"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature."
— Helen Keller
In Osnabrück, where the shadow of History still speaks, stands a structure that is more than just a museum. It is a tear in the fabric of time, a fissure conceived by Daniel Libeskind — the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus — an obligatory passage through the wreckage of the twentieth century. Its corridors do not guide: they confront. They do not welcome: they interrogate. And today, perhaps the most piercing question is this: Are you safe?
Here, visitors enter a labyrinth of memory through more than two hundred works by Felix Nussbaum, a painter exiled, erased, and finally resurfaced as a silent witness to horror. His paintings — created before his flight, during his years in hiding, and in the final days before deportation to Auschwitz — do not merely depict: they address. Distorted faces, fractured landscapes, an unnatural light — all speak of a human condition stripped of itself, suspended in the expectation of annihilation.
Yet this is only half the story.
The other half is written in the present — a present that pretends to have forgotten what fear feels like. Ariel Reichman, a Berlin-based artist of Orthodox Jewish origin, bursts into the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus with his exhibition Keiner soll frieren! – No One Should Freeze!. But the cold Reichman evokes is not meteorological: it is the psychic chill nested in our collective perception of threat, in the unprocessed layers of vulnerability.
His installation pathway transmutes Nazi-era objects — medals, badges, ceremonial flowers — into unsalvageable relics, cast into metal sculptures that do not redeem, but bind memory to the now. As if history were not a closed book, but a molten substance still shaping our perception.
At the center of his intervention is the interactive installation I AM (NOT) SAFE, a mute yet luminous provocation activated only by the visitor’s decision. A button. A choice. Yes or No. Security or threat. But the answer does not remain private: it is projected, illuminated, made public. In that moment, the solitary body becomes collective — and the collective becomes fragile.
Reichman doesn’t build mere works of art; he opens fractures. Like the Space of Mourning, inspired by the Jewish ritual of Shiv’ah, where one doesn’t simply commemorate, but rather inhabits the weight of absence. Here, grief is not a reaction; it is a place. It is no longer just Nussbaum’s pain, but ours — current, personal, shared.
The dialogue between Nussbaum and Reichman doesn’t occur through style, but through trauma. One paints from within the catastrophe that condemned him; the other listens for its echoes in a forgetful present. Both remind us: what happened is not only in the past. It is a dormant code, ready to awaken in the inattentiveness of those who believe themselves safe.
That is why the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus is not just a museum. It is an ethical gesture, a restless structure that forces you to walk inside confusion. Libeskind conceived it not as a neutral container but as a dissonant, fractured architecture — incapable of comforting. Its walls do not guide. They compel.
Anyone who crosses its thresholds moves between the before and after of catastrophe. And begins to understand that the question is not whether history can repeat itself — but whether we will recognize its signs before it’s too late.
In the cruel game of centuries, every generation must face the same question: Do I feel safe? And the answer — like the flickering glow of a neon sign — will never be final.
"Art is not made to decorate walls. It is an act of resistance."
— Pablo Picasso
Felix Nussbaum Haus
Lotter Straße 2 – Osnabrück, Niedersachsen, Germany
Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday, 11:00–18:00; Saturday and Sunday, 10:00–18:00
