Politische Symbolik in der deutschen Kunst

This essay explores the adoption and adaptation of three motifs in German art (mainly painting) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the three, the swastika, is of obvious political significance, but the other two – trees and forests, and knights and armour – also have political as well as cultural resonance. The essay takes the tree/forest image from the religious and nationalist landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich to the environmental concerns of Joseph Beuys and the dark historical musings of Anselm Kiefer. The discussion of knights in armour touches upon early romantic imagery, studies by Adolph Menzel, the self-portraits of Lovis Corinth, and various reworkings of the theme in male and female versions from late nineteenth-century nationalist iconography to competing images from the Cold War, and the gendered work of Rosemarie Trockel. The swastika section deals with pre-National Socialist and National Socialist use of the symbol and then with the inclusion of swastika motifs – sometimes explicit, sometimes covert – in the work of artists from the GDR and the Federal Republic, including, for instance, Martin Kippenberger. The purpose of this iconographical study is to demonstrate thematic connections across the two centuries and to explore the complex and changing uses of standard symbolic types. At the forefront of the discussion is the way in which these standard types have been employed for political purposes in strikingly different ways. The source material is a wide range of original artworks and the art historical literature