In February 1990, the German news magazine Der Spiegel ran the headline “Why are they still coming?”, adding: “In West Germany, hatred for immigrants from the GDR could soon reach boiling point.” That year, resentment towards so-called newcomers from the east erupted without restraint. East Germans were insulted in the streets, shelters were attacked and children from the former GDR were bullied at school. There was a widespread fear that the weekly influx of thousands of people would overwhelm the welfare system and crash the housing and job markets. The public consensus? It needed to stop.
That same year, Kathleen Reinhardt and her parents moved from Thuringia in the former GDR to Bavaria. She was in primary school, and her new classmates greeted her with lines such as: “You people come here and take our jobs. You don’t even know how to work properly.”
It was a formative shock. Reinhardt, who was recently appointed curator of the German pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, has an eye for imbalance, for what is missing, for who is not being considered. That she will represent Germany at one of the art world’s most prestigious exhibitions is – against this backdrop – not just remarkable, it’s historic.
Thirty-five years after reunification, a different kind of German story is being heard. At a time of polarisation, when supposedly stable institutions and even the global order itself are faltering, figures such as Reinhardt – someone who understands “otherness” and has lived between two worlds – are exactly what is needed. In her career, Reinhardt is known for going where things are uncomfortable, for entering terrain that is politically fraught or typically avoided by curators. She thrives in the difficult – and confronts it.
Perhaps this is because she was born in a small GDR town in the early 1980s and was raised under socialism, but then grew up in Bavaria – the very embodiment of West German order. Reinhardt studied American literature (with a focus on Black writing), art history and international management in Bayreuth, Amsterdam, Los Angeles and Santa Cruz. She speaks four languages and holds a PhD on the American conceptual artist Theaster Gates. She has managed the studios of the South African artist Candice Breitz and the Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj, and has curated high-profile exhibitions at the Dresden state art collections.
In 2022, she became director of the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin. Located on a quiet, tree-lined street in what still smells like old West Berlin, the museum was once sleepy and conformist. But it now attracts curators, artists and critics with its radical reprogramming. Reinhardt’s exhibitions there aim to reveal ambivalences, focusing on fracture rather than polish.
But it’s not just her CV that points to something worth noting about millennial Germans shaped by the…
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