Last week a friend travelled across Germany to visit high-modernist architectural sites. If that interest sticks with them, my friend will be spending significant time in West German suburbia. Building owners whose affluence and social status allowed them to live in a commissioned piece of modern architecture tended to reside there. While one might think “museum” when picturing built modernity, the European reality is more often “mansion.” It is also “prison.” Seeing it in terms of who inhabits it opens up a rather embodied sense of modernism. But you will need a car. Otherwise, West German suburbia is off limits. But you could start with an image search of newsreels reporting abductions of politicians and industrialists by West German militant groups in the 1970s. Zoom into the background to see where they were taken from. And then widen your search to the architecture those same militants were subsequently incarcerated in for said abductions. This too should give you a vivid introduction to modernism’s life after its formalist high. To see built modernity as social housing, you will have to go further back in time. Pre-WWII. Here you will also see how modernity remains consistently incomplete. How it is ruptured by the unmodern powers it is built from. You will see that modernism only rarely made it to the court buildings where militants’ convictions were pronounced. But there is art in all those buildings. Mostly hanging from the walls. Proof of culture. Where art is not present, nothing needs to be proven anymore, publicly. Still, there will be chairs, tables, cabinets, maybe curtains. And while the art hung in those buildings differs greatly in value, the genericness of its cultural function aligns it with the chairs, tables, cabinets, and curtains. It is one of them. Don’t think the art of the West (works that can stand on their own); rather, think the art in the West (works that function as stage design). I was born in West German suburbia in the 1970s. I learned from Henrike Naumann to think of all the arts as forms of publicized domesticity. Henrike was born in an East German town in the 1980s.
Henrike was a star.
She did not ever get it wrong. Henrike developed an aesthetic process that involved finding the exact limit of her responsibility in every single one of her works. This was her form. Henrike herself was site specific. Where her responsibility could not take shape, her work ended and she left.
Henrike showed me the West in my ways. Discussions about art’s social (ir)responsibility are not rare in Berlin, where we both moved decades ago. For every anti-fascist, such discussions are as foundational as they are unending. I had been enthusiastically writing against art’s bourgeois autonomy for years, arguing that it was a mere token of colonization, partitioning inside from outside, when Henrike entered my horizon in 2016. Her work demonstrated that it was the heteronomies within which art was placed—alongside chairs, tables, cabinets, and curtains—that needed attention, that needed their forms worked out, that needed to be framed. Under a modern form of life that is shot through by a fascist undercurrent, responsibility is not so much a moral as a material question. Never a sermon. Always a site visit. Moral discussions about art’s (ir)responsibility tend to speak from an imagined position of exemption, beyond fascism, unsullied by it. I had esoterically done this too. Henrike’s scenographies, on the contrary, figured art’s (ir)responsibilities by showing our implication, our involvement.
To the very modern and very autonomous idea of critique, Henrike added a deflating note: modernity had shifted to the postmodern era after WWII. It had entered its fascization phase incomplete, and had come out of it in pieces. Henrike spent the 2010s figuring a present that was ruptured by fascisms, in which it was never entirely clear if fascism was the present’s fissures or its glue. This is how Henrike got us all very invested in the idea that art is really a genre of the postmodern life of furniture. I am not being metaphorical. Henrike made everybody see modernisms where they hit the floors. In postmodernisms. In attritions and abrasions. Wherever it comes into contact with lived life, art is design. That is its post-fascist life. The “post-” is metaphorical (fascization leaves its mark). No matter how white the walls, all modern art is distinctly domestic. And the colonization of privacy is what gave rise to art’s legendary autonomy. There is always an outside to its inside. Henrike made that felt. Her exhibitions regularly turned into Sunday-stroll destinations for local residents. Henrike offered her own provinciality. Henrike built autonomous units of heteronomous life. Domestic units. Henrike invited everybody to a house visit to examine a body of proof.
The first of her house visits took place in the city where she grew up, Zwickau in Saxony. For her 2012 diploma in scenography at the Konrad Wolf Film University Babelsberg, Henrike introduced and arranged a life-size view of fascism as a real-life fiction. This was an installation of original and fictional materials, accompanied by a three-hundred-page thesis introducing them as our reality. In 2011, two of the three core members of the self-proclaimed National Socialist Underground (NSU) jointly committed suicide in anticipation of their imminent capture, while the surviving (and later arrested) third member blew up their shared flat in Zwickau to destroy evidence of the group’s twelve-year racist killing spree. This spree had consisted of four bomb attacks that left multiple victims mutilated for life, and nine targeted murders. All the attacks were directed against people who had more culture than just German culture. The survivors, their families, and their friends were further victimized by the police, whose investigations were driven by the same xenophobia that led the NSU to murder. There’s more: the NSU also killed a police officer and committed fifteen robberies that left many people severely injured. Henrike’s work examined the sense of normalcy that had protected these fascists from being exposed, amidst a national culture that only made their murders visible after the NSU proudly and programmatically claimed them. For more than a decade, their victims had been treated as suspicious by German national culture. That same national culture allowed these militant fascists to live firmly integrated into society and supported by it. Fascism is never far. In 2011, fascism blew up in Zwickau-Weißenborn, not far from where Henrike’s grandmother lived.
Henrike staged this normalization as fascism’s omnipresent infrastructure. Some of the charred wallpaper and a piece of carpet from the exploded hideout in Zwickau’s Frühlingsstrasse made it into Triangular Stories (2012). Henrike had walked over to the ruin from her grandmother’s house. She built two room corners, complementing one another. Each corner framed a video work—fake home videos set in 1992. One video showed the three members of the NSU as a teenage love triangle, joking around and showing off. The other video portrayed a slightly older version of the trio on Ibiza, partying and staying in a shitty hotel. On the grainy VHS videos, all the figures are equally violent. The Nazi youth bludgeon the seller of the VHS camera they use to record the footage. Their staged rooms are full of devotional objects, and their gestures mimic those of Germany’s (not-so-distant) past. The Ibiza gang, by contrast, has no identifiable political orientation. They lose their minds in consumerism and destruction. Naumann, however, harmonizes the two trios. They are alike because nothing about them is mutually exclusive. The domestic corners in which these videos were set up—an apartment and a hotel room—are both transient. On one side, white walls and cream-colored carpeting, a Minnie Mouse sweater, a CD tower, a rolling chair, a folding chair, a framed drawing of the French comic character Pierrot and one of a German shepherd, a barbell next to a baseball bat, veneer furniture framing a TV set, over which a German imperial war flag is hung. The other side is the emptied commercial repetition of the first corner: another rolling chair, a sofa, a remote control, a veneered postmodern wall rack, and patterned wallpaper and carpet. Henrike wrote in her thesis that 1992 was the year with the highest number of right-wing attacks in postwar German history. And she asks: Where were you in 1992? In 2025, I find the number of right-wing attacks hard to count, because their official identification has been compartmentalized. Xenophobic attacks are now counted separately. Anti-Semitic attacks are now counted separately. Yet even by this count, in 2025 right-wing attacks rose by 48 percent over the previous year.
In the late 1970s, in his book Über die Gewalt (On Violence), Peter Brückner wrote of German culture that “the emergence of patriotic fervor and social prejudice presupposes a society in which the individual must be offered some compensation for the oppression and disappointment imposed on him, a weak ego that finds its pathological support in a fetishistic ‘We.’” He argued that the state of normalcy was modeled on a state of war. In a 2021 interview on Untitled (2013), a work developed out of Triangular Stories, Henrike said that her “artistic process functions like the themes which I deal with. Violence as an experience of production is a technique with which I have worked repeatedly.” Again, Henrike worked by implication. She did not seek to ascribe guilt to her audience, but to urge herself and us to take responsibility.
Henrike told a close friend of hers that the research that went into her work for the German Pavillon at the Venice Biennial 2026 was comparable in scale to the work she had done for her diploma. Triangular Stories laid out a problematic that she continued to work on for years. I am writing about a historical period. I am writing about the formation of Henrike’s understanding of (artistic) responsibility. In her work for the German Pavilion, she set out a new range for her work. She developed it from “Re-Education,” her show at the Sculpture Center in New York in 2022. She began to understand each of our provincial forms according to their sense of war. We are now in a different present. One in which war spreads widely. And one that is without her responsibility. It is ours now.
Because of Henrike, I proposed one extra stop to my architecturally inclined travelling friend: Sep Ruf’s 1957 Kanzlerbungalow in Bonn, the outdated capital of West Germany. It is where all German chancellors lived before unification, before Berlin was reinstated. It comes complete with a Rufian Kanzlersofa and a lot of Eames’. Sadly, guided tours are booked up till the end of 2026. But for a couple of hours there was one spot left. That very week. Someone must have fallen ill. I knew my friend couldn’t make it. I wanted to call Henrike. She needed to make it. We needed to make it. But, of course, she will not and we will not. Now I want everybody to travel to the Kanzlerbungalow. Because Henrike won’t. I will make sure to go. My mother now lives close to Bonn. Everybody needs to make something out of their provincialism, now that Henrike cannot do it for us anymore.
I remember teaching a seminar on fascism with Henrike in the midst of Covid lockdown. We proceeded by decades: 1980s, fascism as sex; 1990s, fascism as technology; 2000s, fascism as end times; 2010s, fascism as culture; 2020s, fascism as politics, which was not yet in full view. At the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, which Sep Ruf had built in the Reichswald Forest in 1954, Henrike shared a decade of her material research with everybody. All prefaced by: I did this so that other don’t have to. Her work is radically educational that way. It has to be picked up. It needs a somewhat infectious reception, a provincialization of our responsibility. On the last day of our seminar, we tried just that: each seminar participant, including us, introduced one or more rituals from where they grew up. I strongly suggest that everybody try this with their friends. And cut out the nostalgia. Take each ritual seriously for the way it shapes the body of its community, its sexes, its technologies, its culture, its politics. Henrike’s work mapped the contexts in which she was able to do exactly that. She figured fascism as not latent anymore. It had never fully been. “Violence as an experience of production is a technique with which I have worked repeatedly.” She taught us how to be implicated. Later this year, Henrike would have taken up a professorship at HFBK in Hamburg. She would have shaped generations of artists. Never a sermon. Always a site visit. She never lectured anybody about where she was from, which was arguably very un-German of her. Instead, she included everybody in her provincialism. A radically domestic art, shaped by its material responsibilities. Before I met Henrike, I never knew I wanted that from art. Now I do not want anything else from it.
When the house in my hometown burned down in 2011, I realized that not only the state, the police, and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution had looked the other way—I had too. Suddenly, I realized that although I am quick to take a critical stance, I am usually not in the mood to take on political responsibility—while right-wing terrorists murder for political motives and dismantle our democracy.
—Henrike Naumann, Triangular Stories (2012)
