Anselm Kiefer denies any direct influence from Heidegger. He even denouncesHeidegger in an interview, claiming,
I'm interested in Heidegger's ambivalence. I am not familiar with his books, but I know he was a Nazi. How is it that such a brilliant mind was taken in by the Nazis? How could Heidegger be so socially irresponsible? It is the same problem as with Celan: here is a wonderful writer who was arotten anti-Semite . . . I have shown Heidegger's brain with a mushroom-like tumor growing out of it to make the point .
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However, Kiefer is famous for creating his own ambivalent aura. He was quitefamiliar with Heidegger's work even as a young man. In an entry to his diary from 1963,when Kiefer was eighteen years old, he describes the seashore at Saintes Maries-de-la-Mer in the following way.
What would it be like traveling on a boat in the ocean and seeing this line all around wherever onelooks? It is therefore also nothingness. But not the nothingness of Heidegger, which he particularlycrosses out, but rather the existing nothingness. For this line is in reality no line but rather movement."
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It is evident from this passage that Kiefer had more than a layperson's grasp of Heidegger from a relatively early age.Kiefer increased his technological subject matter during the 1980's. His work isstrewn with images of tanks, fighter jets, electrical technologies, nuclear reactors andreactor cores, power transmission stations and the like. There are recurrent themes of war,apocalypse and nuclear catastrophe and more benign images of audio and videocommunications technologies interspersed with women's dresses and bits of organicmatter, especially clay and earth.Technology also appears in Kiefer's
technique
in a very