Representing the unrepresentable in Anselm Kiefer's 'Sulamith

Anselm Kiefer's monumental painting Sulamith is the culmination of his controversial Holocaust-themed paintings which signify both the European Jewish victims and the Nazi perpetrators of World War II. Scholars have been divided on the meaning of Kiefer's memory images and whether they function to memorialize the victims or romanticize the Nazi past. This paper examines the function of Sulamith as a Mahnmal , a new type of memorial developed in the mid-twentieth century to admonish the perpetrators and warn future generations never to repeat the horrific past. Kiefer's work responds to postwar ethical and aesthetic challenges, as posed by Theodor W. Adorno, to find new forms of representation to bring the past to public consciousness. Kiefer's essential method is to build upon traces left behind, and reinvigorate them with imagery from Germanic cultural history to construct a newly reinforced trace empowered to evoke memory of the traumatic events.