Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy review an exciting rollercoaster ride of beauty, horror and history

Born in Germany as the Nazis fell, Anselm Kiefers back catalogue is an astonishing look at the awful burden of history

Sunflowers and Nazi salutes: the Anselm Kiefer extravaganza hits the Royal Academy in picturesInside Anselm Kiefers astonishing 200-acre art studio

Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany in 1945. A new life can rarely have started in a less promising place and time. To enter the world as the Third Reich fell was to be a baby surrounded by human ash.

Does that seem a tasteless way of putting it? Well, Kiefer is not tasteful. Ever since he posed for a photograph in 1969 giving the sea a Nazi salute, he has resurrected the terrors of the 20th-century in a shocking, pungent and explicit way that defies both the politeness of forgetting and the evasiveness of appropriate speech. He would rather you were angry than amnesiac. He will not let the ashes of historys victims blow away, but thrusts them in your face as a handful of truth.

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