“… it is a misconception that the dead are dead.”

artist name: Roland Boden
curator: Dirk Teschner

In his exhibition, artist Roland Boden references the monumental Thälmann memorial located not far from the exhibition site in Ernst Thälmann Park.

An oversized bust of Ernst Thälmann was erected in the middle of the high-rise residential complex, which was first completed in 1987; in an unbroken continuation of the hero worship of the workers' leader who was murdered in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. To this day, opinions on this figure are divided - some ignore Thälmann's personal sacrifice, others deny that as a KPD chairman loyal to Stalin he was still pushing forward the disastrous policy of fighting the Social Democrats when the need for an alliance of the workers' parties against Hitler had long since become clear in the final days of the Weimar Republic. In a cruel twist of history, many of his comrades-in-arms, most of them no less loyal to Stalin than he, fell into the mills of the "Great Terror" of the 1930s after emigrating to the Soviet Union – denounced, arrested, tried in show trials, deported to the GULAG camps or immediately "liquidated." Few were spared, and yet after 1945 those who returned were tirelessly and selflessly active in implementing the dreamed-of social reform according to Stalinist standards in eastern Germany.

The installation "GESPENSTER" shows a curtain flanking a slightly distorted photo of the Thälmann monument's current state. The curtain is hung with a grid of small clay busts that are somewhat reminiscent of Mexican death cult masks. Lined up as if on a string of pearls, the grotesque heads are a reference to the German communists and left-wing liberals who were murdered in Soviet exile in the 1930s. A sentence by Heiner Müller comments on the installation: "... it is a misconception that the dead are dead."

location: KORN Kunstraum - in the shop window of the Heinrich Böll Library, Greifswalder Straße 87, 10409 Berlin