Anselm Kiefer Breaking of the Vessels: Doreet LeVitte-Harten

Anselm Kiefer had already employed kabbalistic methods in his works long before he knew anything about the Kabbalah. His entire approach to the artwork—with its wandering symbols and anagogies, his understanding of the role of the artist, and his sense of time, as it should be applied and projected from the created and remembered material, indeed the very state of fluctuation itself, which he wished to preserve in his works carefully and unconditionally—found a correspondence in the main themes of the Kabbalah.

In this Jewish mystical teaching, Kiefer discovered an ancient mirror for his own ideas, which, before encountering this system, had been formulated in other terms. The Kabbalah provided Kiefer with a more precise vocabulary. Ideas gained names and heroically defined their own territory. To call something by its proper name means to confer reality upon it—and what could be more important than granting reality to an appearance which, precisely because of its character, could not be mistaken for the thing itself?

The Kabbalah not only supplied him with concepts, it also furnished him with a repertoire of images and a systematized exegesis of their transformation, for those names and those images condensed an ancient patent. Nothing would be more misguided than to see in Kiefer an illustrator of kabbalistic images. He himself never assumed the role of interpreter, and he was not one even when he engaged with German themes or mythological events. What seems to arouse his curiosity is the capacity of the essences that arise from those themes—and that, thanks to their remnants and resonances, both transform and simultaneously retain their original meaning.

In this sense, the analogy between his ideas and the kabbalistic themes, the images, and the interest in the exotic is exceeded and reaches into the sphere of an identical worldview. This analogy does not function even on the overly simple background of alchemical tendencies, as various authors have suggested, since alchemy is the wrong label for the phenomenon of transmigration in Kiefer’s work. It is something deeper, for beneath the religious cloak of the Kabbalah lay an aesthetic system so complete and so consistent with Kiefer’s open aesthetics that their encounter seemed almost inevitable.

It is advisable at this point to say a few words about the Kabbalah, in order to explain its aesthetic character with regard to its presence in Anselm Kiefer’s works. The Kabbalah begins with 24 treatises written between the 2nd and 5th centuries, known as the Hechaloth (“Palaces”) and Merkabah (“Chariot-Throne”) literature. Most of the treatises deal with the act of creation as the effect of the twenty-two Hebrew letters and the first ten numbers, with national and personal magical formulas, while other treatises, interpreting the first chapter of Ezekiel, offer descriptions of the upper worlds as a chariot. But only five treatises can truly be considered mystical, for only they speak of the process by which the mystic acquires his knowledge when he ascends to the higher worlds—or, in the expression used there, descends. At this point, Kabbalah belongs to Gnosticism, since it already contains the notion of the higher worlds—the Pleroma, as a pluralistic realm of good and evil, male and female forces, an arena of power, but also the idea of the good God as the deus absconditus, the God who does not dwell in this world, the absent presence, the black hole.

At this stage of its development, Kabbalah corresponds to Kiefer’s ideas in general terms. For the articulation of the world, not as a marginal note to the image, but as a view of the world as a text—that is, the contemplation of the word as the ultimate image, while the pictorial surface is regarded as empty, as an impossible task—is an idea underlying many of Anselm Kiefer’s works. This explains the frequent appearance of words and sentences in them. Whereas the image is evoked from remnants, from the seepage of relics, the word endures over time and remains whole, enabling the fragments to enter into the process of transformation. The many books and libraries Kiefer has made are not only a testament to the power of the word, even though they function as images, but also the opposite, for they are not a homage to knowledge but closed chapters in the history of connection—and yet it is precisely from them that redemption will come.

If the early phase of Kabbalah fascinated Kiefer, then at a much later stage in its history the analogy moves beyond the metaphorical level and takes on significance as a second language. In the teachings of Isaac Luria, Kiefer found the constructions, if not the words, he had been searching for. Most of Kiefer’s works that refer to Kabbalistic themes go back to Lurianic Kabbalah, which made a vast departure from its origins—both from the early sources such as the fifth-century treatises and from later ones such as the Zohar of the 13th century, the holiest book of Kabbalah, written by Moses de Leon.

Isaac Luria was endowed with an immense spirit, whose imagination and scope equaled that of Milton or Dante. He was of the stuff of which messiahs are made, but his intelligence did not permit him false tactics. Nevertheless, he was able to give the Jews of his time, the 16th century, comfort and compassion to mitigate the traumatic suffering of their diasporic condition, which had worsened after the catastrophic events of 1492. Until then, Kabbalah had been reserved for the chosen few. But Luria widened its reach by explaining the Zohar in terms accessible to the entire people. By interpreting historical events in mythological terms, he gave them order and logic, thus transforming the diaspora into a doctrine with justification and making it bearable.

Luria had said that creation unfolded in three phases: at the beginning, God was En-Sof, without boundaries. In order to make room for creation, God limited Himself, contracted inward, entered into an inner exile. This is called the act of Zim-Zum, contraction. What remained was God’s light, the Pleroma, and from it emanated the first man, Adam Kadmon (not Adam Rishon, the biblical Adam), a kind of light-configuration, God’s first formation. From his nose, his eyes and ears, and his mouth streamed the light of the En-Sof. This became the light of the Sefiroth (singular: Sefira), God’s attributes, the matrix of the world, the letters from which it is made.

But it happened that the light which came from the eyes of Adam Kadmon was too strong for the vessels meant to contain it. Thus, the vessels of the six lower Sefiroth broke, and the divine light returned to its source, while only smaller portions remained behind, now mixed with the particles of evil. Evil, which before creation had been a part of God’s power, received in this process—called Shevirat ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessels—its own identity and manifested itself in the world.

The third phase, the restoration, or Tikkun, contains messianic elements. Luria’s restitution made every Jew a protagonist, for it was entrusted to him to return the world, through prayers and religious duties, to its state before the breaking. Luria did not end here, but further developed the theory of the faces—another configuration of God’s attributes—meaning that the potential of the Sefiroth undergoes a formative process. He also added the theory of Gilgul, the transmigration of souls, which bridges the time until the coming of the Messiah.

At this point, the similarity of Lurianic design to an aesthetic method becomes evident. Zim-Zum is the act of the artist, who contracts his psyche in order to make space for what is to be created. In order to create, the artist withdraws into himself, almost disappears, makes himself into a channel—the exact opposite of the idea of genius. The breaking of the vessels is the knowledge that what passes through this channel cannot be perfect, nothing akin to the Platonic hierarchy, while the restitution is the Sisyphean task of attempting it nonetheless. Kiefer is quite aware that whatever he creates can be nothing more than placing stones around the black hole in order to mark its boundaries. This knowledge makes it possible for him to engage with themes that would otherwise be untouchable. The image can therefore be defined in negative terms, by what is absent. Above all, however, it is an invocation, a magic, a road.

Roads and paths are present in Kiefer’s work on every level—as metaphors, as actual appearances, as words. Sometimes they are transformed into vehicles of movement such as airplanes or wings. They are the channels through which he sends Jason and Gilgamesh, Siegfried and Isis forward and backward in time. The immanent and abstract paths consist of a network of wind currents that traverse space and time. They are facets of emanation, and they find their most coherent expression in the idea of the Sefiroth.

There are ten Sefiroth, ten attributes of God. In some works they appear under their Hebrew names: the highest crown Kether Elyon, the idea of wisdom Chochma, his intelligence Bina, his love Chesed, his dread or punitive power Din, his mercy Tifereth, his enduring constancy Nezach, his majesty Chod, the foundation Jessod, and his facet as the archetype of Israel, understood as an organism Malchuth.

Anselm Kiefer. Emanation, 1984–86.

The Sefiroth not only form a network of influences and the matrix of the world, but they are also conceived as emanations in all directions. This means that all transformations trace back to them. The idea of emanation is fundamental to understanding Kiefer’s works, for thanks to this idea he can construct each piece as a compressed and layered structure, where each layer is the sediment of the one that comes after. The process of emanation grants meaning to the remnants—the straw, the hair, the clothes. They are not relics of the past but living examples of the central idea. They are lifted on emanative threads from historical and mythical pasts and connect the multiple levels embedded in each work, creating the mechanism through which time, in its historical process, becomes the synchronous field of all its events. But emanation itself is also subject to the law of transformation, and apart from appearing under its own title, as in Emanation of 1984–85 and 1984–86, it is also the subject of works like Yggdrasil (1985) and Outpouring (1984), and it appears in the imagery of roads, threads, the Sefiroth, as well as in the heroes themselves—that is, in everything that bears or could bear invocation. For Kiefer, it consolidates the waymarks on his path back to the black hole, the deus absconditus of his vision.

And it is precisely here that we determine the latent religious atmosphere of the works. They are not religious because of their themes, but because of how they handle them—because they point to God’s absence without invalidating his presence. If Joseph Beuys follows Master Jesus step by step, narrowing religion down to Western territory, then he impoverishes precisely the religiosity he wanted to emphasize. Kiefer heightens the religious element by emphasizing the absence of his subject; in doing so, he robs himself of the role of adept, which was Beuys’s error. It is all too true that one cannot today call an artist “religious” without sounding ridiculous, since doubt is written on the banner of art, and faith on that of religion. And yet, if one considers religion as a doctrine of exile, as Luria viewed the Kabbalah, one notices that art can be seen as the doctrine that erases this inherited antagonism.

Kiefer’s heroes—or what they represent, or what they stand for—are, like the artist himself, in exile. We will expand on this point later; here it is enough to remark that the individual personalities, particular events, and diverse materials are nothing but facets of the search for what cannot be described. As a metaphor: Kiefer’s pictures are not about what one sees, but about what cannot be shown.

If all themes return to one core, then what is the relationship of the works that specifically deal with kabbalistic subjects to earlier ones? In other words, what connects Lilith with Osiris, the wings with the Sefiroth, the palette with emanation?

The iconographic thread that binds all these aspects is the material that Kiefer repeatedly employs—namely, lead. Along with mercury, it is regarded as the prima materia, the first matter from which, according to alchemists, gold and silver could be made. Its magical power lies in its ability both to transform and to be transformed. Lead is the material of Saturn, whose two aspects are melancholy and time. Melancholy in relation to Saturn signifies not only a series of negative things but also the ability to create, while time in this context is not seen as linear—that is, Saturn represents not historical or diachronic time, but time in its aspect as dimension. These two aspects recur in Kiefer’s work. Melancholy, representing the pictorial act, appears in a series of works about the palette and wings, and then migrated into the images of airplanes and Lilith. It is interesting to note that the Zohar (Raja Mehemna I, 227b) called melancholic people Lilith’s sons, from which later works derived Lilith’s daughters.

Anselm Kiefer. Osiris und Isis (Osiris and Isis), 1985-1987.

But the chain linking these entities does not end here. In his attributes, Saturn resembles Osiris despite their reversed roles. Osiris, whose body was cut up and reassembled, is Saturn, who dismembered his own father. Both are subjects of Kiefer’s works: Osiris and Isis (1985–87 and 1986) and Saturn Time from the same year. Saturn shares with Lilith the melancholic aspect, and just as he is the inverted image of Osiris, so Lilith is the inverted image of Sulamith, who appeared in earlier works as the counterpart to Margarete. The Zohar says that Sulamith represents the bright facet of the soul, just as Lilith represents its darker side, and the pseudo-Elazar text compares her to lead. Just as lead, in the alchemical process, must be purified to reveal its inner gold, so Sulamith must be treated—she being the Shekhinah, the female partner of God, the organism Israel, the final Sefira that opposes Lilith but carries all her aspects.

Both Lilith and Saturn share a common attribute—the serpent. It appears in Kiefer’s images so often and across so many cultures, levels, and events that its significance becomes inescapable. In Kiefer’s works the serpent is the possibility of earthly knowledge in its progression—that is, it is a thoroughly gnostic serpent. Its analogies are the lines in the works, their roads, the contours of the palette. Iconographically, it represents the prima materia, meaning it is identical with lead, and it represents mercury, Hermes/Mercury, whom the Talmud calls Lilith’s son, and who was considered the inventor of incantation—that is, precisely the act through the power of emanation that takes place in Kiefer’s creation. Incantation is the name he gives himself when describing the act through which the remnants he uses exercise their meaning.

From this iconographic and accidental chain one learns various things. Kiefer’s heroes are one hero, and the various subjects share a common core. Whether Gilgamesh or Isis, Siegfried or Lilith, whether they are the palettes or the wings or the stones, they reveal the channels toward hidden wisdom and toward the alchemical transformation that each era finds suitable means to express—seeking a kind of breakthrough that situates the images in the eternal field between Zim-Zum and Tikkun. Each theme is the Lurianic Gilgul—the transmigration of souls—but it would be unwise to regard them as the result of a rounded mythological worldview. Kiefer does not repeat myths simply because of their attractive melodies, but subverts their meaning into linear knowledge—just as Luria, in his use of mythological elements, was careful not to make them an end in themselves. Nothing could be less mythical than the preparation for the Messiah, since it meant a quest that would culminate in metahistory rather than under history, as mythological processes usually do.

From this standpoint one can understand Kiefer’s kabbalistic works. They did not alter the code of the preceding myths or hidden contents, but they refined it and, as the specific group of kabbalistic works shows, gave it a coherent text.

Anselm Kiefer. Breaking of the Vessels, 1990.

Among this group is a work entitled Schebirath hakelim (The Breaking of the Vessels). It is a bookshelf with lead books, arched over by an arc inscribed Ain-Soph. On both sides are fields with the names of the Sefiroth, and at the base of the stand, broken glass representing the shards of the vessels.

Schebirath hakelim is depicted as a library that endured more than a catastrophic event—that underwent a catharsis. The idea of the library as the world had already been tried by Kiefer in Zweistromland – The High Priestess (1989), which should also bear a German name, in order to indicate that Mesopotamia is the cradle of culture—that is, a place where knowledge is gathered, a practical axis mundi. The books in this work carry all kinds of letter combinations; the Sefiroth and their being of lead are the two aspects of the prima materia. They thus represent the stages of understanding, but they are also the substance that mobilizes it—that is, makes it immanent. The books, which are separate entities of what once was a whole, refer back to the first Schebira, the first break from knowledge that was once whole, since they are already categorized knowledge.

Categorization is the act of the serpent. On their path from their virginal state, the place of Eden, from Mesopotamia, all of Kiefer’s heroes, so to speak, learned the passage to good and evil, culture and nature, sacred and profane—and when they acquired this knowledge, it was at the price of disenchantment and fragmentation. Insofar as the books represent knowledge, they represent it in its imperfect state, and yet within them lies the way back to wholeness. Saturn and Adam Kadmon were whole, hermaphroditic, male and female alike, and their breaking or cutting made them symbols of totality, which was lost in the act of the Schebira. Lilith gained her identity at the moment Eve appeared, who was not made from the same substance as Lilith and Adam—that is, from the point where the process of disenchantment begins. In this sense, Lilith later avenges this first act of categorization.

Something confusing lies in the depiction of the breaking of the vessels, but this confusing element enters into most of Kiefer’s works. It has something to do with how cosmic catharsis—and likewise many other mythological sequences—are visually translated not by metaphors or symbols but by incantation and analogies of emblematic character. As if the alchemical process had not been halted and transferred through terminology and images into the realm of psyche known to the Enlightenment, into convenient symbolic states, but had retained its physical presence and dimension. As if disenchantment were, in Kiefer’s eyes, a phenomenon not yet fermented or overturned. It has to do with a touch of naivety, an almost German trait, withdrawn from exaggeration. This quality, which for lack of a better word we call here naivety, gives the courage to deal with subjects that to a more disenchanted eye would appear impossible to handle. From this approach, a kind of deliberate awkwardness is introduced into the treatment of images, which replaces translation and refinement with elements of physical truth.

Anselm Kiefer. Lilith's Töchter (Lilith's Daughters), 1990.

The same trait is found in the works entitled Lilith or Lilith’s Daughters, though here we must suspend judgment on whether they belong strictly to the kabbalistic group or come from elsewhere. As we have seen, Lilith is analogous to earlier figures—the serpent and Saturn, Sulamith as well as the wings and roads. She often appears with airplanes emerging from her sleeves, as if her qualities of transmission and movement were being reinforced. And yet movement, once considered a positive element, turns into a destructive force when it traverses ruined cities and catastrophic atmospheres, thus repeating the lamenting note familiar from earlier works.

With Lilith, another analogy is conjured—that of clothes, black hair, and airplanes. While previously each appeared separately, here their combination evokes a new construction. Since Lilith has numerous facets, one asks what role she plays in Kiefer’s pictures. Is she the great mother, the anima, the evil one, or does she bear a hidden aspect not visible to our eyes?

Lilith originates from Babylonian demonology and appears in the triad of Lilu, Lilu-Lilutu, and Ardat Lili, most resembling the latter. She shares features with Lamastu and Labartu, as well as with the Greek Lamia—all characterized as child-killers and temptresses with long flowing hair and hybrid features.

The kabbalistic tradition gave Lilith a major role. She is not a mere demon but stands at the top of the hierarchy as Samael’s (Satan’s) wife—a role not given to her in Talmudic or midrashic literature, where she is not mentioned as a killer. Only much later, in a 10th-century tract known as Pseudo-Ben Sira, was Lilith’s story told and her place in the kabbalistic view made clear. As Adam’s first wife, she demanded equal conditions and rights and refused what later became known in Christian tradition as the “missionary position.” When these rights were denied, she fled to the Red Sea (some say to Egypt), and Adam begged God to bring her back. God sent three angels—Sanoi, Sansanoi, and Samanglof—to fetch her, but she refused and told them she had been given by God the mission to kill children and to take the role of avenging angel at the fall of Rome. She promised, however, not to kill any child named after them. The Zohar sees Lilith as a prime danger to the sexual union of man and woman. It is believed that Lilith waits at a couple’s bed to destroy the sanctity of their union, and many spells are prepared to ward her off, since in Kabbalah the sexual act is the first condition for bringing God and the Shekhinah together, and bringing humanity beneath the wings of the Shekhinah, the feminine side of God. The anarchic story of Lilith and Adam places her in total opposition to Eve; she kills and gives birth only to demons, and unlike Eve, she is not subordinate to Adam. Furthermore, Chayim Vital, Luria’s most important disciple, equates her with the angel cast from heaven who was called “the flame of the revolving sword”—that is, the figure who was the guardian of Eden after Adam and Eve had left.

The Lilith of Kabbalah is described as the scarlet woman with long red hair, for despite her title “the Black One,” red is her most important color. Hair as an element of temptation is not permitted to married women, but in the works titled Lilith hair does not function as such. Along with ashen garments, it is a remnant of something once alive, a gift of death to life, a magical instrument on its path to revive something forgotten—a means of transformation.

Clothes too are such a means. They are nothing, a container, a vessel that must be filled with meaning. In the context of Lilith, they stand for the Anima, a role earlier assigned to the palette. Lilith corresponds, true to the catastrophic role of women in Kiefer’s painting, to Sulamith, Brünnhilde, the women of the Revolution, the Trümmerfrauen. She is both the remnant of catastrophe and its herald, the animating force, a catalyst of movement. Kiefer’s women were almost always in a state of lament, and the ashen garments, typical of ancient Jewish mourning ritual, testify to this. The garments evoke many associations, extending even to the memory of the Holocaust, since hair without its bearers and clothes without bodies are two of the most poignant images we carry in regard to the dead of the 20th century. Yet the garments also refer to the robe of the third wise one, the white robe for prophecy and meditation.

It is true that such sad associations are easily evoked when one looks at the great garment spreading over smaller examples of its kind, but I am not sure that Kiefer had this in mind when he chose such a formation. In the context of the kabbalistic images, it is a faithful rendering of the Shekhinah spreading over her people. Lilith is the dark facet of the Shekhinah, but at the same time she is a part of her—her anger, the Sefira Din within the Sefira Malchuth, which represents the Shekhinah.

Anselm Kiefer. Daath, 1990.

Lilith in the image of the Shekhinah is the great Anima, the power that creates, and thus the God revealed as the opposite of the God who contracts into himself. She corresponds to the known knowledge that set the process of categorization in motion and made her the source of evil. Yet she is also the path to the nameless presence that lurks behind all Kiefer’s images, a bridge like the one painted in Daath, with Daath being the Hebrew word for this knowledge.

If the idea of the deus absconditus points to the impossibility of creation, Lilith becomes the possibility of creation. Lilith is rebellion against God, against meaninglessness—like the serpent, like the palette, like the artist himself—even at the cost of imperfection, at the cost of remaining human.

Notes

Translated from the German 2025

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