Original subtitles

The Women of Antiquity

Octavia, Poppaea, Julia Maesa...

We may be the nameless and forgotten ones,

but we don't forget a thing.

Uriel...

Gabriel and...

Raphael.

And there is Michael.

♪ Ladybird fly home ♪

♪ Your father is at war ♪

♪ Your mother is in Pomerania ♪

♪ Pomerania has all burnt down ♪

♪ So sleep, baby, sleep ♪

BAD CHILDREN'S CELL

For P.C. and M.H.

Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger.

Templum,

that means: language

the House of Being.

I spilled the night out of a pot,

it wasn't night in there enough

for Paul Celan

'Wolf's-bean' by Paul Celan

You flowers of Germany,

oh, my heart becomes crystal incorruptible,

in which light tests itself.

Lock the door. There are roses in the house.

There are seven roses in the house.

In the Ukraine,

where they murdered my father and mother:

what flowers were there?

What flower, Mother,

hurt you there with its name?

You, Mother, who said 'wolf's-bean, '

not 'lupine.'

Mother, whose hand did I clasp

as I went with your words to Germany?

Mother, murderers live there.

Mother, they're silent.

Mother, they're writing poems.

Mother,

no one silences the murderers!

How difficult it must have been for Paul Celan,

a Jewish poet, to have to write in the German language!

After all, both mother and father fell victim to the Holocaust.

Death-Fugue

Black milk of dawn we drink you evenings

we drink you at noon and on mornings we drink you at night

we drink and we drink

we dig a grave in the winds

where one lies at ease

A man lives in the house

who plays with the snakes who writes

who writes when it darkens to Germany

your golden hair Margarete

he writes it and steps in front of his house

and the stars glisten

and he whistles his dogs to come

he whistles his jews to appear lets a grave be dug in the earth

He shouts stab deeper into the earth you there

you others play on for the dance

he grabs the gun in his belt

he draws it his eyes are blue

stab deeper your spades there you others play on for the dance

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night

we drink you at noon and on mornings, we drink you evenings

we drink you and drink

a man lives in the house

your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Shulamit he plays with the snakes

He calls out play death more sweetly

death is a master from Germany

he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly

then as smoke you'll rise in the air

then you'll have a grave in the clouds there one lies at ease

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night

we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany

we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and we drink

death is a master from Deutschland

his eye is blue

he strikes you with lead bullets

his aim is true

a man lives in the house

your golden hair Margarete

he sets his dogs on us

he gifts us a grave in the air

he plays with the snakes and he dreams

death is a master from Germany

your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Shulamit

This is the Martin Heidegger book.

Here you see

the brain of Martin Heidegger

in my attic in Hornbach,

and these are all poisonous mushrooms

which then cause a cancer

to grow in the brain.

Now there is already a slight darkening,

and here you see

how the cancer is spreading.

It becomes bigger,

almost taking over half the brain.

And now the cancer is all over.

Heidegger, I could have even met in person,

when I was studying in Freiburg.

He taught there at the same time.

Paul Celan met with him once,

in the mid-'60s,

in his remote cabin in the Black Forest.

What did he expect from the visit

with the German thinker?

Some explanation of his Nazi past?

Into the guest book, Celan wrote:

In the cabin book,

with a view of the fountain star

and a hope in the heart for a word to come

25 July 1967.

But such a word never came.

Nothing but silence from the great philosopher.

Nothing about his errors.

The whole of society was silent then,

all failed to grasp the unimaginable.

I myself lived among people

who had all been around

and didn't want to talk about it.

Okay, okay, okay.

Now we try this one.

Let's take off the fern, the big one at least.

This one we bring to the front.

Ludwig, across like that.

Wiesław, alcohol...

Okay, good.

Careful.

At the bottom!

SKY... PAINTING... EARTH

Dear Josef Beuys,

Thank you for your quick reply to my letter.

I'm glad you agreed to look at my paintings.

I'll soon be on my way

from the Odenwald

to you in Düsseldorf...

Joseph Beuys, at the Düsseldorf Academy,

had many subsequently successful students.

As early as 1972, he wanted to save the forest with them.

Here, with the young Anselm Kiefer,

whom he quickly made a master student.

Mr. Kiefer, you live deep in the Odenwald,

far from the hectic pace of everyday life.

Is this a better way to work, a kind of retreat?

I live here because I need the landscape for my work.

I work with the landscape.

Of course, it's also beneficial that it's peaceful here,

and that I have few disruptions.

I can occupy a big house

which would be more difficult in the city.

As a young artist, Anselm Kiefer prodded incessantly

at the open wound of German history.

His paintings are covered with references to mythical German heroes:

Siegfried, Hermann, Parzival.

Blood-soaked legends of the deep past.

These are the same heroes around whom the Nazis built a cult.

This made critics uneasy

and led to outrage when he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale,

with some accusing him of fascism.

At the Biennale Anselm Kiefer is representing

the artistic position of the FRG.

This choice is a big misunderstanding.

The museum director maybe thought

he had found another 'Neue Wilde, '

as the German neo-expressionists are called.

But with his history slander, that isn't what Anselm Kiefer is.

At most he is a new reactionary.

'Ways of World Wisdom' is written on a giant woodcut.

And what are these ways called?

Kiefer's German nationalist answer: 'The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.'

Grabbe is surely not suspected

to be a German nationalist or a chauvinist.

Yes, but the subject was so strongly

- utilized by the Nazis... - Yes, totally abused.

But that's just why, because I was born in 1945,

I have the chance to take up this subject again.

There's no use in suppressing it, just because the Nazis abused it.

I brought up the problem of abusing the poets and artists.

They abused Hölderlin, for example.

He made a lot of poems about fatherland

and his fatherland was in Greece.

But the Nazis used it as a patriotic song.

When a painting provokes a response,

and people say, "This man is a neo-fascist..."

I don't say, "Fine."

I feel injured.

That's clear.

But I don't go in front of my painting

and I'm not saying I'm an anti-fascist.

Because if you say you are an anti-fascist,

- it's an Beleidigung. - Yes, it's an insult.

It's an insult for the real anti-fascists who was in this time.

See? There's the studio.

- It looks like a factory. - Yeah, it is a factory. It's, uh...

Amazing big. But he's also producing a lot of works.

So a lot of paintings, sculptures, and he needs this space.

It's not a real library because, uh...

Has much more knowledge, much more pictures of the world than this library.

So it's a small, simple form.

Uh, literally, in this, uh, library is the surface of the world.

- To air out the skin of the world. - -The skin?

Because in most of the books

are photographs that I took from the aircraft.

Over Poland, over New Zealand, over Greenland, and so on.

So the idea was to photograph the skin of the Earth.

And then to put it into books.

And then you have it for the next, uh, 2000 years.

Whatever happened... happened.

The leather, it's very heavy, from one side.

But it looks very light, it looks very--

If the wind were to move the leaves a little bit.

I heard the wind was bringing them. You didn't?

POPPY AND MEMORY

This is beautiful, Ludwig! It's getting there!

BED MEMORY

Stop.

Herr Kiefer, a little lower?

Lower, so it doesn't splash so much.

But I want it to splash, at first.

America has a new superstar: Anselm Kiefer.

The start of his retrospective in Chicago

was celebrated as the art event of the year.

An international Kiefer symposium

simply added to the success in Los Angeles.

The MoMA in New York

will now bestow the greatest honours.

85 paintings, books and drawings are included in the show.

'Palette with Wings, ' 1985,

a symbol of liberation

alluding to the Greek figure of Icarus, and Wieland the Smith,

the dangerous mage of Norwegian legend.

A hall of honour modelled on prominent Nazi architecture

such as the Reich Chancellery by Albert Speer.

While Kiefer pushes a painful boundary for his fellow Germans,

foreigners welcome him as a bold taboo breaker.

It seems as if the German nation has trouble dealing

with an artist who wants to grapple with the past of Germany,

wants to use his work as a place

to grapple with the past of Germany.

It is perhaps easier to completely

surrender to the spell of his art,

than to observe it with detachment.

With Kiefer, in a most shocking way, landscape painting is possible again.

"You can't just paint a landscape when tanks have driven through it", he says.

Kiefer's first flush of success came in the 1980s.

And he used the money to buy and renovate

an old brick factory in Buchen, Germany.

Here, he expanded into sculpture and installation.

He began to create a world for himself.

We are now in the hall where...

the mud was stored.

Yes, and it's quite chaotic.

So it's like mountains and that's...

It's without, uh, structure in a way.

But it's bordered by these, uh, walls.

And, um...

When the cause is bordered by rectangle border,

then it becomes a painting.

Now!

I remember, almost 20 years ago,

I was disturbed

by a performance which you called 'Occupations.'

You performed the Nazi salute on European sites.

What was that about? Was it just a provocation?

BETWEEN SUMMER AND AUTUMN 1969,

I OCCUPIED SWITZERLAND, FRANCE AND ITALY.

A FEW PHOTOS:

It wasn't a provocation, at least it wasn't meant to be.

Not a provocation just for the sake of it.

I did what I thought was absolutely necessary at the time.

In hindsight, I think this act was very important.

It was during a time, 1968/69,

when the whole subject of World War II,

fascism, the Third-Reich was not addressed at all.

In school, we had it for three weeks and that was it.

At this time, it was very important

to bring this all back into memory and work on it.

I held a mirror up to everyone's face.

The "Sieg heil" salute had been banned in Germany since 1945.

Dressing up in his father's Wehrmacht uniform

and performing it for a camera

was Kiefer's protest against forgetting.

If people say, "Oh, who has made that? Is this a neo-Nazi?"

Then, um...

Then I say nothing because...

I go back to a earlier time...

in which time I don't know what I was.

And then, it's not clear what I was

in '30 or in '39.

It's not clear what I would have done.

Most of the intellectuals, they don't ask this question.

"The Argonauts were the most famous Greek heroes.

Jason called them together

to accompany him on his great journey.

To do so, he had the fastest boat built

to ever sail the seas:

The Argos, equipped with 50 oars.

With this ship and his friends' help

he wanted to bring the 'Golden Fleece' back home from the end of the world.

Like a god, Jason strode across the field of Ares,

took the dragon's teeth from his helmet

and sowed them in the furrows.

And the Argonauts watched from the end of the field

as behind Jason

a whole army of warriors arose from the ground."

Art and mythology

are different forms of recognition.

Myth provides answers to the questions

of where we come from, where we are going,

what we are.

You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Over your cities grass will grow.

The greatest myth is the human race itself.

Lilith...

has always preoccupied me.

In Jewish mythology, she was Adam's first wife,

like Adam, created from the dust of the earth.

She felt equal to him and did not see

why she should be inferior to him,

or lie beneath him.

The first marriage dispute

was already a myth.

Lilith has been demonized ever since.

She's said to have fled from the Garden of Eden,

a restless demon of vengeance,

threatening women in childbirth.

She's said to rob men of their semen,

in order to conceive her demonic children.

Nothing but horror stories from men,

trying to discredit her...

To some like a winged demon of war and destruction,

to others, the patron goddess of a world

from which the sacred has retreated.

Lilith lives in burned-down ruins.

So and you know these ruins after the war.

It was a perfect place for Lilith.

She was looking for that, for a long time.

Petrified fighter planes

exhibited at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie

are among Kiefer's most striking works.

Frighteningly relevant at the time of the second Gulf War in 1990/91.

The history or the wars that are happening nowadays,

are impossible to understand by rational means.

Such absurd and impossible things happen there,

no one can grasp them with pure logic or reason.

The Nationalgalerie in Berlin,

has opened one of this season's most stunning exhibitions with Kiefer.

On his latest trip to America, Kiefer was distinguished as

'most important contemporary artist.'

The world Kiefer shows isn't perfect

with its morbid landscapes and environments.

A master of subtle irritation.

He produces large format myths.

You were accused of your way of dealing with history,

now you are accused of escaping into myth.

How do you feel about this contradiction?

There's no such thing as 'escaping into the myth.'

Because the myth is present.

Myths represent another way of understanding history,

beyond the simply rational.

In 1992, Kiefer moved his studio to Barjac in the south of France.

Without the help of architects or engineers,

Kiefer and his assistants have turned this 200-acre site

into one of the most dazzling, jaw-dropping works of art in the world.

SECRETS OF THE FERN

Everyone who falls has wings.

The Morgenthau Plan

Anselm, time's up!

Thank you, Auntie Jung.

With pencil and sketchbook, but most of all with good ideas,

Anselm Kiefer from Rastatt has received an important award:

the Jean Walter Prize.

It is the first time for a German graduate to receive it.

Anselm Kiefer wanted to follow the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh

Starting in the Dutch city of Arnheim.

Anselm Kiefer suggested this study trip

to CIS, the school organization.

Many send applications, only a few are accepted.

Anselm Kiefer was among them.

He followed van Gogh's life

to Arles in the south of France.

Since 1962 Rastatt High School

is part of the organization CIS

and could therefore present its first applicant, Anselm Kiefer,

who carried out this journey in the summer of 1963,

and has now, for being the best central European applicant,

received the Jean Walter Prize.

Anselm Kiefer returned with over 300 drawings.

These show his painterly talent.

People search for lightness, because they shy away from burdens,

the abyss.

Fundamentally, they don't want to see it.

That's why this lightness exists.

If you take a look at the entire history of the world,

the geological, cosmological history,

then what we are is not even a drop in the rain.

We're less than a drop, we are an atom.

Then you can obviously say: 'We are very light.'

The unbearable lightness of being...

Being is an absolute part of Nothing.

Or you could also say that Nothing is part of Being.

They are tied together,

there is always a simultaneity, no chronology.

That's reassuring, of course, because if you plan something big,

then you know that failure is already part of it.

A dead person am I,

who wanders

no longer registered

anywhere.

Unknown in the prefect's realm,

superfluous in the golden cities and the verdant country,

dismissed long ago

and bequeathed nothing

but wind,

and time and sound.

I, who cannot live among people.

I, with the German language.

This cloud around me which I keep as my house,

drift through all languages.

Oh, how it darkens,

those dark ones,

those rain sounds

only a few fall

In brighter zones

it then carries the dead up.

I don't feel like I have arrived at all.

Actually, I still feel

...banished.

Banished, and...

not really on the run, but always on the way.

I can't stop it.

At the long tables of time

the tankards of God are carousing...

"At the long tables of time

the tankards of God are carousing...

They guzzle the eyes of the seeing

and the eyes of the blind,

the hearts of the ruling shadows,

the hollow cheek of evening.

They are the mightiest of boozers:

they raise to their lips the empty as well as the full

and don't spill over like you

or I."

Childhood is an empty space

like the beginning of the world.