But his focus on empty spaces and decay also has greater reach. It suggests nameless hubristic cultures razed from the earth time and again. His preoccupation is with life passing over things, as Sophie Fiennes unnervingly showed in her film And Over Your Cities Grass Shall Grow.
In this he seems to have found inspiration not only in German history but in two other sources. One was the painting of van Gogh and the other was the philosophy of Heidegger.
I’ve been writing about this recently in A Shoe Story Van Gogh, the Philosophers and the West.
When he was eighteen Kiefer won a scholarship to go and study van Gogh’s art in its own places. (See Chapter 14: ‘A Counterpath: Reading Derrida and Being Happy in Amsterdam’).
Van Gogh is well-known to art historians for the way he raided the rubbish site. Scraps of iron, bent wire, dead flowers: he loved these tokens of used-up life, and sand and dust getting mixed up in his paint. One can imagine a morally passionate twentieth-century artist learnt a lesson there.