The artist Horst Hoheisel and the architect Andreas Knitz are known for their interventions in public space known as "negative" or "counter" monuments.

The box and its contents refer to Germany's National-Socialist past and the Holocaust. The fragments were taken from a demolished Gestapo headquarters: a prison and barracks formerly housed on the site of the State Archives of Thuringia in Weimar. The artists arranged for the demolition to be conducted publicly. Crushed fragments of building material were mixed with gravel and laid down as the final layer in the courtyard. Glass lanterns were intended to allow a view into the newly-planned basement storage facilities. On the one hand, the Archives document achievements of German culture: the correspondence of the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and records of the influential art school Das Bauhaus. But among the holdings there are also the vestiges of a devastating tragedy, documented by the files of Buchenwald.

The archive box of this multiple, similar to those used at the State Archives, suggests documentation or an "exhibit" at a trial--preserving the crushed detritus of the demolished buildings and memorializing the history of their crimes. There is a purposeful disjuncture in the artist's application of the "cool" methods of Conceptual Art to the presentation of the appalling memory of Nazi terror.