Joseph Beuys is one of the most important and controversial German artists of the late twentieth century, an artist whose persona and art is so tightly interwoven with Germany's fascist past--Beuys was, after all, a former soldier in the Third Reich--that he has been a problematic figure for postwar and post-reunification Germany. In illuminating the centrality of trauma and the sustained investigation of the notion of art as the two defining threads in Beuys's life and art, this book offers a critical biography that deepens our understanding of his many works and their contribution.

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