For Anselm Kiefer, the medium of the book is a repository, a container, and a space for thought—a medium in which history, myth, and nature become intertwined. Kiefer's books are not legible objects in a conventional sense, but rather sculptural structures made of lead, plaster, cardboard, soil, sand, paint, or organic materials. They bear traces of growing and burning, of the fleeting and the enduring. They condense memory and transformation, matter and spirit.

For Kiefer, the book is both a symbol and a tool: a repository of collection, but also a means of concealment. It preserves knowledge that can no longer be deciphered; knowledge that requires intuition and feeling. Through his visual language, he triggers these emotions in the viewer. The unspeakable, the lost, and the repressed are hidden between heavy lead pages. Anselm Kiefer's books are, in a sense, paradoxes—heavy, silent, and yet eloquent. Their weight and materiality reflect the burden of history, but also opportunities to transform the past into new forms.

His artistic intent is to visualize processes that occur between life and death, growth and decay, memory and oblivion. His book objects distil this idea into a physical experience: the illegible becomes a symbol of the limits of human knowledge, while the surface of the books—layered, damaged, painted over—becomes a vessel for time and experience. [EH]