Blog

“I’d like to see everyone assume responsibility for places like this,” says Gregor Schneider. I caught up with him on the evening when the exhibition titled Tell me about yesterday tomorrow opened.

When he says “places like this,” he means houses like the one that was home to the former Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and close ally of Adolf Hitler – like the one where Joseph Goebbels was born, in what is now the Rheydt district of Mönchengladbach. Goebbels declared Rheydt to be an independent town in 1933, which is why following its re-absorption into Mönchengladbach, the city still has two main train stations to this day. The fact that the birthplace of one of the driving forces behind the Nazi genocide still stands here without any comment at all is both horrifying and surprising. Gregor Schneider (b. 1969), an artist who is also from Rheydt, bought the house in 2014. He moved in at first and lived there for a time himself before gutting the building. He has left it in this state, anonymized from the inside, to this day. He describes the artistic process as “a completely forced situation. I didn’t want to delve into this topic at all. I thought we had actually processed it enough. But then, when it’s literally right in your neighborhood, that’s a whole other question.” 

In the context of the exhibition titled Tell me about yesterday tomorrow, his work Suppe auslöffeln, Geburtshaus Goebbels, Odenkirchener Str. 202 (“Spooning Up Soup, Birthplace of Joseph Goebbels, Odenkirchener Street 202”) is making its first appearance at a museum in Germany. What is the “ideal place” for a work like this? How does the work fit into the context of the permanent exhibition at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism? “I think it’s great for it just to be on display, for the information to be provided,” Schneider says. “We can talk here about the fact that Goebbels’s history has been inscribed on this house. That’s something that was completely lost to history. I could also have imagined a broader museum setting for it. A lot of people were interested, but they all backed down.” The work on display includes a number of objects belonging to the former owners, along with architectural remnants of the house itself. The video showing the artist himself spooning up soup serves as a metaphor; the German idiom “spooning up soup” can also mean “to take the consequences.” But who is “spooning up” whose “soup,” in that case? Does art have to take a position where city politics fail? 

Now this controversial work is on display in Munich, once the Capital of the Movement – the Nazi movement, that is. The Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism is presenting a work that – as the artist himself says – “no one is taking responsibility for.” Although Rheydt itself still has not taken an official position, Schneider’s work is having an impact nonetheless: These days, no one is laying flowers on the site to mark the date of Goebbels’s death. 

By Antonia Kazmierczak, a student of art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich