There is an undeniably tragic dimension to central motives of postwar German painting, particularly in the works of Anselm Kiefer. The imagery of devastated landscapes, charred fields and forests, empty attics and bunkers, flames, and ashen skies in Kiefer’s paintings evoke the devastation wreaked by Germany during the Second World War and by National Socialism. References to the poetry of Paul Celan and a lost Judaic heritage render such scenes extraordinarily haunting. The use of such materials as ash, lead, burnt canvas, human hair, and straw contribute to both the material innovation and the provocative nature of these works. Invoking Goethe, Wagner, Hölderlin, and other significant representatives of German culture, Kiefer renders this tragic dimension a particularly German one, revisiting these figures in light of the central disaster of the twentieth century. Melancholic and darkly distorting works by other painters of his generation, for instance Georg Baselitz, may also be associated with tragic history.

Yet it is not clear which aesthetics of tragedy may be most adequate or appropriate for approaching and assessing these works. Tragedy hosts a range of resonant associations with the sublime, with the notion of fate, with the poetics of sacrifice, concepts recurrent in modern German thought from Kant to Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Walter Benjamin, too, theorizes a poetics of mourning and a poetics of melancholy to contrast classical tragedy and tragic drama of the German baroque. In this context, the concept of tragedy may resonate in heroic and violent terms, or serve as an index of the unrepresentable, of immeasurable rupture and incalculable loss.

A differentiation of the tragic, proposed in this essay, may reflect this conceptual complex and its rich history. Central issues that may arise include to what extent a tragic aesthetic can be adapted to the theme of historical disaster in the postwar context; in what ways such disaster may remain outside the grasp of any aesthetic expression or reflection; and how this evasiveness or ineffability of the subject-matter is reflected in artistic works and their respective media. Friedrich Hölderlin advances the notion that at the pinnacle of tragedy, signification is nullified. As he puts it, the sign “= 0.” If this is so of tragic poetic language, in what ways must painting overcome the limits of representation in order to indicate the Holocaust as its theme? The Holocaust, in its totality, cannot be fully depicted.