Dokumentationszentrum Thüringen (DZT)

Room 2

Neue Deutsche Todeskunst

Drawing from different generational experiences of East Germany, Erik Niedling (*1973), Fabian Reetz (*1997), and Juro Carl Anton Reinhardt (*1998) engage with shared questions concerning memory, subculture, ideology and transformation. Thuringia functions as a condensed space in which political upheavals, aesthetic patterns, and traces of German history have sedimented. What connects the three artists is less an interest in death itself than in the conditions under which social movements and individual values take shape. The title Neue Deutsche Todeskunst refers, on the one hand, to a musical genre that emerged in the early 1990s and, on the other, to an attitude that refuses the prospect of a happy end. That opens up a space for self-determination beyond political promises of redemption, cultural nostalgia, or the demand for biographical coherence. The exhibition is divided into two parts. The ground floor addresses experiences of violence and the social dynamics that have emerged from them since the 1990s. Initiated by Reetz, the exhibition format overlayers temporal epochs such as the founding of the nation-state, the period surrounding German reunification, and the present. The use of light sources follows this approach which resists a linear narrative of progress. Fragmented points of light emerge within the darkened space.

Part of ST37 (Niedling, 2012) is a green laser directed at the upper end of a steel rod leaning against the wall. Compressed at both ends and ritually rubbed with goat’s milk, the rod refers to the night of 24 December 1998, when the artist was caught up in an episode of drug-fuelled excess and violence that began with the use of a laser pointer. The events of that night are documented in a 194-page account compiled in collaboration with the writer Ingo Niermann, based on the participants’ conflicting recollections. Niedling obsessively revisited the disintegration of his circle of friends without attempting a complete reconstruction. Instead, the work opens onto unstable conditions in which cultural codes and personal biographies alike become fractured.

6. Christoph L. is simultaneously attacked by another group of young men. When he attempts to flee, René K. hits him over the head with a full bottle of Cinzano. He suffers a major laceration, puts up a fight, and beats the pursuers in flight. 7. Christoph L. and Erik N. meet again and look at each others’ injuries. Christoph L. exposes his torso and rubs blood from the laceration on it. 8. At a construction site, Christoph L. takes an iron rod and Erik N. tears a slat from a wooden fence. Thus armed, the two intend to return to the Predigerkeller. (Erik Niedling with Ingo Niermann: Burial of the White Man, Sternberg Press, 2019, pp. 118–119)

In Riefenstahl-Gewittern (Reetz, Reinhardt, 2026) is illuminated from within by candles, casting a flickering light into the room. Details from the indie magazine Zillo emerge indistinctly across its laser-engraved paper surfaces. Presented like an architectural model the covers of the magazine form its exterior walls; the interior walls consist of inside pages from an issue. Individual images have been cut out, as have sections of the table of contents. Reetz and Reinhardt focus on the formal elements and graphic design such as page numbers, logos, and the editor’s foreword, which exposes the economic pressures under which the magazine was produced.

Auf einer halben Seite wird eine Doppel-CD nebst Buch zu Ehren der Nazi-Kult-Ikone Leni Riefenstahl beworben. Die hier angekündigten Bands und Projekte lesen sich wie ein Auszug aus dem Who is Who des Szeneteils, der mehr oder minder offen mit faschistischen Images kokettiert und/oder faschistische Ideologieversatzstücke reproduziert. Für Riefenstahl, die „in einem Meer von barbarischen Kitsch das unangenehme Paradox einer faschistische (Film-)Kunst von Rang geschaffen“ hat (Georg Seeßlen), können sie sich alle begeistern. (Auszug aus: Alfred Schobert, Mit Leni Riefenstahl wird Nazi-Kunst populär gemacht. Das Magazin Zillo und seine Verstrickung in die rechte Szene, Junge Welt, 1996, p. 1)

Zillo played a central role in the network of Gothic bands across the German- speaking world during the 1990s. In 1996, the newspaper junge Welt published a text by Alfred Schobert denouncing the entanglement of the indie scene with far-right ideas. Bands such as Strength Through Joy were promoted in its pages. Their double CD Salute to Light included a musical interpretation of the völkisch veneration of light associated with the painter Fidus, alongside recordings from Riefenstahl’s Olympia film. The politicisation of bodies, present both in Riefenstahl’s films and in images of East German athletes in the GDR, persists in the staging of international bands whose portraits appeared on Zillo’s covers and now glow in the candlelight of the exhibition. The vivid movement between the Gothic scene’s progressive, gender- fluid explorations of the self and reactionary, archaic forms of representation makes it difficult to determine exactly what is being seen. In January 2014, all of the magazine’s offices and its warehouse burned down. The room’s third light source is a soot-blackened neon tube (Reinhardt, 2026), dimly illuminating a board presenting texts and an object. Here, Schobert’s article appears in the resolution of a 1990s computer screen, retrieved via the Wayback Machine. Beside it is a mountaineering goggle from the Second World War, designed to protect against snowstorms while restricting vision to narrow slits, and a report-like account of Christmas Eve 1998, copied by Reetz and Reinhardt from Niedling’s Burial of the White Man, published in 2019. The texts associated with both works serve not as explanations but as a means of making visible the artists’ research tools and the forms of proximity established between their practices.

At the top of the stairs, the exhibition’s second part occupies former office rooms lit by daylight. The exhibition poster, which programmatically brings together dates and names from both the 1990s and early German Romanticism, is accompanied by a further graphic work, I blame the german reunification (Reetz, Reinhardt, 2023/2026). Together, the works reflect Reetz and Reinhardt’s interest in appropriating archival material and graphic elements. The title lettering was handwritten in ink, following the DIY aesthetic of many Gothic events, then digitised and engraved onto paper. The angelic figure on the poster reinterprets the figure visible on the admission ticket to the first Wave- Gothic-Treffen; the typeface is likewise identical. The precise reproduction of these strategies follows the scene’s subcultural mechanisms of distinction in response to its increasing commercialisation.

The multi-part wall installation Die Anderen Bands (Reetz, Reinhardt, 2026) leads into the private sphere. Resembling sound-absorbing panels, the objects refer to music production and are based on an ornament the artists discovered in a photograph taken in the bedroom of a teenage Goth in 1991. The pattern was digitally reconstructed and engraved onto paper. In his research into the archiving of subcultures, Reetz encountered numerous photographs of young people making their affiliation with the Gothic scene visible through handmade clothing and posters.

At the same time, these DIY-fashion appears embedded in conservative domestic interiors, heavy furniture and floral wallpaper. It is precisely this tension that reveals the social structures against which the young people were positioning themselves, as well as the extent to which their forms of protest remained bound to the private sphere. The teenage bedroom becomes a site of retreat, self-staging, alienation, and resistance.

Death marks no conclusion here. It becomes a technique to disappear, a withdrawing from the promises of permanence, identity, and historical certainty. Neue Deutsche Todeskunst proposes a way of asserting a form of inner sovereignty under conditions of widespread exhaustion.