Tracing German Political History Through Domestic Aesthetics In Henrike Naumann’s Installations, unpublished essay

The domestic space is frequently associated with feelings of “belonging, intimacy, and safety.” Franklin Vagnone argues that the home is formed by the “living that takes place within [it]” as opposed to “the structure or its contents.” But if we define the home based solely on the interpersonal exchanges that occur within it, then where does that leave the influence of society, culture, and history? As Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling argue, “people create home through social and emotional relationships.” When we consider that “social relations are dynamic and ever-changing,” the home becomes a “nexus of politics, economics, and culture.” We must also consider that “living is always mediated by materiality.” This way, we can recognize the home as a process that is both “material and imaginative.” How, then, could traces of human “living” start to reflect existing political tensions? To answer this question, installation artist Henrike Naumann arranges seemingly mundane domestic interiors to examine the social and psychological conditions of post-reunification East Germany, along with the rise of right-wing extremism among German youth.

The Social and Psychological Conditions of Post-Reunification East Germany

After forty years of division, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) unified under the Unification Treaty on October 3, 1990. Though this agreement legally united the two regions, it did not resolve the existing social and psychological rift between their citizens. According to Ilia Nozadze, ongoing narratives “idealizing the West” or “antagonizing and marginalizing the East” were “reinforced by the mass media sources” to “[divide] and [control] the populations of ‘two Germanies.’” Eastern Germans equated the West with everything “profit-driven, egoistic and selfish,” while Westerners equated GDR citizens with “utopian and outdated ideas.” The tensions of such sustained separation are illustrated by the reconstruction of Berlin’s central district, Mitte. The borough, formerly part of the capital of the GDR, underwent “around 150 street name changes … urban renewal[,] and gentrification …” Despite being an “attempt to smooth over the radical differences between [the GDR and FRG],” these efforts “[strived] to ‘foster cultural homogeneity within a new political unit,’” leaving citizens of the former East Berlin feeling “foreign in their own city.”

The Domestic Space as a Record of Regional Fragmentation

The central section of 2000 presents itself as a concept store modeled after EXPO 2000, a World’s Fair hosted by Germany in the year 2000. The concept store is defined by its careful curation of products that come together to communicate an coherent overarching theme. The deliberate nature of the concept store bears an uncanny resemblance to the project motions behind EXPO 2000, only with an unfortunate twist. EXPO 2000 adhered to a theme that championed ecological sustainability, but in the end only used its optimistic sentiments to drive commercial profit.
The fair’s origin traces back to Gerhard Schröder, who initially argued that a World Exposition must “represent social, ecological, and cultural needs.” A year later, global policy coincidentally embraced Agenda 21 at the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which declared:

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.

Global awareness of the climate crisis presented Schröder with a useful political tool. Rather than conronting systematic economic contradictions, he leveraged sustainability as an all-encompassing fix and a “grand narrative that was proposed in order to alleviate” the environmental crisis, establishing Agenda 21 as the blueprint for EXPO 2000. Schröder and his partners promoted EXPO 2000 with claims to cultivate “new forms of solidarity… social cohesion and [the] self-worth of a ‘society of citizens.’”
As the fair’s General Manager, Birgit Breuel cited Agenda 21 as EXPO 2000’s guiding premise. While the fair displayed innovative eco-architectural alternatives, it left the “underlying reasons for the crisis… largely undisputed,” ensuring that “the same people that had been active in creating it, were nowq active in supposedly fixing it through sustainability.” Breuel’s career history provides a testimony to this shortcoming. Before managing EXPO 2000, Breuel served as head of the Treuhandanstalt, the public holding company responsible for overseeing a “shock therapy” style of privatization of the former East German economy. The Treuhand seized more than 39,000 state enterprises and real estate properties, leaving the “East German economy in full collapse.” Breuel later praised it as a “central success” and “exemplary in world history.” Given Breuel’s track record, the market-driven motives behind EXPO 2000 came as no surprise.
Glaring and indiscreet, just as the irreparable economic harm dealt by her hand, a life-sized portrait of Birgit Breuel hangs on the installation’s wall. In its vicinity sits a tombstone-esque vanity bearing funeral wreaths, accompanied by the inscription “Der Deutschen Einheit / In Stiller Trauer” (German Unity / In Silent Mourning). This mock funeral memorializes the unfulfilled future of an economically prosperous East Germany.
The regional fracture this caused is represented by two rugs that each mirror the shapes of East and West Germany, residing separately on opposite ends of the room. This gap stands for East Germany’s alienation, complicating Germany’s status as a unified nation. Although Schröder and Breuel once shared purported intentions to reunite German citizens and situate Germany as a global leader, Naumann reinscribes this promise as a myth.
In Ostalgie (Urgesellschaft), a 90-degree rotation flips the living room on its side, producing a spatial illusion. Pieces of furniture appear to defy gravity, while smaller details, such as plastic skeletal remains resting on a decorative plate, possess an ominous presence. This grim configuration echoes Steffen Mau’s use of the term “ossification” to articulate “what has happened in East Germany since 1990.” The word, borrowed from medicine, refers to a biological process in which soft tissue cells harden into solid bone. Mau uses the term to “describe the hardening of differences between East and West Germany… The transformation phase is over and the inequalities have become permanent.”
The installation’s title further investigates this metaphor by pairing two separate German terms. “Ostalgie,” which combines “ost” (East) and “nostalgie” (nostalgia), refers to a collective longing among East Germans for the predictability of everyday life in the GDR prior to the destabilization brought on by post-reunification. In English, “urgesellschaft” translates to “primitive society.” When placed side-by-side, these terms pose a polarizing question: is “ostalgie” an act of innocent remembrance? Or does it conjure a sanitized image of the past?
Alexander Harder probes this duality in a series of interviews conducted with Eastern and Western German retail workers impacted by post-reunification “dynamics of transformation and crisis.” He observed that the loss of economic security manifested an outlook called declinism, a “metanarrative that frames most of the [interviewees’] everyday experiences,” rooted in a “prevailing sense that the present is out of order and unjust and the future is a source of anxiety.” When the domestic space is turned on its side, it becomes reflective of a world where individuals maintain a “percieved disorientation.” Nostalgia forms a “crucial element” of this metanarrative. This dynamic aligns with Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of retrotopia, which describes a phenomenon where widespread anxiety and selective memory come together and produce a regressive vision for the future built on “visions located in the lost/stolen/abandoned but undead past.”

The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism Among German Youth

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 correlation between post-reunification decline, emotional indifference, and reckless ideological retaliation. Das Reich eerily embodies an entirely conceivable worst-case scenario, tracing instances 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 fictitiously 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 West Germany 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. These installations, despite explicitly referencing political histories specifc to the German landscape, are thereby given the opportunity to resonate transnationally.
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, it is 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 prospect for the future can reemerge through acts of historical reappropriation, an immanent pattern that Naumann further reinforces throughout her incriminating body of works. Acknowledging this cyclical interplay is pivotal to developing a critical inquiry into the past. Without this, 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 Cabrera

Contact