Rebecca Horn: Concert for Buchenwald

Essays by Doris von Drahten, Boris Groys, Rebecca Horn, Bernd Kauffmann, and Martin Mosebach

In 1999, acclaimed German multimedia artist Rebecca Horn created Concert for Buchenwald, a large-scale, two-part installation in Weimar/Germany commemorating the horrors of genocide and emigration. This darkly intense work evokes both the shoah and the mass murders in former Yugoslavia. The first part of the installation is set in an abandoned train depot. Its walls are lined with glass panes behind whose shiny surfaces you can make out layer upon layer of ashes. Running alongside one of the walls, railroad tracks are blocked up by densely entangled heaps of various stringed instruments, reminiscent of the piles of corpses that were discovered in Buchenwald. The second part of Concert for Buchenwald is installed in Schloss Ettersburg, an 18th century palatial residence. Here, the humming sound of panicked bees is audible from hives suspended from the ceiling of an opulent ballroom, and suggests memories of expulsion and escape. This book includes several essays that explore various aspects and interpretations of Horn's installation, as well as her own notes tracing the origins of the installation's prominent metaphors.