From the beginning of his artistic career in the 1960s Anselm Kiefer has drawn his subjects from Germany’s cultural traditions and its troubled history. In particular he has been interested in expressions of ideology in German art, architecture, literature and philosophy, and the ways in which the Nazis turned the close interrelationship between the nation’s aesthetic traditions and politics into a system of mass delusion and terror. This is one of a series of photographs documenting Kiefer’s performances from the summer and autumn of 1969 which he collectively titled 'Heroische Sinnbilder (Heroic Symbols)'. The series is best known for Kiefer’s re-enactments of the Hitler salute in various historically and culturally charged locations. However, the symbolism of this particular image harks back to nineteenth-century German Romanticism, the harbinger of a nationalist ideology that was later appropriated and transformed by the Nazis.