The Rhine River flows north more than 800 miles, from the Swiss Alps through the west of Germany and on to the lowlands of Holland. The river is important to Kiefer, both personally and because it resonates in German myth, literature, and history from ancient times to the present. The river figured in battles of World War I and World War II and in controversies regarding industrial pollution in the 1960s and 1970s. Kiefer grew up in the Rhine region, mostly in towns along the east bank of the river, which appears closest to the viewer in this work.