It is an “inner necessity for her to speak here,” says Gabriele Stötzer on the eve of her acceptance into the circle of wearers of the Goslar Kaiserring. And it hasn't been customary for so long that those honored take the floor at the so-called imperial banquet in the Great Holy Cross, a former hospital from the 13th century. But, says Stötzer, that's what it always said in her Stasi files: "It's not given to her not to say something."
So she says something in her Thuringian-tinged voice that is less a prepared thank you speech than an intuitive speech performance. She looked around to see who could help her here. Then she points to the right, where a monumental figure of Christ hangs on the cross: "I believe," says Gabriele Stötzer, "in friendship. I believe in love. I believe in art. I believe."
It is the emotional conclusion to an evening in which Gabriele Stötzer's past was initially remembered. To a woman, born in 1953, who grew up in the GDR and opposed the state. After her protest against the expatriation of Wolf Biermann, she was sentenced to one year in prison for “defamation of the state”. She spent seven months in the notorious Hoheneck women's prison.
She later did performances and actions with the Erfurt group of artists and organized “plein airs” in Eichsfeld. She lived a free concept of art that was at least suspicious to the state. That didn't silence her. A few weeks after the fall of the Wall, she was one of four women who occupied the Stasi district administration in Erfurt on December 4, 1989 and helped prevent the destruction of files.
Her art initially barely penetrated the alternative scene. Only in recent years has it become more widely recognized that, with her photo collages, experimental Super 8 films and performance documents and textile works, she has been one of the important protagonists of feminist, socially critical action art since the 1970s. In her laudation, Florence Thurmes, General Director of the Chemnitz Art Collections, placed Stötzer in the tradition of artists such as Carolee Schneemann and Charlotte Moorman.
The Gropiusbau in Berlin is currently devoting the largest retrospective of her work to date to Stötzer. And she is the first East German artist to have a solo exhibition in this house, which is, after all, run by the federal government's cultural events organization. In 2026!
It's a double delay. For years, museums have been bringing female artists into a canon that for a long time was almost naturally male. With Stötzer there is a second blank space: the art of the East German underground. And the Kaiserring jury, which includes the President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation Marion Ackermann and the director of the Frankfurt Museum for Modern Art Susanne Pfeffer, also noticed that not only have women been underrepresented in the selection since 1975, but East German artist biographies have so far been completely missing.
Gabriele Stötzer is the first woman with a GDR past to receive the Goslar Kaiserring, which is considered the most important German art prize. She is now on a list with Henry Moore, Richard Serra, Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, Andreas Gursky and Isaac Julien and also with Rebecca Horn, Cindy Sherman and Isa Genzken. Visibly touched, she let Mayor Urte Schwerdtner put the ring on her.
And in her again intuitively improvised speech, the 73-year-old puts her finger in the wound. “It's really the case that I'm the first female artist from the GDR, who never used to do gigs for you, but who is now appearing more in the public eye.” In the West German province, a few kilometers from the former inner-German border, after the effects of the state elections in nearby Saxony-Anhalt, the sentence has a special resonance.
Especially since the award ceremony traditionally takes place in the Goslar Imperial Palace from the 11th century after a strict, solemn ceremony. Anyone who speaks here also speaks about the German pathos of the paintings by Hermann Wislicenus, who painted an “Apotheosis of the Founding of the Empire” on the Romanesque walls in the 1880s.
Stötzer presents “The Long Arm of the Stasi” to the audience, her book for which she researched her own past and the fates of 32 artists in the Stasi archives more than 25 years later. She also talks about the IMs who were spying on her. “This is my generation,” she suddenly realized, “we are all victims and perpetrators.” Looking into the hall, she remarks: “We are all one generation.” Gabriele Stötzer sees this solidarity of her generation as a responsibility, also for reconciliation between friends. Silence, as she learned under the dictatorship, doesn't help.
