Those who regard Anselm Kiefer as the greatest living artist will see enough proof in his Amsterdam show. Those who find his work journalistic, too full of moralising comment about real events, won’t change their minds either. The title of the exhibition comes from an anti-war song, after all. There are burnt-out uniforms and the Nazi references that he has used for much of his career. “We have a situation now like in 1933 in Germany,” he has said, alluding to contemporary populism.
Do we? Eighty years have passed since the end of the second world war (and Kiefer’s birth). He is far from alone in using the moment to warn about that past repeating itself. This trope never goes away. If only it would.
The 1930s are an almost useless guide to what is happening now. The strongmen back then came out of an era of scarcely precedented chaos: the great war, hyperinflation, political gangs fighting for control of the streets. Today’s demagogues emerged in a period of sustained peace and affluence. It was more or less the richest nation on Earth that elected Donald Trump in 2016, after decades of falling violent crime, and more than 40 years since its last conscript war. The Britain that voted to leave the European project had far more industrial peace and international standing than the one that first joined. As for Germany, the far right’s voting base maps almost perfectly on to the old East, which is unrecognisably richer and freer than it was at reunification.