Why I Love Kiefer's "Occupations"

It was provocative. It was forbidden. It was poignant and well thought-out.

It was great art.

I'm speaking of course about Anselm Kiefer's piece "Occupations," in which he tackled the post-Holocaust censorship in his native country of Germany.

The photos, some of which shown here were taken in the late 1960s, were not seen by the public until 1975.

The Holocaust was one of the most horrifying events in human history, without doubt. A mass of people had been rallied behind a psychotic leader to execute millions. 

In its wake, the emotional turmoil and recovery of Germany and its people is, frankly, unimaginable. 

But Kiefer saw one thing he disagreed with.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the nation of Germany outlawed the sieg heil salute. They wanted no vestiges of Nazism left in their country to exist, or worse- grow again.

Stamp it out, and keep it out. 

And most of us, knowing what we know about the Holocaust, can totally understand that human reaction.

But while a young Kiefer was quick to admit that the Holocaust was, indeed, the embodiment of horror, he saw outlawing and banning the famous Nazi salute as a step in the wrong direction.

He argued, through the 18 black and white photos of "Occupations," that by censoring actions and banning them, it would be easy for the current population to forget, gloss over and allow the horrors of their own history to drift far back into their collective memory, so as to potentially disappear and remain dormant forever.

Human atrocity needs to be spoken about, he argued. It needs to be remembered and discussed, no matter how uncomfortable it may make us.

Like a drug addict who has been clean and then starts thinking "It wasn't that bad," and then relapses.

Hate is the drug of humanity that we must recover from.

We cannot minimize the horror of humanity's history through the anesthetizing effects of silence.

The horrors and prejudices and hate crimes of the past need to be spoken about, lest a new generation come along and learning nothing from the past they inherited but do not know, and end of repeating them.

In "Occupations," he embodied the adage: Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.

Nothing is too horrifying to censor, he argued. No conversation around history should be censored. We are not protecting people from anything- after all, it was people who made the Holocaust possible. 

And, more optimistically, people who brought it to an end.

But censorship is, in its essence, controlling information, and thus, controlling a people.

We do not need to be censored from learning about what we, ourselves, are capable of. We need to be educated. We need to stand on the ready, with full knowledge, to squash any semblance of hate that may arise within each one of us. If we don't know where hate has led people in the past, it's easy to excuse away small acts of our own hatred today.

Only when armed with the full truth about what we, humans, are capable of can we rightly head off the negative forces that exist in each individual and in each nation's collective consciousness.

A nation that knows not its own history is simply a group of fools heading toward their next catastrophe.

Let us be brave enough to never censor the past. Because by censoring it in any way, and in even the smallest of forms, we prevent humanity from learning from it. We, also, tacitly permit another future generation to repeat it, simply because we think that censorship makes for a cleaner system of operating in the present. 

Censorship is a clean solution. It's still a popular solution. But it's a selfish solution.

It prevents some problems for the current generations at the expense of future generations. (Not to mention the pure arrogance of censorship, in general...)

Let us face our problems head-on. Let us see the full truth and confront it. Let us be adults.

That is what Anselm Kiefer argues in this piece. And that is why it is mind-bendingly great art.

Interestingly enough, nobody, except one lone professor of his, liked the work. They thought it was appalling. They thought it was crass. They thought it was juvenile and stupid and needless and senseless and hurtful.

But one professor saw its pure genius.

There are many other dynamics and messagings that Kiefer expresses through "Occupations," but his dialogue in it of censorship is the one that jumps out most to me, especially in the current time in American history which we find ourselves in.

TRISHA WILES