The Artists Questioning Nostalgia for East Germany’s Past

The shocking presence of bright blue in a white gallery space also counteracts East Germany’s reputation as a colorless place. When the Norwegian Pakistani designer Benjamin A. Huseby, 42, was growing up outside of Oslo, he felt East Berlin had an exotic appeal. In 2016, Huseby, who’s now based in the city, founded the fashion label GmbH with Serhat Işik, a child of Turkish immigrants who grew up in the Ruhr Valley, West Germany’s industrial heartland. The brand launched with a men’s wear collection that scrambled together East and West stereotypes: Business and sports attire were stitched from deadstock industrial fabrics like PVC. The company’s hammer-and-pick logo recalls both the Soviet emblem and Ruhr mining firms, and its name, the legal designation for corporations in Germany, is so anonymous it seems almost authoritarian. “We’ve always been very inspired by German industrial and bureaucratic aesthetics,” Huseby says. “When people see gray, drab clothing or architecture, they associate it with the East, but this is just as much an aesthetic of the West.” GmbH found a market just as the French fashion house Balenciaga, under the directorship of Demna, was garnering wide acclaim for its update of vernacular fashion from the former Soviet Union. That sort of ostalgie is common across the former Eastern Bloc, where favorability ratings for Communism in some countries remain high, even as it’s become trendy in the West among audiences eager for escapism.

Like Huseby and Işik, the artist Sung Tieu sources cold, bureaucratic aesthetics from her own memories of the German immigration system in ways that complicate ostalgie. (This spring, the Berlin-based Tieu, 35, will open two solo exhibitions — her debut in the United States — at the Amant gallery in Brooklyn and M.I.T.’s List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Mass.) In “Song for VEB Stern-Radio,” her 2021-22 exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, a group of East German portable radios, tuned to a dead channel, sat on a pristine, white-carpeted floor in a chamber of mirror-polished steel. The radios were assembled by Vietnamese contract laborers not unlike her father, who had left Vietnam in 1987 — the year Tieu was born — to find work at a steel mill in Freital, in the East. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tieu joined her father there, spending countless days in immigration offices, where furniture was often made of steel and the lighting was fluorescent. “I feel a sense of both trauma from and belonging to these kinds of spaces,” she says.

The radios, Tieu says, are “highly ostalgic objects, but by revealing the invisible and precarious labor that produced them, I want to infuse them with a more complex history.” Visitors to the exhibition were required to remove their shoes and walk in booties or stockinged feet on the velour carpet. Nostalgia tends to gloss over the conditions that produced the thing being missed, but Tieu’s work makes these conditions impossible to ignore.

Naumann, too, has sought to complicate nostalgia for East German history by invoking its political consequences. Her 2012 project “Triangular Stories” used postmodern furniture from the time of reunification to recreate the childhood bedroom of a neo-Nazi terrorist from her hometown. It was an attempt to understand how a life that once closely resembled her own could have led to such a drastically different conclusion. Yet there is a playful inquisitiveness to Naumann’s art too, as seen in her Flintstones tableau. It stems from the perspective of having been a child at a time of cataclysmic change, she says, one she shares with other children — and artists — of reunification. “I don’t have as much baggage,” she says. “Because I was a child when Germany was reunified, I have this freedom to ask very naïve questions.”