LIT Review # 2 - Forest-Death

Simon Schama. “Der Holzwog: The Track Though the Woods” In Landscape and Memory, 120–134. 1995. Knopf.

Schama’s aptly named book, Landscape and Memory, explores humanity’s relationship with nature and the myths and memories that shape our perception of landscapes over time. My focus is on Chapter Two, Der Holzwog: The Track Through the Woods, particularly part IV, Waldsterben.

The title of this piece in Schama’s book, Warsterben, means forest death, and this became a term used in the environmentalism movement in Germany. The term emerged in the early 1980s to describe the widespread decline of forests, particularly spruce and fir, which had been deteriorating since the late 1970s. This phenomenon was largely attributed to air pollution, especially acid rain, caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

In this Waldsterben section, Schama specifically discusses Anselm Kiefer, a German-born artist known for his paintings that confront difficult aspects of his country's history. In 1971, Kiefer moved to Odenwald, a region in Germany that had been significantly impacted by early industrialisation. The once-thriving broadleaf hardwood forests had been cleared for farmland and later replaced by commercial conifer plantations.[1] In the 1980s, the German government surveyed the destruction from emissions, and found that Odenwald had ‘suffered dreadfully’. Schama describes Keifer’s view as: “the woodlands were broken by broad stretches of agricultural land, orchards, and gently rolling hills and meadows.”[2] 

The Hauraki Plains in New Zealand, once the country’s largest wetland, the Piako Swamp, were drained and converted into dairy farmland in the early 1900s, radically altering the landscape and ecosystem. The new English-based Government were very proud. As Paul Monin states, “It was the stuff of triumphalist settler narratives.”[3] The swamp was of immense significance to Māori, who valued it as a mahinga kai—an essential source of food and resources—and regarded wetlands as highly productive and sustainably managed taonga. In contrast, Pākehā colonists and settlers viewed wetlands as unproductive wastelands, full of unhealthy miasma, and ready to be drained and repurposed for agriculture. A newspaper article from 1909, a time when the felling and drainage were almost complete, sums up the proud European view: “Man’s conquest over nature was probably never more active or more fascinating than in this age of mechanical and scientific ingenuity. In the transformation of the Piako, there are all the elements of a romance of modern times.”[4] The article continues, comparing the completed project to those in Holland and the German Rhine.

In New Zealand, we take pride in the myth of being ‘clean and green.’ But do we, too, suffer from collective amnesia? Many forget, or never learn, that European settlers and government policies led to an 85% loss of our wetlands, the most severe decline of its kind in the world.[5] The consequences of this destruction mirror those seen in places like Germany’s Odenwald, where Kiefer lived - forests lost to industrialisation, landscapes reshaped, and deep social and ecological scars left behind. As Schama says “To be sure, myths are seductive things.”[6]

According to Schama, Kiefer felt a deep personal connection to the forest and trees - his own name, ‘Kiefer,’ means ‘pine tree’ in German.[7] He included self-portraits within his forest paintings, engaging with the Romantic myth of the forest as a symbol of German identity, a narrative exploited by the Nazis during World War II. Kiefer frequently uses the forest as a symbol of German national identity, drawing upon its historical and mythical associations. Born in 1945, Kiefer grew up amidst the physical and moral ruins of his country. As a young artist, he recognised a national ‘collective amnesia’ surrounding Germany’s past and sought to confront it through his work.'[8] Schama describes it well: “He committed to becoming a cultural nuisance, worrying away at the scabs of memory until they revealed open and livid wounds again.”[9]

Closer to home, the settlement of Parihaka in Taranaki was invaded on November 5 1881, by over 1,500 armed constabulary and volunteers, led by Native Affairs Minister John Bryce. Richard Shaw's ancestors once farmed land in Taranaki, which had been confiscated from its owners and sold to his great-grandfather, who had been with the Armed Constabulary when it invaded Parihaka. This tragic incident inspired him to write his book ‘The Forgotten Coast’, and he concludes, “...best I get my story straight. Best I end the forgetting.”[10]

To disrupt collective amnesia, Kiefer combined culturally revered elements of German heroic myths and traditions with unsettling reminders of the country’s recent history. A striking early example is his 1969 photographic work Besetzungen (Occupations), inspired by Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. In Kiefer’s version, the lone Romantic figure is replaced by himself performing a Nazi salute, directly confronting Germany’s unresolved past.[11] The Occupations series sparked outrage, as Kiefer intended. He recognised the deep connection between German identity, landscape mythology, and nationalism, exposing how these cultural narratives had been co-opted by fascism, yet he deliberately engaged with them in his work to challenge their persistence.

Caspar David Friedrich, a revered figure in German Romantic landscape painting, often depicted humanity's insignificance against the vast, powerful forces of nature. German Romanticism, which emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, celebrated emotion, individualism, and the sublime, finding symbolism in landscapes. This fascination with the sublime, both in nature and the human spirit, was central to the movement. Nature was seen as both a source of inspiration and a manifestation of the divine, shaping the relationship between humanity and the natural world.

In New Zealand, early paintings by botanists and artists who accompanied James Cook were used to correctly record botanical specimens and topographical areas. Later, European pastoral painting, depicting cultivated landscapes as orderly and harmonious, was used to reinforce the notion of human intervention as a beneficial and civilising force. The verb landscape refers to the practice of altering or designing the physical features of a piece of land, often for aesthetic or functional purposes. Works by New Zealand Company-employed painters, like Charles Heaphy, were used as promotional tools to attract settlers. These images presented the land as cleared, flat, and uninhabited - ready for settlement, picturesque and inviting.[12] Heaphy’s painting Mount Egmont from the Southward exemplifies this approach. The mountain is deliberately elongated and framed by delicate trees for aesthetic effect, while the native bush surrounding the mountain is bordered by flat, cleared land, depicting a landscape ready for use by a civilised people. 

Kiefer believed that romanticised cultural myths had helped fuel the rise of fascism in Germany, leading to brutality and devastation. In pursuing honesty and truth about Germany’s history, he embraced German Expressionism as a counterpoint to the modern abstract painting emerging from America. He wanted “raw texture, the gritty materiality, of historical truth”.[13] Kiefer emphasised these myths in his work, exploiting clichés and commonplace icons used by the Nazis, as in his series Occupations. Kiefer intentionally set his own artwork on fire, using destruction as a means of expression. Drawing on myth and memory, he also incorporated traditional German woodcut printing - a technique deeply tied to German cultural identity - to challenge and confront the past.[14] Schama describes this strongly when he states: “So where Romantic art reiterated the sentimental celebration of native landscapes, his art did what history did: it burned them.”

Bringing together history, myth, memory, and materiality, Kiefer deliberately provokes, unsettling the comfort of wilful forgetting.