This picture shows Anselm Kiefer giving the Hitler salute in front a landscape that recalls the motifs of nineteenth-century German romantic painting. With his crumpled baggy jacket and pants, his sandals and his sunglasses, Kiefer here parodies the quintessentially Nazi pose in an attempt to come to terms with his country’s Nazi history. The photograph is one of a series that Kiefer created in 1969, first presenting the pictures at his degree show at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts in a book that he ironically titled 'Heroische Sinnbilder (Heroic Symbols)'. In 1975 he published the photographs under the title 'Besetzungen (Occupations)' in a Cologne art magazine. While most obviously alluding to the Nazi’s military occupation of central Europe, Besetzungen (cathexis) was also the term Freud used to theorise the investment of psychic energy in a particular object and the condition of mourning, suggesting a more reflective engagement with the past.