t the art so expressed would be eccentric in the way of contemporary art are understandable, not to say logical.1a
The eccentricity of Beuys's early life may be seen in the choices he made in the midst of the emergence of Nazi Germany. While, as Marks reports, Beuys could not and indeed did not avoid becoming what might be termed a card carrying member of the Hitler Youth, certain of his actions, in retrospect, may be perceived as antithetical to the notions held by the Nazis. In this regard, Beuys appears to have developed a higher natural regard for the ecological landscape of his birthplace than for political insanity. He was an only child at a time when Hitler exhorted women to have broods of little Germans. He also achieved a measure of psychological independence at a time when psychological conformity was increasingly the fashion; Marks says Beuys "got his education as much from the landscape and history of Cleves as from formal schooling or conventional family life, and he felt a kinship with the marshy, waterlogged terrain."2 This kinship affected Beuys's life in measurable ways, for at a time when Nazis were burning what they felt to be dangerous books, he "reached into the flames to rescue the Systema Naturae of Linneaus."3 Comparatively few persons throughout history have ever run away to join a circus. Beuys appears to have been one of the rare human beings who in his adolescence opted for "a free, nomadic life, celebrating ritual, the interdependence of human beings and animals, and the bringing of wonder and surprise into the lives of the spectators"4 even as the mass of Germany was chafing under the yoke of growing conformity.
The formative influence of this kind of early life must be considered an important element of Beuys's art. Aside from the fact that a biographer observes the nexus between Beuys's positive experience of bucolic terrain in his early life and the ecological commentary in his later artistic endea...