In February 1990, the German information mag Der Spiegel ran the headline “Why are they nonetheless coming?”, including: “In West Germany, hatred for immigrants from the GDR may just quickly achieve boiling level.” That 12 months, resentment against so-called rookies from the east erupted with out restraint. East Germans have been insulted within the streets, shelters have been attacked and kids from the previous GDR have been bullied in class. There used to be a common concern that the weekly inflow of hundreds of other people would crush the welfare machine and crash the housing and process markets. The general public consensus? It had to forestall.
That very same 12 months, Kathleen Reinhardt and her folks moved from Thuringia within the former GDR to Bavaria. She used to be in number one college, and her new classmates greeted her with strains akin to: “You other people come right here and take our jobs. You don’t even understand how to paintings correctly.”
It used to be a formative surprise. Reinhardt, who used to be just lately appointed curator of the German pavilion on the 2026 Venice Biennale, has a watch for imbalance, for what’s lacking, for who isn’t being regarded as. That she is going to constitute Germany at one of the vital artwork global’s maximum prestigious exhibitions is – by contrast backdrop – now not simply outstanding, it’s historical.
Thirty-five years after reunification, a unique roughly German tale is being heard. At a time of polarisation, when supposedly strong establishments or even the worldwide order itself are faltering, figures akin to Reinhardt – anyone who understands “otherness” and has lived between two worlds – are precisely what is wanted. In her profession, Reinhardt is understood for going the place issues are uncomfortable, for getting into terrain this is politically fraught or most often have shyed away from by means of curators. She prospers within the tough – and confronts it.
Most likely it’s because she used to be born in a small GDR the town within the early Eighties and used to be raised beneath socialism, however then grew up in Bavaria – the very embodiment of West German order. Reinhardt studied American literature (with a focal point on Black writing), artwork historical past and world control in Bayreuth, Amsterdam, Los Angeles and Santa Cruz. She speaks 4 languages and holds a PhD at the American conceptual artist Theaster Gates. She has controlled the studios of the South African artist Candice Breitz and the Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj, and has curated high-profile exhibitions on the Dresden state artwork collections.
In 2022, she changed into director of the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin. Situated on a quiet, tree-lined side road in what nonetheless smells like outdated West Berlin, the museum used to be as soon as sleepy and conformist. Nevertheless it now draws curators, artists and critics with its radical reprogramming. Reinhardt’s exhibitions there intention to show ambivalences, specializing in fracture reasonably than polish.
Nevertheless it’s now not simply her CV that issues to one thing value noting about millennial Germans formed by means of the GDR. I interviewed Reinhardt a couple of weeks in the past, and I got here away realising that girls like her play in a league of their very own. She desires to know how all of it connects – who we’re lately and the previous we emerge from – whilst preserving a wholesome scepticism against grand narratives. That during itself feels virtually avant garde in a time when tales from then and now are being instrumentalised, appropriated, bent or just glossed over.
On one among her first walks during the museum’s lawn, Reinhardt encountered The Dancer’s Fountain by means of Georg Kolbe – a 1922 fee from the Jewish artwork collector Heinrich Stahl, who used to be later deported to Theresienstadt and murdered. The fountain had vanished all over the Nazi technology, resurfaced within the Seventies and used to be reinstalled with out a rationalization. On the most sensible: a swish, dancing feminine determine. On the base: stylised Black male our bodies supporting the basin.
Reinhardt’s response? She began to dig. Operating with artwork historians and provenance researchers, she traced the fountain’s adventure, exposed information and recognized a most likely fashion whom Kolbe had used. She delivered to gentle the complicated and violent histories of the 20 th century inherent on this object, changing into the primary director within the museum’s 75-year historical past to refuse to seem away.
Previous this summer season, she invited Lynn Rother to the museum to participate in a panel dialogue on provenance analysis, its present standing and long run possible. Like Reinhardt, Rother has an East German background. Born in 1981 in Annaberg-Buchholz, she now lives between Berlin, Lüneburg and New York. She is the Lichtenberg-professor of provenance research at Leuphana College and the founding director of its Provenance Lab. Closing 12 months, the Museum of Trendy Artwork in New York created a brand new place only for her: its first curator for provenance.
Rother’s paintings could also be in regards to the tales in the back of gadgets. Who owned them? Who misplaced them – and why? Her analysis lays naked the darker infrastructures in the back of museum collections: looting, coercion, criminal gray zones. She uncovered the greatest artwork deal of the Nazi technology and now leads two primary virtual analysis tasks subsidized by means of €1.8m in investment, exploring how machine-readable knowledge can assist hint – and sooner or later shut – gaps in provenance.
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Artwork, as Rother advised me, has all the time been a cellular asset in occasions of warfare and disaster. Museums and the artwork marketplace have benefited, at once and not directly, from the tragedies of the 20 th century. Some works in lately’s collections have been obtained thru murky channels in moments of utmost horror. The good problem of Rother’s paintings is to recognise and file the ones entanglements.
You’ll want to say it’s a filthy process. Provenance researchers are observed as troublemakers. Their paintings on occasion results in restitution, and with it, uncomfortable questions on nationwide narratives and institutional satisfaction. Rother’s group just lately ran a computational research of provenance information and located a hanging development: married girls have been systematically erased. Even if a piece had belonged to a lady, her husband used to be indexed as the landlord. “That’s now not a clerical error,” she mentioned. It displays that structural discrimination and patriarchal mechanisms are simply as provide within the artwork marketplace as any place else.
Like Reinhardt, Rother has spent years within international establishments. I haven’t shared their tales simply to chart the upward thrust of 2 outstanding girls, however as it’s been a hard-fought street since German reunification in 1990. We, the ladies from the East, have come some distance. For years, we have been ridiculed, lost sight of and decreased to stereotypes. Even Angela Merkel used to be first observed as a quiet little lady, then branded a Mutti, a motherly determine, a time period concurrently condescending and comforting and used to downplay her authority.
However we’re now not a punchline. As of late, girls from the East – now not simply in politics and tradition, however now additionally within the international artwork global – cling probably the most maximum influential positions. To me, the tales of Reinhardt and Rother display how exclusion and institutional stress can – slowly, painfully – turn into perception. How reminiscence, for the ones formed by means of the GDR, isn’t linear. And the way energy, when approached from the margins, can also be exercised extra seriously, and with higher care.
In Bavaria, Reinhardt steadily felt she wasn’t in – however now not totally out both. “What I had used to be college. Training. That used to be my little step up.” Her folks, a manufacturing facility employee and a application clerk, supplied give a boost to however no privilege. It used to be equivalent for Rother, who used to be pushed from early on. After learning artwork historical past, industry and legislation, she earned a traineeship at Berlin’s state museums in 2008. There, she got here to peer that it wasn’t handiest about difficult paintings – her origins mattered.
She used to be repeatedly requested: “Are you from East or West?” The hierarchy used to be obtrusive. Westerners ran the establishments. Jap administrators have been deputies – at perfect. Even the artwork reflected this: East German works have been written off as second-rate.
Each girls have lengthy rejected the patronising West German gaze. The “east”, Reinhardt argues, isn’t a different case, however a prism – some way to take a look at broader geopolitical strains and ask larger questions on how we means historical past and transformations in societies. Or in Rother’s phrases: “With artistic endeavors, labels subject. However we as other people shouldn’t be certain by means of them.”
What those girls be offering isn’t nostalgia. It’s readability. A resistance to simplification. A trust that historical past isn’t a completed room. In Reinhardt’s workplace, there’s a poster that reads: “You don’t have to rip down the statues – simply the pedestals.” Either one of those millennials are doing simply that – in moderation, insistently, telling all of it once more. We want extra like them.
Carolin Würfel is a creator, screenwriter and journalist who lives in Berlin and Istanbul. She is the creator of 3 Girls Dreamed of Socialism
