Creativity Quote by Anselm Kiefer

Home isn’t a flag in Anselm Kiefer’s line; it’s an interior architecture project, built out of ruins. When he says he wanted to "build the palace of my memory", he’s recasting an old idea (the mnemonic "memory palace") into something tactile, heavy, and morally charged. Kiefer isn’t talking about recalling grocery lists. He’s talking about constructing a place sturdy enough to hold what postwar Germany would rather misplace.

The subtext is a refusal of easy belonging. Born in 1945, Kiefer arrives after the catastrophe, into a nation busy renovating its image. In that context, "homeland" becomes suspect: too contaminated by nationalist fantasy, too eager to trade complexity for comfort. So he relocates citizenship to memory, with all the discomfort that implies. Memory, unlike territory, can’t be conquered into innocence. It keeps its stains.

The intent also tracks Kiefer’s artistic method: making history physical. His work famously uses lead, straw, ash, scorched books, monumental scale. Those materials behave like memory behaves: they corrode, they persist, they carry residue. Calling memory his "only homeland" isn’t sentimental; it’s defensive and defiant. If the external homeland is compromised - politically, ethically, mythically - the artist builds a private one that can’t be nationalized.

There’s a paradox that makes the line bite: a palace suggests grandeur and permanence, but memory is unstable, shifting, haunted by omission. Kiefer’s point is that you build anyway. Not to feel safe, but to stay accountable.