Bodies for Control and Profit | WS 2025/2026

In cooperation with the Friends’ Association and the management of the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, the Bonvicini class’s collective research project focuses on the topic of forced prostitution in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during the Nazi dictatorship. The goal is to develop artistic forms that commemorate and give visibility to this forgotten victim group, ideally materializing in a monument on the site at Sachsenhausen. 

During the Nazi dictatorship, brothels were set up in ten of the larger concentration camps, including Sachsenhausen near Berlin, where women were forced into prostitution for selected prisoners. The camp brothel in Sachsenhausen was built in August 1944 as an annex next to the pathology department in the infirmary. Seventeen women were imprisoned there as prostitutes.

Only in 2002 was sexual violence officially recognized as both a crime against humanity and a war crime. This also led to a new evaluation of forced prostitution. In 2020, the German Bundestag formally acknowledged the victim groups of the “criminals” (green triangle) and the “asocials” (black triangle). Most of the women forced into prostitution belonged to these groups, which are now recognized as “forgotten victims.”

After the war, very few of these women were able to speak about their physical and psychological suffering, and almost none applied for compensation for their imprisonment. According to current research, no compensation was ever paid for the harm and humiliation caused by forced prostitution.

The subject touches on relations of power and exploitation that affected women. Alongside the transmission of historical knowledge, the class will focus on contemporary forms of remembrance and on exploring artistic and design-based ways of creating an appropriate commemoration.

The class also welcomes participants from other programs who are interested in the topic.

Planned meetings and events during the Winter Semester include: 

22.10.2025     UdK, Room 04  

3 PM Introductory meeting

4PM Round discussion with Monica Bonvicini, Barbara Gstaltmayr, Tom Mustroph and Mareike Otters

5PM „Das große Schweigen“ film screening

5:30 PM Discussion with the film directors Caroline von der Tann und Niemayer

08.11.2025  Room R95

3-5PM Lecture by Katrin Peters on culture of remembrance followed by Q&A

13.11.2025 Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen

11 AM Book presentation by Robert Sommer „Das KZ Brodell“

12 PM Guided tour, guide Salvatore Trapani

Afterwards Meeting with the director Dr. Astrid Ley and exhibitions manager Mareike Otters

22.11.2025 Haus der Kulturen der Welt

4PM Exhibition visit „Global Fascism“ 

06.12.2025 Online

4PM Sam Durant lecture followed by a meeting with Katja Demnig (via Zoom)

07.02.2026 UdK, Room 104

4PM Meeting and discussion with art historian Susanne von Falkenhausen

Participants’ info: 

Barbara Gstaltmayr is an Austrian curator, researcher, and cultural practitioner working in contemporary art and exhibition-making. She has been involved in curatorial and educational projects at institutions including the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK Berlin), where her work focuses on artistic research, curatorial practice, and interdisciplinary approaches to visual culture. In addition to her institutional work, she has contributed to projects engaging with remembrance culture, exploring how artistic and curatorial strategies can address historical responsibility, collective memory, and the representation of difficult pasts in contemporary contexts.

Tom Mustroph works in Berlin and Palermo as a freelance journalist and dramaturg. He operates in several journalistic fields, such as theatre, fine arts and sports. He is most interested in how self-responsible work can succeed elegantly and in accordance to minimal moral standards. He collaborates with several German language publications such as taz, FAZ, Neues Deutschland, NZZ, Theater der Zeit, zeit online, Deutschlandfunk and WDR.

The historian Mareike Otters is responsible for events and special exhibitions at the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, as well as working as an exhibition curator. She is pursuing a doctorate at the University of Siegen in the field of Visual Culture, with a dissertation on visualizations of crimes in concentration camp memorials.

Caroline von der Tann is a writer and documentary filmmaker. She began her career as a freelance journalist and later worked as an editor for Sat.1 in Berlin and ORF in Vienna. In recent years, she has focused on directing and writing documentaries, with a particular interest in biographical storytelling, history, and political journalism. Her documentary Das große Schweigen. Bordelle in Konzentrationslagern was nominated for the Prix d’Europe in 1995.

Maren Niemeyer is a journalist, film director, and cultural manager. She studied journalism, German philology and film studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and Freien Universität Berlin from 1984 till 1990. At her dissertation, which she handed in only a couple of months after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, she studied the film history of the DDR and its film company DEFA which had been largely unknown in West Germany. 

Katrin Peters is a German scholar and curator working at the intersection of media studies and contemporary art. At the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK Berlin), she has held academic and curatorial positions, contributing to teaching and research in media theory, visual culture, and exhibition practice. Her work focuses on archival methods, curating contemporary art, and the role of images and media in shaping cultural memory and public discourse.

Robert Sommer is a German historian and researcher specializing in the history of National Socialism and concentration camp systems. He has worked extensively on the history of the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, with a focus on forced labor, camp structures, and postwar memory culture. He is also the author of a major study on Nazi camp brothels, in which he examines the system of forced prostitution in concentration camps, including its role in coercion, punishment, and control within the camp regime. 

Astrid Ley is a historian and historian of medicine. She is the head of the research department and exhibition curator at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial. Her principal research interest is medicine under National Socialism and, in particular, medical care in concentration camps. At Sachsenhausen Memorial, she curated the permanent exhibitions “Medicine and Crime: The Infirmary of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp” (opened 2004), and “Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp 1936-1945: Events and Developments” (opened 2008). She edited two anthologies and five exhibition catalogs, some of which were translated into multiple languages.

Sam Durant is a multimedia artist whose works engage social, political, and cultural issues. Often referencing American history, his work explores culture and politics, engaging subjects such as the civil rights movement, southern rock music, and modernism. Exposure to an educational culture emphasizing democratic ideals, racial equality and social justice created the foundation for Durant's artistic perspective.  Often taking up forgotten events from the past, his works make connections with present and ongoing social and cultural issues.

Katja Demnig is a German cultural project coordinator and educator involved in public history and remembrance work. She is associated with the Stolpersteine initiative, which commemorates victims of National Socialism through small, embedded plaques in public spaces. Her work focuses on developing exhibitions and educational programs that connect historical research on the Holocaust with contemporary audiences, fostering civic engagement and awareness of Germany’s past.

Susanne von Falkenhausen, Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Humboldt University of Berlin, does not consider herself an art critic. All the same, she writes about art, its autonomy and dependencies, aesthetics, media and politics. She has taught at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK Berlin), where she has contributed to research and teaching in art theory and interdisciplinary approaches to art history.

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Class of Monica Bonvicini