Exhibition Views
GESPENSTER
Solo exhibition: Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück, 17 August 2024 – 31 March 2026 GESPENSTER began after the death of my mother and my aunt, when I inherited a family archive I hadn't known existed. At its centre is my great-aunt Käte Niederkirchner — a resistance fighter murdered at the Ravensbrück concentration camp — and the gap between the heroic narrative built around her and the silence that surrounded her in our family. In the GDR, Käte was everywhere: schools, collectives, sports clubs, streets bearing her name. And yet as a child I knew almost nothing about her. The story felt too large, too elevated — I didn't feel equal to it. I never asked questions. What the archive revealed was more complicated than any hero myth. Behind the official story lay other stories — including that of Käte's brother Paul, who was murdered in 1938 and erased from the family narrative so completely that for decades his fate was reduced to a single line in my grandmother's biography: "My eldest brother Paul died in the Soviet Union." GESPENSTER is not a homage. It is an attempt to look honestly at the people behind the myth — their contradictions, their silences, the choices they made under impossible pressure. To ask who memory belongs to, and what is lost when we only tell part of a story. The project is supported by the Fondation Tour du Monde and the Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten.