The major visual artists of post-war Germany have spent their careers working in the rubble of their culture’s catastrophe. Whether they are celebrated because they tackle it, or tackle it in order to be celebrated, it is noticeable that Germany’s most renowned artists remain immersed in that disaster. The career of Gerhard Richter for instance, born in 1932, really began in the 1960s with a series of oils on canvas repainted from photographs. Some were easier to begin to interpret than others. Among the most obvious and famous is the haunting painting from a photograph of a slightly lopsided man in an ill-fitting Nazi uniform titled Uncle Rudi (1965). Others were clearly of equally ominous subject matter even when the viewer didn’t know precisely what that subject was. Herr Heyde (1965) only shows an oldish man heading into a building with a policeman beside him. But even if we knew nothing of the names, we hardly need to be told that Werner Heyde was an SS doctor who was captured after nearly fifteen years on the run and hanged himself in prison. Others, such as Familie Liechti (1966), further blur the lines. Are we looking at a family of perpetrators or victims? They lived through those years. Something must have happened to them. Beyond the technical skill, Richter’s accomplishment is in capturing through these often marginal shots the fact that a pall hangs over everything from the era they depict and the era in which they were created. A layer of guilt and blame lies over the whole culture like a fog.6

The same goes for the work of Anselm Kiefer. Born thirteen years after Richter, in the year the Second World War ended, his work is even more obviously devoted to recording a great culture in the wreckage of its self-destruction. His vast Interior (1981), like Richter’s work of the 1960s, obviously records the horror. In this case the first-time viewer can probably guess, by the grandiosity of the room and the dilapidation of the image – the shattered look of the glass ceiling, the ripped walls in the grand hall – that this is a Nazi room. Further reading shows that it is in fact one of the offices in the New Reich Chancellery designed for Hitler by Albert Speer. But the sense that this is a grand vista (the painting is about nine square metres) of a room in which something terrible happened is as obvious as a guilty-looking man in a police line-up. More recent works like Ages of the World (2014) are also carefully created depictions of societal ruin. In that case, discarded canvas is piled on discarded canvas, amid rubble and twisted metal. It is as though after the catastrophe, little can be done with it other than to dwell on the fact that everything is ephemeral, everything can be destroyed, next to nothing can be saved.7