Henrike Naumann

“Not far from the House of Ministries, on Otto-Grotewohl-Straße (formerly Wilhelmstraße), lies Thälmannplatz, home to the building housing the National Council of the National Front and the League for International Friendship of the GDR. The Thälmannplatz underground station was given a design in red marble worthy of its name” (Annemarie Lange, Berlin – Hauptstadt der DDR, Leipzig 1969, p. 115). On 3 October 1991, the underground station was initially renamed M*****-Straße and finally, in 2025, Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Straße.

A founding member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and, from 1949 until his death in 1960, the first and only president of the GDR.

After their shift at The Home Front Agricultural Production Cooperative, Mickey and Minnie tend to their garden, where they grow fruit and vegetables. There, they learn that hard work and dedication pay off, as the state buys their produce to help bridge supply gaps. After work, Minnie looks after Morty and Ferdie, her husband’s nephews, whose parents were killed while fleeing the former Eastern territories.

A candlestick vaguely reminiscent of the medieval hunting device known as the “Wolfsangel” or crampon. Misinterpreted by the Nazis as a Germanic rune, the Wolfsangel is seen as an expression of military prowess. Neo-Nazi organisations continue to use the symbol as an identifying badge to this day. Its use is therefore prohibited in far-right contexts, with the exception of the German Armed Forces.

The cupboard hieroglyphs allude to the everyday constraints within which art is situated. The task is to observe chairs, tables, cupboards and curtains, to work out their forms and to understand them as frames. In modern ways of life, permeated by both new and old fascist undercurrents, responsibility is less a moral question than a material one. (Loosely adapted from Kerstin Stakemeier.)

Although the road winds its way through the countryside, the motorway hieroglyph symbolises the concept of the “car-friendly city” (Hans Bernhard Reichow). As a guiding principle, the vision of the “car-friendly city” shaped the reconstruction and redevelopment of West German cities in the post-war period, and thus also post-war postmodernism. The way this is experienced today is largely defined by the automobile.

Triskelia and spirals are symbols found in various parts of the world since the Neolithic period. The neo-Nazi network “Blood and Honour,” which included members of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), used a swastika modified to resemble a triskelion as its logo. In esotericism, spirals often represent life energy, development, change or movement towards one’s own centre. Esoteric ideas and the metapolitics of the far right are closely intertwined. The current Italian minister of culture, Alessandro Giuli, has a spiral tattoo on his elbow.

Between 1978 and 1989, pupils in Years 9 and 10 in the GDR were required to take part in compulsory military training. All boys attended a military training camp, where they practised things such as throwing hand grenades and shooting, while girls took part in a civil defence course. The question of how the militarisation of GDR society relates historically to the current remilitarisation of the Federal Republic remains unanswered.

Lieutenant colonel in the Motorised Rifle Corps of the National People’s Army (NVA), born in 1951 in Schneeberg, Saxony. After completing Year 10, trained as a crane operator. Military service with the NVA from 1970 to 1972, followed by officer training in Zittau until 1975. Discharged as a lieutenant colonel from the 1st Motorised Rifle Division in Potsdam in December 1989. During his officer career: built a house and had a son. Worked as a foreign trade representative for a West German company specialising in photocopiers and fax machines from January 1990 to early 1991. Founded a retail business for communication systems in January 1991, which filed for bankruptcy shortly afterwards. (Realistic fictional biography.)

Emperor Wilhelm II brought the carrettu sicilianu (Sicilian cart) to Germany following a trip to Italy in 1904 or 1905. Following the end of the monarchy in 1918 and the expropriation of the Hohenzollern family, the cart became the property of the Berlin Museum of Ethnology. Today it stands in the newly built replica of the Prussian City Palace, the construction of which was partly financed by donations from the far-right milieu.

The Feliks Dzierżyński Guard Regiment was under the authority of the GDR’s Ministry for State Security (MfS). Feliks Dzierżyński founded and led the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, and its successor organisation, the GPU, until his death in 1926. In December 1991, demonstrators toppled the Dzierżyński statue in front of the Lubyanka in Moscow. The Lubyanka had been the headquarters and central prison of the Soviet secret service; today it houses the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).
The loom tells the story of two upheavals: the decline of the GDR’s textile industry after 1990 in towns such as Crimmitschau, and the historic rise of industrial production in the 18th and 19th centuries. It captures the moment when mechanical looms reorganised people’s work, and society and everyday life began to be shaped increasingly by capitalism.

Anarcho-primitivism refers to a political and philosophical movement that seeks a return to pre-industrial ways of life and production. In modern art, the term “primitivism” refers to a style that defines certain people as “primitive” and draws inspiration from those people’s artworks.

At the beginning of the 20th century, many members of the Russian avant-garde were fascinated by the art of the so-called primitives and by the folk art of rural and urban communities. Neo-primitivism emerged from this examination. One exponent of this movement was A. R. Penck, who was stripped of his East German citizenship in 1980.

“Art is liberation. Art is defeat. Art is unconditional surrender.” (Henrike Naumann)

Lento Violento (LV) is a genre of electronic music that emerged in the late 1980s, greatly influenced by Gigi D’Agostino. It is characterised by a slow, heavy bass drum. D’Agostino sees Lento Violento as a lifestyle. His track “In My Mind” happened to be playing in 2021 while Henrike Naumann was working at the Urals Optical-Mechanical Plant (UOMZ), which served as a venue for the Ural Biennale in Yekaterinburg. During the Second World War UOMZ produced the T-34 tank, which made a decisive contribution to the Soviet Union’s military victory over Nazi Germany. Today the factory produces parts for weapons used to kill the Ukrainian population.

“Abusive parents, teachers, masters, the hierarchies of violence among young people, and the military constantly reminded them of the existence of their peripheries (showing them their limits), until the functional, controlling armour of the body had ‘grown’ and this body had acquired the ability to fit seamlessly into larger structures with armour-like peripheries. The men’s body armour would thus be their ego.” (Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien: Männerkörper. Zur Psychoanalyse des Weißen Terrors, Basel/Frankfurt am Main 1985 (first published 1978), p. 190.)

The body armour of GDR society.

The Peasants’ War Panorama, unveiled to the public in 1989, consists of a monumental panoramic painting on display at a museum built for it in Bad Frankenhausen (Thuringia). GDR artist Werner Tübke was primarily responsible for the painting, entitled Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany. The painting depicts scenes from the German Peasants’ War (1524–26) and the revolutionary Thomas Müntzer, but also a dense web of allegorical references to human fears, superstitions and religious beliefs. Thomas Müntzer preached in Zwickau—the birthplace of Henrike Naumann—in 1520 and 1521.

Miniature farmhouse interiors are part of the tradition of Erzgebirge folk art, which developed in the region alongside ore mining since the 12th century. Erzgebirge folk art is particularly renowned for its woodwork. During the GDR era, the local workshops were grouped together under the VEB Kombinat Erzgebirgische Volkskunst Olbernhau (EVK).

In the Exquisit shops, which opened in 1962, the people of the GDR could purchase high-quality but comparatively expensive clothing, cosmetics and accessories. From the late 1960s the shops began selling clothing designed in-house. Customers could pay in East German marks in the Exquisit shops, unlike in the Intershops. The GDR government thus sought to stimulate consumer spending while reducing the population’s savings, which were growing steadily due to persistent supply shortages. The shops were criticised by the public because very few could afford their goods.

In the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ), the Soviet Military Administration implemented a land reform starting in 1945 under the slogan “Junkerland in Bauernhand” (“Junker Land in Peasant Hands”). As part of this process, landowners with more than 100 hectares, as well as landowners classified as war criminals or members of the Nazi Party, were expropriated without compensation. Collectivisation began in the early 1950s, often enforced, and merged farms into agricultural production cooperatives (LPGs). Further restructuring took place in the 1970s through the separation of crop and livestock production. This was accompanied by increasing agricultural mechanisation and industrialisation, which fundamentally altered production methods and reduced the use of human labour while increasing yields. Due to persistent supply shortages, many people in the GDR, particularly in rural areas, provided for themselves by growing fruit and vegetables in their own gardens. Despite the ongoing mechanisation and industrialisation of agriculture, traditional farming knowledge remained significant in everyday life until 1989/90.

When the people of the GDR brought down the Berlin Wall in November 1989, around 337,000 Soviet soldiers were stationed in the country. Encounters were occasional; the Soviet soldiers were largely isolated within their barracks from the GDR population. The Red Army had violently suppressed the protests on 17 June 1953, but it did not intervene when sections of the East German population demonstrated in the autumn of 1989. The withdrawal of troops began with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and was completed in 1994. Thousands of abandoned barracks and military sites were left behind.

As historian Peter Thompson argues, the gas mask embodies a vision of “chemical modernity,” spanning from the battlefields of the First World War through the poison gas at concentration camps to the climate catastrophe of the present day. The atmosphere becomes the arena of a struggle for survival. Gas masks foster a sense of community, for those who have one belong and those who do not will die.

“While right-wing terrorist groups (with links to the ‘Gladio’ stay-behind groups linked to NATO) carried out attacks in Milan (1973) and Bologna (1980), members of the ‘Wehrsportgruppen’ (paramilitary groups) organized attacks in West Germany, such as at the Munich Oktoberfest and on the Jewish publisher Shlomo Lewin and his partner Frida Poeschke (both 1980). Despite denazification efforts, the official policies adopted by the Allies during the Cold War ensured staffing continuity to ward off the puported communist threat.” (Henrike Naumann/Clemens Villinger – Normal World Order)

In 1993 Silvio Berlusconi founded the populist movement Forza Italia, and it enabled him to join the government just one year later. His media empire laid the foundations for his political influence, which lasted for around 20 years. Current Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni founded the student movement Gli Antenati (“The Ancestors”) at almost the same time, aged 15; the name, also the title of the Italian version of the animated series “The Flintstones,” gave it a neo-primitive feel in the 1990s.

Originally GDR sculptor Ruthild Hahne was to design the Ernst Thälmann monument in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. The Central Committee of the SED eventually opted for Soviet sculptor Lew Kerbel. The monument was unveiled in April 1986. Hahne had been one of the founding members of the Berlin-Weißensee Academy of Art in 1946. Parts of the academy are located in the former Trumpf chocolate factory, which belonged to the Monheim family of industrialists and was expropriated by the GDR in 1949. Peter Ludwig married Irene Monheim in 1951, and the couple began collecting art from the GDR in the 1970s.

In the prepper community, guides are circulating on how to turn everyday objects into weapons on what is known as “Day X.” The period following this imagined collapse of society is seen as an existential struggle of all against all, from which those who can turn vases into weapons will emerge victorious.

You’ve made your bed, now lie on it.
No one’s going to cover you.
And if anyone kicks, it’s me.
And if anyone’s kicked, it’s you.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, opera by Kurt Weill, libretto by Bertolt Brecht, world premiere in Leipzig in 1930