Anselm Kiefer, Morgenthau Plan

In 1944, U.S. Treasure Secretary Henry Morgenthau proposed that after the war Germany be divided into at least two countries, with key industrial cities lopped off and given to their neighbors. The remainder would be de-industrialized and turned into an agricultural backwater. Many high officials in Britain and Russia had similar fantasies. But what came after the war ended was the Cold War, and both the Americans and the Soviets rearmed their parts of Germany and promoted the rebuilding of industry, so as to have allies in the bigger struggle then consuming them.

German artist Anselm Kiefer has christened his latest exhibit The Morgenthau Plan. What this means seems to be unclear. Kiefer has spent much of his career trying to get his fellow Germans to think about Nazism and their part in it, and his works are full of Holocaust references. He is also, like many on the European left, skeptical of the whole apparatus of industrial civilization. So what are we to make of these (for Kiefer anyway) Arcadian images? Returning to a technique he used early in his career, Kiefer painted these directly onto photographs of fields near his studio in the south of France.

Is he implying that Germans might have been better off under the Morgenthau Plan, or at least suggesting the possibility? On the other hand, one is titled, Let a Thousand Flowers Boom, a quotation from Mao that Kiefer must be using ironically. Does that mean the Morgenthau plan was a trap, like Mao's proclamation, which he used only to sniff out dissidents? Or is Kiefer just playing with the fantastic notion of our returning to the land, with the Morgenthau Plan reference tossed in mainly to put people in a serious frame of mind? After all, many people really did intend to do this to Germany, however unrealistically.

Whatever the intent, I find these remarkable.