Weimar: “Concert for Buchenwald” by Rebecca Horn
Above/featured: Permanent exhibition of a sculptural installation inside a former tram shed. Photo, 10 May 2026 (P).
Inside a period of 30 minutes, I’m the only visitor to a special art installation in the German city of Weimar. I’ve come to witness a silent concert in a living memory of millions.
The sculptural installation “Concert for Buchenwald” by German artist Rebecca Horn is highly regarded as an important representation of the Holocaust in German contemporary art. Inaugurated 9 November 1999, Horn’s art work is housed in one of the former sheds for the city’s former streetcars in the Elektrizitätswerk (E-Werk) complex.
The location of Horn’s installation was always deliberate. In the fog of post-war attempts to reconstruction and resolution, some tried to separate in moral terms the art and architectural heritage in Weimar from the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the Buchenwald concentration camp in the hills 7 km northwest from the city centre. Not only do various elements of the art work make connections regarding memory of the individual, physical, and temporal, they also confront the viewer with the question of personal and historical connections between Weimar and Buchenwald which go farther than mere geographical proximity. Horn’s art work was purchased in 2002 for Klassik Stiftung Weimar as a permanent installation.
Rebecca Horn was a renowned multimedia artist who focussed on installation pieces, studies of body shapes and extensions, kinetic arrangements and their interactions with the spaces they inhabited. Horn died in 2024 at the age of 80 in Germany’s Bad König in the Odenwald forest region where she was born and raised.
… Immer noch schlafen Körper, die Geigen auf den Gleisen warten geduldig auf den Transport ihrer Erlösung. Der Wagen fährt über den Hals einer Geige, im Zerbersten erklingt leise ein Ton.
… Bodies as violins lie sleeping on the track and wait patiently for transport to their fate. The wagon rolls over the neck of a violin, its shatter releasing a faint sound.
– Rebecca Horn
