Nowadays, Van der Lubbes life and death is great stuff for highly fundable and politically correct commemorative activities. One of these was the Van der Lubbe group show, for which we were invited to make a contribution. After committing ourselves to partake in this wonderful event, the following question started nagging at the back of our heads. How and with what work could we do justice to Van der Lubbe? Should an ambiguous figure of recent world history such as Van der Lubbe be used as the inspiration for the n-th theme show by artists who'd never heard of Van der Lubbe the day before yesterday and whose motivation to participate didn't go very far beyond having another fab show to boast on their curriculum? How could we avoid falling into the trap of making a superficial interpretation or a mere aesthetic illustration of the Van der Lubbe figure?

The only really viable solution we could think of was to ask the man himself what he thought of this circus surrounding his persona. Unfortunately, dead people are hard to interview. We are, however, not easily deterred by such trifles. All we had to do was to find a spiritual medium of the likes of Mrs. Deane , through whom people on 'yonder side' could speak with their own voices. (As described in Experiments in Psychics by F.W. Warrick, 1939). Ideally, we wanted to interview and record Van der Lubbes voice as heard through the medium on tape and to play this in the group show. Initially, we could not find such a gifted medium in the short span of time available. In the end we were saved from infamy by a journalist friend, who wrote an article about our quest for a medium, which was published nationwide. Immediately, several spoken and written media came forward with offers to help us for free in return for coverage. We received spontaneous phone calls from mediums from name and fame with private messages for us from Van der Lubbe. We found ourselves with more material than we'd ever hoped for.

In front of the Supreme Court in Leipzig. The accused Van der Lubbe with his interpreter.

© Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz

We ended up with a magnificent, one hour long monologue by the Dutch mediums of the year (1999), who did a special session for us and the TV crew in a house where Van der Lubbe had once stayed. We printed out the messages received by phone and hung them side by side with a detailed account of the history, motivation and background of our project. The whole group show turned out to be a hit. It received numerous reviews in national newspapers and art magazines. The late Martin van Amerongen, a well known columnist, dedicated a hilarious column to our project in De Volkskrant. It can be read (in Dutch!) here. Needless to add, our work was not part of the ensuing traveling exhibition.