Anselm Kiefer et la poésie de Paul Celan 

For decades, Anselm Kiefer (born in 1945) has been obsessed by the memory of Nazism and its horrors, that he has tried to exorcise through a very material painting, allying sand, dry flowers, straw, sunflower grains, ashes, burnt sticks or bronze books… A native from Donaueschingen, a region marked by the Germanic myth of the Nibelungen, Kiefer is constatnly trying to understand the unspeakable. Paul Celan the poet lost all of his family in the camps and committed suicide by jumping off the Mirabeau bridge in Paris. His poems served him for a long time as a vital lead in this search. The book develops a close analysis of this relationship between the written word and artistic creation, in a language that is sometimes hard. The work was awarded the Artcurial prize of the contemporary art book.

• Anselm Kiefer and Paul Celan’s poetry, by Andréa Lauterwein, du Regard publishing house, 2006, ISBN : 2-84105-159-5, 59 €