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Margarete, the blond personification of ideal German womanhood, and Shulamite, the cremated Jewess who is also the archetypal Beloved of the Song of Solomon, interweave in Kiefer's work in a haunting and oblique way. Margarete's presence is signaled, like a motif in music, by long wisps of golden straw, while Shulamite's emblem is charred substance and black shadow. Hence Kiefer's tragic image of Shulamite, 1983: a Piranesian perspective of a squat, fire-blackened crypt, the paint laid thick in an effort to convey the ruggedness of the masonry, whose architectural source (as Mark Rosenthal points out in his astute introduction to the difficulties of Kiefer's work) was a Nazi "Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers" built in Berlin in 1939. At the end of this claustrophobic dungeon-temple is a small fire on a raised altar, the Holocaust itself.
Not all of Kiefer's allegories work with such clarity. When he felt the urge to be didactic ten or so years ago, he could be remarkably opaque. Ways of Worldly Wisdom, 1976-77, attempts to create a whole genealogy of German nationalism starting with Arminius, who in A.D. 9 wrecked Augustus Caesar's policy of German occupation by destroying three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. As a primal hero of German history, Arminius was a great Nazi favorite, but here Kiefer conflates him with awkward portraits of all manner of later German "descendants" like Blucher, who fought against Napoleon; Schlieffen, whose strategy for the westward conquest of Europe was the basis of Hitler's blitzkrieg; writers from Klopstock to Rilke, and so on. Lines signifying affiliation, as in a family tree (a whole family forest, in fact, this Teutoburg), ramble slackly between some of the characters. Pictorially, the result is a shambles, and one needs an instruction manual to decipher it.
Where Kiefer rises to greatness is in his simpler and less conceptually turgid images like The Book, 1979-85, and Osiris and Isis, 1985-87. The former takes as its point of departure one of the canonical images of German Romanticism, Friedrich's Monk by the Sea, 1808 -- a tiny figure contemplating infinity, culture lost before the magnitude of nature. In Kiefer's painting this is almost reversed; the main motif is a lead book without writing, its silvery pages full of light and as big as a medieval hymnal, an object as imposing as the seascape behind it. Is this the Book of Creation? Of Revelation? The unnamable form of God?
Even more impressive is Osiris and Isis. According to Egyptian mythology, the god Osiris was murdered and dismembered by his brother Set. All the parts of his body except the penis were then reassembled for burial by his sister- wife Isis, so that he could have eternal life. An immense liturgy of transformation grew from this myth, and Kiefer uses it to connect primal fertility rites to the no less awful mysteries of nuclear technology. The painting is filled by a gigantic step-pyramid, the site of Osiris' burial but also, by implication, a nuclear reactor. Osiris' body parts are ceramic fragments scattered at the base, each wired by bright copper cable to his ka, or soul, at the summit of the mastaba, represented by a circuit board. Death and integration: fission and fusion. Through such metaphors, Kiefer sets forth images charged with warning and suffused with hope.