Henrike Naumann and German Politics: Tracing Historical Memory Through Domestic Aesthetics

Unpublished, March 2026

The Fractured Reality of Post-Reunification East Germany

In 2000, two rugs are custom-cut to mirror the shapes of East and West Germany. Residing separately, one occupies the left-most section of the installation, while the other occupies the right-most section. Strange and outlandish decorations fill the space, such as a sculpture that bends into four upward-facing human hands, along with a grated metal chair, unsuitable for functional use, that tapers into sharp geometric forms. Here, the unfamiliar spirit of reunification manifests. Postmodernity symbolizes the inescapable influx of a new capitalist paradigm, transforming 2000 into a historical site where an unforgiving compromise has forced East German life into estrangement.
Presenting itself as a concept store, the installation’s central section mimics Expo 2000, a world exhibition that took place in Hannover, Germany in the year 2000. The event remains distinct for its commitment to ecologically sustainable design within industrial, architectural, and technological practices. Its principles relied strictly on avoiding processes that were “exploited to impractical limits” in pursuit of the “development and improvement of humankind.” This was promptly reflected in its physical construction, which included a structure assembled from 45,000 planks of wood and another composed of recycled paper.
Organized at the near start of the post-reunification era, and in the midst of subsequent economic disparities, the exhibition sanctioned an overtly progressive theme in pursuit of commercial gain. Its initiative can be traced back to Gerhard Schröder, who led the Social Democratic Party and served as Minister-President of Lower Saxony between 1990 and 1998. In 1990, the Social Democratic Party and the Green Party formed a coalition government, gaining state authority over Lower Saxony. That same year, Germany won the bid to host Expo 2000, having not yet developed a concrete conceptual outline for the showcase. The following year, Schröder openly sought to codify this absence with a theme that, in his words, could “represent social, ecological, and cultural needs of people [and] be a forum for discussions coming from different directions, but [also be] tolerant enough in order to put contradictions alongside each other.” This paradoxical responsibility posed a dilemma for Schröder, but was soon resolved when the United Nations held their first Conference on Environment and Development. Taking place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992, it prioritized environmental policy on a global level. It resulted in a document known as Agenda 21, which states:

Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being. However, integration of environment and development concerns and greater attention to them will lead to the fulfilment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems and a safer, more prosperous future. No nation can achieve this on its own; but together we can - in a global partnership for sustainable development.

Global awareness regarding the climate crisis presented a new opportunity for Schröder to adequately and reputably leverage sustainability as an urgent cure, which effectively situated the matter as a overarching theme for the exhibition. Acting as General Manager of the project, Birgit Breuel would later refer to Agenda 21 as the premise for its overarching theme. Indeed, Expo 2000 delivered unique examples of environmental architectural alternatives. Though, it still left the “underlying reasons for the crisis [largely undisputed,] and the same people that had [previously been responsible] in creating it [through capitalism] were now active in supposedly fixing it through sustainability.” A deep-dive into Bruel’s career history reveals an ulterior agenda that could stand as a testimony. Bruel was the head of Treuhandanstalt, a public holding company responsible for executing a “shock therapy” style of privatization on the former East German economy and its state-owned assets. Treuhandanstalt converted “10,000 companies, 25,000 [real estate properties] … 1,500 shops and pharmacies, [and] 2,000 cinemas” into for-profit corporate entities. Breuel unabashedly recounts this jolting operation as a “central success” and “exemplary in world history.”
Glaring and indiscreet, just as the irreparable harm dealt by her hand, is a life-sized portrait of Breuel hanging on the installation’s wall. A tombstone-esque vanity sits in its vicinity, bearing funeral wreaths. Nearby, quaint scripture reads “Der Deutschen Einheit/ In Stiller Trauer” (German Unity/ In Silent Mourning). An unrealized potential for socioeconomic prosperity in East Germany is memorialized here.
In Ostalgie (Urgesellschaft), a 90-degree rotation flips the room on its side to produce an optical illusion. Pieces of furniture defy gravity and hang stuck to the wall. Smaller details carry an ominous undertone, such as plastic skeletal remains resting on a decorative plate. A portrait of Erich Honecker, who led East Germany for eighteen years, too hangs within reach. This configuration echoes Steffen Mau, who employs the term ossification to analyze the current German landscape. Originally belonging to the medical context, ossification describes a process in which soft tissue hardens into bone. A metaphor becomes visible when East and Western dissimilarities are considered: the two regions have had their differences ossified, having never undergone convergence. In Ostalgie (Urgesellschaft), prehistoric symbols are used to symbolize the region’s declining trajectory.
The title plays on two German terms. “ostalgie” combines “ost,” meaning East, and “nostalgie,” meaning nostalgia. “ostalgie” refers to a collective longing among East Germans for the nature of everyday life before the socioeconomic destabilization brought on by reunification. As an attempt to reclaim East German identity through nostalgia, it responds to displacement by providing an idealized safe haven for individuals who seek psychological grounding amid the unfamiliarity and uncertainty of reunification. “Urgesellschaft” translates to primitive society and refers to a simplistic and straightforward way of living that existed prior to official recordings of history. When placed together, “ostalgie” and “urgesellschaft” essentially mock each other, hinting at a case of oversimplification. Can ostalgie be classified as an act of innocent remembrance? Or does it merely conjure up a censored image of the past?
Alexander Harder probes this duality when he conducts a series of interviews with retail workers in East and West Germany. Both regions suffered through parallel degrees of “transformation and crisis,” which, Harder argues, contributes to a cultural response that “render[ed] far-right politics acceptable.” Harder, surveying participants, noted that “[hope for] political efficacy … is explicitly disavowed … sometimes entailing a visceral rejection.” Harder names this outlook declinism, which is a “metanarrative that frames most of the [participants’] everyday experiences [and refers to a prevailing sense] that the present is out of order and unjust.” Nostalgia, forming a “crucial element” of this metanarrative, promises “a ‘normal future’ [that] attempt[s] to position it[self] as a common sense demand. While rooted in the lived experiences of East Germans, a sense of Ostalgie is familiar across the entirety of Germany, generally symbolizing better past times. Harder’s findings align with what Zygmunt Bauman calls retrotopia. In this concept, Bauman diagnoses ostalgie, not as an unassuming byproduct of reunification, but as a phenomenon where selective memory breeds with widespread fear and results in a regressive vision for the future. Drawing on Svetlana Boym, he notes that nostalgia is a “defence mechanism" as well as a “longing for continuity in a fragmented world [that] relinquish[es] critical thinking for emotional bonding [and] promises to rebuild the ideal home.”
Bauman’s lens indeed situates the reasoning behind ostalgie culture, whereas Ostalgie (Urgesellschaft) spatially simulates the disorientment of the GDR’s fading legacy.

The Iterative Permanence of Right-Wing Ideology

In Das Reich, cupboards and cabinets stray from their standard placements, flat against the wall, and form a circular enclosure surrounding the central point of the room. A viking horn makes for an audacious centerpiece, perching at eye-level on a faux fur hide. Emulating the distinct style of the German Reichsbürger, this installation imagines a dystopian reality in which they have issued their claim to power. Citizens of the Reich believe that the Federal Republic of Germany does not legally exist; they reject entirely its legitimacy as a sovereign nation. Their movement does not rely on a coherent and fixed ideology, instead pursuing what Pia Lamberty and Josef Holnburger call “conspiracy-ideological sovereignism,” which they define as “the effort to (re)establish individual or popular sovereignty and bring about a corresponding order, perceived by its adherents as being the natural order of things, over the existing social and political order, which they view as the means by which a global conspiracy aims to eliminate their ingroup.” Among their baseless conspiracy theories, Reich adherents believe the Allied Powers remain an occupying entity in Germany. By their logic, a formal peace treaty must be negotiated in order to eliminate this “occupation.”
The Patriotic Union was one of many networks formed within the German Reichsbürger. With violent intent, they plotted to storm the Bundestag, the German congress building, and take state representatives hostage. Police foiled this plan on December 7, 2022 when they searched apartments, houses, and offices across eleven German states. They seized ninety-seven guns and over twenty-five thousand pieces of “ammunition, helmets, uniforms, night-vision devices, machetes, daggers, radios, blank vaccination cards, computers, cell phones, [and] hard drives,” along with a list of names and addresses belonging to politicians and their staff.
Accompanying the installation are two short films made by Naumann in which events of parallel intent surge. The first film, Terror, follows three teenagers as they document their everyday lives on a stolen VHS camera. The recording captures bedrooms “plastered with swastika flags” and four pistols arranged in a swastika. These protagonists reference a three-member terrorist organization known as the National Socialist Underground. Spanning a thirteen-year spree, Uwe Böhnhardt, Uwe Mundlos, and Beate Zschäpe, all self-identified neo-Nazis, committed ten fatal xenophobic hate crimes, carried out three bombings, and enacted fifteen bank robberies. The second film, Amnesia, follows four frivolous teenagers. While lounging in a hotel room, they “fool around, drink hard liquor, smoke, make out, [and] do coke.” With a sense of “profound nihilistic boredom,” they quickly become “erratic and suddenly aggressive” when they go to a club. These films articulate right-wing hostility in everyday fashion. Evading passivity, Terror and Amnesia pry at the inseperability between post-reunification decline, emotional indifference, and wreckless ideological retaliation. Das Reich eerily embodies an entirely conceivable worst-case scenario, tracing the spread of neo-Nazism back to mutating conspiracies and everyday nihilism.
Ruinenwert mimics a residence frequently occupied by Adolf Hitler, the Berghof. The installation evokes its interior atmosphere, which was originally composed of a burgundy suede flooring, a ceiling braced in warm-toned wooden cross-bars, and antique round tables adorned with flower-filled porcelain pots. Its visual style, conceived by interior designer Gerdy Troost, embodies a wholesome simplicity in an effort to modestly depict Hitler‘s public persona. This feigned character archetype appears explicitly in a 1932 photo album, Hitler Wie Ihn Keiner Kennt (The Hitler Nobody Knows), produced by Heinrich Hoffmann. In it, Hitler is seen “dressed in casual clothes, including lederhosen, and enjoying leisure activities, such as walking his dogs, reading outdoors, and talking with a neighbor’s child … away from the ‘noise and restlessness of the cities.’” Through representative distortion, Troost and Hoffmann projected a favorable, yet mythologized, narrative surrounding Hitler’s character.
Made of sleek and shiny metal, a statue of a male figure puffs his chest out, aiming a lamp as if it were a spear. Accompanying its air of triumph is an illustration of black horses hoisting swastika flags in a video work by Naumann titled Brecher. This illustration envisions the soon-to-be 1937 opening ceremony parade for the House of German Art, personally organized by Hitler. Using celebratory nationalist pride, he hoped to establish cultural significance for the Nazi regime.
Similar dogmatic orchestrations appear in the Berlin Olympic Games, which took place in 1936. Its lyrical encomium mentions “athletic actions, naked beauties, youth, [and] strengths,” depicting Germans as healthy, beautiful, unspoiled warriors “who were unaffected by diseases, [just] like gods and goddesses who lived in Olympus.”
As part of the installation’s auditory chamber, stacked vocals chant “Song of Barbarossa,” composed by Friedrich Silcher in the early nineteenth century. The piece refers to Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who led the Third Crusade in the late twelfth century. Barbarossa didn’t make it back alive, yet the song reinvigorates his legacy as an ancient immortal being who awaits his resurrection and triumph:

Er ist niemals gestorben/ Er lebt darin noch jetzt/ Er hat, im Schloß verborgen/ Zum Schlaf sich hingesetzt (He has never died/ He still lives within/ Hidden in the castle/ He has lain down to sleep)

Er hat hineingenommen/ Des Reiches Herrlichkeit/ Und wird einst wiederkommen/ Mit ihr zu seiner Zeit (He has taken within/ The glory of the realm/ And one day shall return/ With it, in his own time)

Barbarossa continues to live on as a symbol of triumphant patriotism, even tangibly. At the Kyffhäuser Monument, located in Thuringia, Germany, he waits on his throne until a call of leadership awakens him on Germany’s behalf. His name even shows up in a code name, Operation Barbarossa, for the Nazi’s invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II. On June 22, 1941, German troops aimed to seize its European territories for increased agricultural production and the enslavement of Slavic people. They also invaded on account of the Final Solution, a goal that sought to eliminate all Jews living within the region.
Murad Karasoy traces the ideological origins of National Socialism to Romanticism. Nazism appropriated Romantic individualism in order to justify authoritarian politics, romanticizing an ethnic interpretation of nationalism while emphasising “the struggle for survival … which included the acquisition of a new living space (lebensraum) to create a new elite through the eradication of the Jews (judenrein), who [were] considered the archenemy of the Germanic race.” The Barbarossa legend can be understood through what Karasoy calls a “German heroic saga,” which fuses nationalist loyalty with an all-encompassing virtue of self-sacrifice. Karasoy further illustrates this mindset through an anecdote in which an air strike injured a young German boy. When asked about his pain, the boy replied: “I have pain, but it does not matter. Germany must win this war.”

Henrike Naumann Re-amalgamizes Political Contestation

Installations such as 2000 and Ruinenwert act as historical networks of institutional turmoil and superimposed ideologies. They become sites of confrontation, demanding that observers investigate imposing, yet easily ignored, socio-political landscapes and potential recurring futures. This trajectory bleeds beyond Germany and into foriegn reigons through other works such as Anschluss ‘90, showcased in Austria, and Re-Educaton, showcased in the United States. Anschluss ‘90 reimagines the three-day annexation period by Nazi Germany over Austria through March 11 until March 13, 1938. What follows, instead of celebratory military parades, is a feast for commodification and a “hedonistic self-optimization” through the grand opening of a 1990s Western-themed furniture store. Naumann aesthetically references the post-reunification era to evoke the stark transformation experienced by East Germany after reunification. Re-Educaton recounts the storming of the U.S. Capitol by Donald Trump supporters in resistance to the 2020 presidential election results on January 6, 2021. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to Das Reich, this real-world event brings Naumann’s simulation of arbitrary extremist violence to reality.
By addressing incidents of historical tension through multiple vantage points, Naumann allows no room for detachment, instead demanding an immediate awareness of the matter. This inclusive prerogative reflects Doreen Massey‘s theory of space, which recognizes space as a continuous sphere of interrelations, in which distinct trajectories, multiplicity, and heterogeneity coexist. Space is always in the process of being made as a simultaneity of stories-so-far. When Naumann spatially assembles viewpoints from the past, present, and future to construct vivid wake-up calls, she chronicles an open-endedness that she notes is not meant to be “a proposal for a solution, only a proposal for a problem.” The works are “not supposed to be a safe space with protective boundaries. It is a problem of society as a whole. There is no punctuation mark, but a comma, after which a however follows.”
Unresolved tensions surrounding German reunification, as reflected in groups such as the Reichsbürger group and the National Socialist Underground, are indicative of escalating tyrannical agendas, xenophobic bigotry, and regressive mythical fixations that actively endanger governing institutions, immigrants, and non-ethnic Germans. This destructive outcome sequentially reemerges through reappropriations, an immanent truth that Naumann further reinforces through her incriminating body of works. Acknowledging this cyclical interplay is pivotal to developing a deconstructive inquiry. Without it, past oppressive events are left vulnerable to a perception of unchangeability, deceiving the mind into a false sense of powerlessness and preserving the lifecycle of prejudiced belief systems that threaten to subjugate civil liberties.

Jessica Michelle

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