamith) — links German pastoral mythology to the Holocaust.
  • ·Kiefer's Margarethe uses actual straw attached to the painted canvas surface, making the material the subject.
  • ·The companion work Shulamite (1983) depicts a windowless, scorched building interior with the wall text of Celan's names.
  • ·Kiefer has produced many versions of this subject across his career; the 1981 work is the most cited.
  • ·The works were deeply controversial in Germany: Kiefer was accused both of aestheticizing the Holocaust and of confronting it more directly than any other German artist of his generation.
  • ·The 1984–85 traveling exhibition 'Anselm Kiefer' at the AIC, SFMOMA, and other venues introduced these works to the US.