Upon entering the exhibition on the upper floor of a historic building in the heart of Hannover, visitors find themselves in a bright, white room. The large wall of windows is covered with white, translucent linen, flooding the hall with natural daylight. Warm spotlights are directed at 21 pairs of bronze sunglasses mounted on the walls, each framed by historical photographs within display rails. The bronze replicas reproduce a model of sunglasses designed and manufactured by American Optical, the oldest and largest optical company in the United States, in cooperation with Polaroid. The model, introduced in 1945, was distributed by the US military to the Nazi defendants accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946.

I stumbled upon these very images of Göring and Frank wearing sunglasses while conducting research and wondered what the story behind them was. The Nuremberg Trials and the atrocities committed under the Nazi regime were to be reported on extensively in the international press. This required continuous documentation through film and photography without the use of flash, which led to the installation of exceptionally powerful ceiling lights in Courtroom 600. Concerned that the defendants might complain of physical discomfort, and that the public might perceive the proceedings as undemocratic, the Allies provided the defendants with sunglasses. Yet this gesture produced a striking contradiction: the very light intended to make the proceedings visible to the cameras also allowed the defendants to retreat behind the darkness of their sunglasses.

The 21 pairs of sunglasses represent the 21 defendants who stood trial, although 24 people had been indicted. Two of the defendants escaped the proceedings by taking their own lives, while in one of these cases, the person’s whereabouts remained unknown at the outset of the trial. Another defendant was unable to participate due to his state of health. The three gaps therefore stand for the three individuals who were indicted in absentia.

Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935), about the NSDAP’s Sixth Party Congress in Nuremberg in 1934, has already been extensively examined from the perspective of visual theory. The film score by Herbert Windt, however, which is just as powerful a propagandistic tool as the images, has received comparatively little attention. I therefore commissioned the composer and conductor Felix Gerhart to create a reinterpretation of the score, which was originally written for a large orchestra. In this “cover,” the melody remains largely recognizable, while the scale, density, and impact of the original are fundamentally altered. The ensemble has also been radically reduced to just six string players.

No, I couldn’t imagine this work as a performance. My video and sound piece lasts exactly as long as the original film, and although it’s primarily conceived as a sound piece, it’s important to me to stay as close as possible to the original form by presenting it as a video documentation of the live performance—even with movie theater seats. As for the setting, I don’t feel any discomfort about it being a problematic reenactment—after all, I didn’t shoot a music video there like Bushido & Shindy did with G$D (Gott sei Dank) (2015). On the contrary, the work takes the location seriously in a documentary sense, in all its sober and terrifying fragility, and keeps itself very much in the background cinematically through a central camera angle and a one-take shot. 

Another key aspect of the work is that construction workers can be seen in the background of the shot, carrying out maintenance work on the grounds of the NSDAP Reich Party Congresses. At times, the sounds of the construction work even drown out the music. It is only through this juxtaposition that it becomes clear that the work ultimately addresses the question of how we can come to terms with our cultural heritage from the Nazi era in the present day. From this, conclusions can also be drawn regarding the resurgence of the far right.

Throughout the process of working on the piece, I kept thinking about Corey Hart’s song Sunglasses at Night. The music video was filmed in a prison, which led me to draw various associations with the Nuremberg Trials through elements such as police officers, stamped documents, and prison corridors. The graphics combine stills from the video with quotations from a letter written by a US soldier to his father, in which he describes receiving the sunglasses of the defendant Hans Frank as a gift from the head of the prison at the Nuremberg Trials. The color palette is based on the spectrum of colors used in the Polaroid logo.

The cultural implications of sunglasses are fluid and continually shift depending on the context in which they appear. They can serve the very practical function of protecting the eyes from sunlight, but just as sunglasses can allow someone to hide behind them, they can also draw attention to the person wearing them, elevating them to the status of a star.

These historical debates are very important to me. I believe art always faces the challenge of ensuring that the subject matter doesn’t simply become an object and that engaging with it doesn’t become an end in itself. In that sense, I’ve always found the self-righteous works by the artists you mentioned repulsive, and they were, in fact, sharply criticized by colleagues at the time. One example is Martin Kippenberger’s work Heil Hitler Ihr Fetischisten (1984), which is meant to be understood as a commentary on the pretentious posturing of those very artists engaged with National Socialism. I’ve always felt closer to later works, such as Christoph Schlingensief’s performance Bitte liebt Österreich (2000) or Katharina Sieverding’s Deutschland wird deutscher (1992), in which the artists took personal responsibility and thereby explicitly stepped outside the protective space of art. On the other hand, art must also be aware of its limits so that it does not degenerate into political and agitational kitsch, as is the case, for example, with the art collective Zentrum für politische Schönheit. In my artistic work and in the exhibition at the Kunstverein Hannover, I try to condense history and establish connections between historical imagery and motifs from pop culture. All of these images already exist and embody the aesthetics of their respective contexts. Through juxtaposition and condensation, it becomes clear just how strongly the pop-cultural gesture was already embedded in the moment the sunglasses were handed out to the defendants and how it contributed to their glorification. To avoid repeating this, I have removed the faces of the Nazi war criminals so that the bronze replicas of the sunglasses can take center stage.