Creativity Quote by Anselm Kiefer

A taboo doesn’t just silence a topic; it reorganizes a whole society’s emotional architecture around avoidance. Kiefer’s memory lands with that blunt, domestic detail - “no more in my house than anywhere else” - because it implicates the living room, not just the state. Postwar West Germany didn’t merely “move on”; it curated a forward-facing identity built on economic recovery and selective amnesia, leaving the Nazi era to sit like an unmarked grave beneath ordinary life. His phrasing captures how collective repression becomes intimate habit: the family reproduces the public script, and the public script hides behind family decorum.

The intent isn’t confessional so much as diagnostic. Kiefer is explaining why his later work had to be abrasive, why it couldn’t be polite. If the Nazi past was unspeakable, then making art about it becomes a kind of forced speech act - a refusal to let history remain abstract, filed away as “then.” The subtext is generational: born in 1945, he belongs to those raised amid ruins and denials, expected to inherit a cleansed narrative without asking who built it. Interest itself becomes transgressive; curiosity is treated like contamination.

There’s also a quiet accusation embedded in “anymore.” It hints at earlier talk that ended, abruptly, when talking carried consequences - legal, social, psychological. Kiefer’s line maps the origin story of a career: not fascination with fascism, but outrage at the enforced quiet that lets it metastasize into myth.