Representation and Event: Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, and the Memory of the Holocaust

This essay explores the relationship between representation and event in the work of German artists Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys. It focuses on the ways in which Kiefer and Beuys engage with an evolving constellation of problems, discourses, and representational strategies that developed in West German culture and abroad in response to the events of genocide. The paradoxes of Holocaust representation, it is argued, reveal themselves in the conflict between the moral imperative to remember and the impossibility of representing a past that by its singularity, incomprehensibility, and horror evades clear representation.