Mourning has many colours and many layers. One mourns people. But one can also mourn a state, a system, an ideology – even those that were deeply flawed. In 2019, the artist Henrike Naumann built an East German living room and rotated it by 90 degrees. The sofa, chairs and coffee table – all in the unmistakable aesthetic of the 1990s – climbed the wall. The carpet became vertical. Cabinets hovered near the floor alongside a CD rack, baseball badges and a flag bearing a slogan in Sütterlin script: “Beware of storm and wind and East Germans who are enraged.”
The installation – titled Ostalgie (a portmanteau of the German words for “east” and “nostalgia”) – made physical what many had felt but struggled to articulate: the collapse of the GDR and its aftermath for those who had lived through it and felt it on some level as a loss. That rupture was not abstract. It tilted the room. It unsettled the ground beneath your feet.
