A Specter of Nationalism

On a warm Friday night in late May, I approached the dimly lit entrance to a bar in the revamped grounds of a former German Democratic Republic (GDR) factory. My ears were still ringing from the deafening heavy metal blasted on our way there by my young chaperones: Freddi, a thin and tall young man who was completing vocational training in storage logistics; Keppler, a veritable Goliath, soon to enter prison for the brutal vigilante torture of several alleged "child molesters"; and Felix, who grumbled incessantly about immigrants, their excessive numbers, their abuse of the welfare system, their delinquent proclivities, and their intolerable cultural habits. For me, the anthropologist, the small courtyard in front of U-21 — the bar was named after a WWII German submarine — gathered much more than merely a fair portion of the young people with whom I conducted research, some of whom we shall encounter time and again in the pages that follow.

Evident were lingering memories of the GDR and of reunification, even among those too young to have meaningfully experienced either, like Norman, a scruffy, chubby twenty-year-old, who stepped over and implored that I lend him money for beers, a "DDR" hat covering his balding top. Or Sylvia, who came to remind me of our planned excursion the following morning to the season's final game of the local soccer club, a bastion of eastern pride. Unmistakable, too, were the inexorable traces of the Third Reich and the dramatic metamorphoses in recent years of how it has been remembered. A handful of people in the small crowd sported T-shirts with the inscription "May 8 — Liberation Day? We're not celebrating!" (8. Mai — Befreiungstag? Wir feiern nicht!). Souvenirs from a right-wing extremist demonstration on the sixtieth anniversary of the Reich's capitulation, the shirts referenced the contemporary recasting in mainstream national discourses of Germany's defeat at the hand of the Allies as its emancipation. Lisa and Elsa, respectively, a skingirl and a neo-pagan aficionado of Nordic myths and Gothic fashions, joined me on the curb for a chat. Their garments and accoutrements evoked a whole universe of illicit signs associated with National Socialism. Their physical appearance at once challenged and conformed to the legal apparatuses, penal regimes, and cultural taboos that police the use of such signs in Germany. It is these mechanisms, we shall see, that are charged with quarantining the dangerous potentialities of emergent national imaginaries in the reunited Berlin Republic.

At the same time, the young people in front of the bar signaled in a number of ways the end of the postwar era. In that sense they suggested as well how the return of the national question in Germany (see Huyssen 1991; Geyer 1997; Jarausch 2006) has in fact been embedded within historical processes that have reverberated far beyond the country's borders. Later that night at U-21, eighteen-year-old Robert drew near, raving about the right-wing extremist NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands [National Democratic Party of Germany]). He advocated for the NPD, claiming that the party eschewed racism and objected instead only to the hordes of slothful immigrants who arrived to exploit the German state. Like his friend Felix before him, Robert also voiced anti-immigration idioms that have become prevalent throughout Europe, shaping political visions and projects not only on the far right fringes but, indeed, across the political terrain. His statements reproduced continent-wide, ethnically inflected, social Darwinist fantasies whose rhetoric — and praxis — has railed against "parasitical foreigners." He reiterated a series of xenophobic anxieties about emergent multiethnic cityscapes. His words signaled the (sometimes brutal) ways in which, from London's East End to Hungary's hinterlands and from Malmö to Athens, young European nationalists have grounded abstract global processes in the concrete physicality of foreign bodies (see Modood and Werbner 1997; Holmes 2000; Pred 2000). Listening to him, it was difficult for me not to recall certain scholarly writings on the shifting orientation of political investments in recent decades. I was particularly reminded of arguments about how social antagonisms have increasingly come to be framed as cultural differences rather than as class conflicts. One effect of these processes, in this view, has been the culturalization of racism and the ethnicization of politics in numerous world regions today (see Alonso 1994; Tambiah 1996; Zizek 1997; Pred 2000; Shoshan 2008b; Brown 2009; Markell 2009).

In turn, virtually all my acquaintances among the few dozen young people at U-21 depended in some form or another on the state for their subsistence. Few among them could harbor realistic aspirations for significant betterment to their material circumstances. As importantly, most received their remittances through various government-sponsored third-sector vocational training or mandatory welfare-for-work programs. In the words of Nikolas Rose (2000a), such strategies of governance seek to activate and "responsibilize" citizens through participatory schemes. In this, too, the fate of my young informants bespeaks the links between contemporary reconfigurations of political imaginaries on the one hand and, on the other hand, shifting and uneven processes of neoliberalization that have redefined modes of production and consumption, as well as the relations between states, nations, and citizens (see Soja 1989; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Povinelli 2000; Harvey 2001; Postone 2006; Wacquant 2007).

This book takes as its point of departure the daily realities of young right-wing extremist groups in an East Berlin district in order to think through their salient place within a post-reunification project of German nationhood. The demise of the postwar order has spelled the return of the nation to the center of the political terrain in Germany as both a question and an imperative. This so-called rebirth of history provoked and still provokes severe anxieties. The traumatic legacy of the National Socialist past has loomed forebodingly over the country's imagination of its future, now compounded by what has been increasingly framed as its junior intimate, the memory of the epoch of the GDR. There is a certain disturbing irony in the fact that this historical rebirth has involved both the reemergence of a unified, democratic, liberal state and the resurgence of its doppelgänger in the figure of authoritarian, nationalist, violent currents. Young right-wing extremists have been vital for domesticating the tension between these historical horizons on the one hand and the urgencies of the historical moment on the other...