Hegemonic listening and doing memory on right-wing violence: Negotiating German political culture in public spheres

Abstract

The first section of this chapter illustrates that the pogrom in Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992 has not been categorized sufficiently as a substantial milestone of right-wing violence in postwar Germany. This pogrom led to historically significant limitations in the right to asylum, ultimately resulting in a change to the German constitution. We propose to look at Rostock-Lichtenhagen as an example to explain that practices of remembering right-wing violence, a process that we describe with the term ‘Doing Memory on right-wing violence’, is a central part of creating a society’s basic story. This basic story, in turn, contributes to how a society understands itself. In this chapter’s second section, we argue first that analyzing practices of memory of right-wing violence, be they acknowledging, forgetting or suppressing those practices, actually make it possible to even expose the persistence of the basic story as a central element of political culture. Second, we want to uncover how potential and publicly effective interventions of and changes to the basic story might look like. Here, we build on Habermas’ model of democracy, utilize Susan Bickford’s work on listening as an important element in her political philosophy and refer to Benjamin Barber, who articulates that a participatory democracy requires political listening. As a result, our chapter’s third section demonstrates how listening can be conceptualized from a supra-individual perspective and how questions that are critical of existing hegemonic structures can prioritize a focus on hegemonic (non)listening. Lastly, we will sketch out strategies to intervene in hegemonic (non)listening. These strategies connect theoretically with concepts of ‘counter publics’ and ‘opinion forming publics’ and reference, among others, the work of Seyla Benhabib and Iris Marion Young, thus enabling the creation and execution of resistance practices of Doing Memory on right-wing violence.

Keywords

memory studies right-wing violence political culture public spheres politics of listening

‘We have a fundamental problem in how we view so-called “victims” of right-wing violence. By calling them “victims,” an act with somewhat racist motivation, we actually take away their agency to be active in our world. It also, I believe, is a question of engagement or “resonance” that we must ask ourselves: How can we create spaces where those affected by violence can engage with the larger society? And here might be another question: How does such a place look like, where those affected by violence are reduced to those by violence, but are also part of the societal narrative?’¹ Dan Thy Nguyen is a German-Vietnamese director, actor, writer and singer. In collaboration with Iraklis Panagiotopoulos, Dan Thy Nguyen developed an audio play (available through the online audio distribution platform SoundCloud) called Sonnenblumenhaus (sunflower house). In this piece, north-Vietnamese contractual workers who survived the 1992 excessive violent attack in Rostock-Lichtenhagen talk about their experiences (recorded between 2012 and 2014). From August 22 to 26,1992, Romani refugees living in Rostock in the Zentrale Aufnahmestelle für Asylbewerber (ZASt – Central Refugee Shelter), also referred to as the ‘Sonnenblumenhaus’, were attacked regularly throughout the city as well as at the shelter, followed by attacks on the neighbouring building that housed formal contractual workers from Vietnam. Over the course of these 4 days, large crowds, often a crowd of several thousands, gathered at the sites of the attacks and applauded the attackers, whose numbers were around 500 to 600 and who even attacked the police.

The first section of this chapter illustrates that the pogrom in Rostock-Lichtenhagen has not been categorized sufficiently as a substantial milestone of right-wing violence in postwar Germany. This pogrom led to historically significant limitations in the right to asylum, ultimately resulting in a change to the German constitution. We propose to look at Rostock-Lichtenhagen as an example to explain that practices of remembering right-wing violence, a process that we describe with the term ‘Doing Memory on right-wing violence’, is a central part of creating a society’s or culture’s basic story. This basic story, in turn, contributes to how a society understands itself. ‘Doing Memory’ describes practices and rituals of memorizing, but also of forgetting. In other words, it includes reinterpreting as well as denying of particular memories. In line with sociologists Trutz von Trotha und Thomas Herz, we plead for understanding the basic story as a key to understanding and analyzing political culture.² The basic story fundamentally structures how members of a society comprehend and make sense of their lived realities and the objects they encounter as well the relationships between such objects. Political actors strive for, argue about and fight over the power to interpret the basic story that ‘encompasses the hegemonic construction of a society’s and culture’s history; the basic story includes the dominant legitimizing constructs of the past and thus serves as the inevitable point of reference when conflicting constructs of the past arise’.³ In this chapter’s second section, we argue first that analyzing practices of memory of right-wing violence, be they acknowledging, forgetting or suppressing those practices, actually make it possible to even expose the persistence of the basic story as a central element of political culture. Second, we want to uncover how potential and publicly effective interventions of and changes to the basic story might look like. To gauge the circumstances for and possible executions of interventions around the processes of Doing Memory, we refer back to the work of Jürgen Habermas, specifically his initiation of a procedural view of human rights and his discourse ethics of mediatized public spheres. Since the critical-normative claim of these two dimensions of thought suggests related epistemic concerns,⁴ we are expanding Habermas’ work by drawing especially on feminist debates, not just regarding the question of who can speak as a political actor, but even more so regarding the question of who is being listened to in current public settings. With such questions, we build on Habermas’ model of democracy, utilize Susan Bickford‘s work on listening as an important element in her political philosophy and refer to Benjamin Barber, who articulates that a participatory democracy requires political listening.⁵ As a result, our chapter’s third section demonstrates how listening can be conceptualized from a supra-individual perspective and how questions that are critical of existing hegemonic structures can prioritize a focus on hegemonic (non)listening.⁶ The combination of these theoretical concepts and selected practices of Doing Memory in Rostock-Lichtenhagen allows us to recognize hegemonic (non)listening as a firmly established component of the German basic story, which we started to introduce earlier. As our examples of memory practices can exemplify, the German basic story today still contains as well as represents structural and institutionalized racism that is embedded in rules and routines of government agencies⁷ as well as media institutions,⁸ that has depoliticized and pathologized racist violence or has contained it as a subject of pedagogy,⁹ and that has reproduced racist knowledge, including an intrinsic, affectively charged ignorance¹⁰ among politicians, police officers and investigators, journalists, and among general civil society. Lastly, we will sketch out strategies to intervene in hegemonic (non)listening. These strategies connect theoretically with concepts of ‘counter publics’ and ‘opinion forming publics’¹¹ and reference, among others, the work of Seyla Benhabib and Iris Marion Young, thus enabling the creation and execution of resistance practices of Doing Memory on right-wing violence.

1. The Rostock pogrom and the basic story of post-war Germany

The years 1991 and 1992 witnessed several racist pogroms in German cities. One that stands out is the mass violent racist attack in Lichtenhagen, a neighbourhood in Rostock, in addition to the racist violence experienced in Mannheim and in Hoyerswerda.¹² Together with the cities of Mölln and Solingen, where a total of eight individuals were killed in racially motivated arson attacks, on November 23, 1992, and May 23, 1993, respectively, Rostock has become synonymous in political debates and media discourses, especially in the context of remembrance of racist attacks in contemporary Germany, for the wave of racist violence that has been occurring in Germany since 1991.

Since the post-Yugoslavian wars that started in 1991, the numbers of individuals seeking refuge in Germany has increased to ca. 444 000 (in 1992) within a short period of time; however, asylum seekers in Germany at that time did not receive adequate accommodations, both in terms of housing and basic supplies. The Zentrale Aufnahmestelle für Asylbewerber (ZASt – Central Refugee Shelter), located in Rostock-Lichtenhagen in the German state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Mecklenburg-West Pomerania), a part of the city known for its Plattenbauten (large tower-like buildings constructed from pre-fabricated concrete slabs),¹³ was no exception. For example, families with small children were staying outside of the building day and night; many didn’t even have access to sanitary facilities. Even though elected politicians and government agencies responsible for this part of Rostock had been notified about the horrendous conditions for weeks, no significant improvements were made. At the same time, anti-Romani and racist sentiments and voices arose; some extreme right-wing groups even threatened to take things into their own hands and restore order – threats that were multiplied by the local press.¹⁴

Starting on August 22, 1992, a racist mob of several hundred people, supported by thousands who applauded and cheered them on, wrought havoc for 3 days in Lichtenhagen, starting with throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the ZASt building and later on the neighbouring housing block of Vietnamese families and the police. The first night, asylum seekers, especially Romani individuals and families, were removed; police also transported the majority of the approximately 300 contract workers from Vietnam to emergency shelters. The remaining residents, together with a television team from the German public TV station ZDF, were barely able to save themselves from the burning building set on fire by Molotov cocktails. Police present at the scene hardly intervened in the racist mass violence.

Four days after this pogrom, the state parliament of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern appointed an investigating committee to understand the racist mass violence and the police force’s operational tactics¹⁵ during the pogrom. The committee only held two individuals responsible: the state’s Minister of the Interior Lothar Kupfer, a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), who was forced to resign, and the Lord Mayor of Rostock, Klaus Kilimann, a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), who eventually resigned himself. After August 1992, the Chief of Police in Rostock, Siegfried Kordus, was actually promoted as the head of the State Criminal Police Office (Landeskriminalamt) in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

After the pogrom, a large number of the individuals affected by the mass violence in Rostock-Lichtenhagen faced deportation to countries in Eastern Europe or were sent back to Vietnam. German residents living in neighbouring buildings were offered 1 month of rent-free living, in contrast to those directly attacked by the racist mob who haven’t received any compensation, be it in the form of rent reduction or replacements for their home furnishings damaged by smoke and fire. Also, financial compensation for any of the injustices suffered was not provided. The racist perpetrators who participated in the pogrom, however, were able to view their actions as a win for their cause: only very few individuals were prosecuted for their criminal acts. Even more, this Generation Hoyerswerda¹⁶ witnessed and remembered racist mass violence as a proven tool to get closer to völkische Reinheit (‘national purity’).¹⁷

The racist pogrom in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, as well as the other pogroms, reignited an ongoing debate about German asylum politics. Already in the late 1980s, the Christian Democratic and the Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) had stated their goal of restricting the right to asylum, which had been codified in the German Constitution. In the newsletter to party members dated September 12, 1991, the CDU’s Secretary General Volker Rühe urged the party to systematically and massively put pressure on SPD politicians to side with them. Their cooperation was necessary to achieve a two-third majority in the German parliament (Bundestag) in order to change article 16 in the German Constitution, which regulates the right to asylum. A few weeks earlier, on August 25, 1991, the then Prime Minister of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Bernd Seite (CDU), already framed the debate about the right to asylum in the context of the exceedingly large numbers of asylum seekers in Germany arguing ‘that we urgently need an addition to the current asylum laws because the population is overwhelmed by the unrestrained influx of asylum seekers’.¹⁸

After the violent attacks in Rostock-Lichtenhagen and a variety of similar attacks that followed, then Chancellor Kohl escalated the discourse around asylum laws even further: at the end of October 1992, he painted a gloomy picture, equating the situation to a state of emergency ushered in by the large number of asylum seekers.¹⁹ In light of the pogrom in Rostock, the chairman of the SPD Björn Engholm, also started supporting changing the asylum law in the German Constitution. On December 6, 1992, representatives of the German political parties CDU/CSU, SPD and FDP (Liberal Party) agreed on a substantial restriction of the asylum law. Thomas Herz has described this change of the German Constitution as an act of institutional oblivion.²⁰ What seemed to have been forgotten when this change took place is this: when the Federal Republic of Germany was created, its institutions were designed, and other provisions were made, to prevent a repetition of a fascist violent state. For example, in order to weaken the tradition of a militarized Prussian General Staff (‘Generalstab’), no such institution was created in the German military (Bundeswehr), and the German military reimagined the role of a soldier as a ‘citizen in uniform’. Similarly, the right to asylum for individuals facing political persecution was codified in the German Constitution as a direct result of the challenges that many of those persecuted by the NS-regime faced when seeking asylum abroad.

These institutional regulations are part of post-war Germany’s narrative about itself; Trutz von Trotha understands this basic story as a construction that includes hegemonic interpretations of the past. Thus, this basic story becomes a central reference in cases of societal controversies and conflicts around the representation and assessment of the past, as well as of the present and future.²¹ Based on von Trotha’s observations, Thomas Herz took the concept of the basic story and has used it to confront the history of national socialism and the onset of racist violence in the early 1990s.²² He has constructed Germany’s basic story until the early 1990s as follows:

At some point, the Geman people were confronted with national socialists [NS, also referred to as Nazis]. These Nazis created a totalitarian and despotic regime. It was an aberration and an illegitimate state. There was resistance against this regime because the German people were misled. In reality, Germans were a “community” of sufferers. This is particularly true for the soldiers. They fought for their homeland and not for the Nazis. Economic success was a way to stabilize the ruling system, at least until the beginning of the war. After the war, the NS-past was successfully addressed and processed. Germans have learned from their past. The economic miracle of the 1950s and the social welfare state have created a stable society. Post-war Germany is pluralistic and open. The annihilation of European Jews was a crime, but the expulsion and displacement of Germans [after the war] was also a crime. Other countries have war criminals as well. There is no collective guilt, only collective responsibility. Germans have made their amends to the Jewish people and have prosecuted the criminals. The suffering connected to the NS-past is part of Jewish, but not German fate.²³

This basic story of post-war Germany has been continually debated, erupting in many controversies and public conflicts. Examples for these are the Bitburg-Kontroverse 1985 (Bitburg-Controversy),24 the Historiker-Streit (historians’ dispute),²⁵ to which Habermas contributed,²⁶ and the Goldhagen-Debatte (the Goldhagen debate).²⁷ Over the past three decades, elements of this basic story have changed because we now know more about the extent of German involvement in NS-regime’s crimes, for example, due to the broad reception of the exhibit Vernichtungskrieg – Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944 (War of annihilation – crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941–1944)²⁸ and the well visited exhibit Topographie des Terrors (Topography of Terror – since 2010) as well as the institutionalization of several educational and memorial sites dedicated to the crimes of Nazism and its victims. In arduous Anerkennungskämpfen (fights for recognition), some victim groups of national socialism were even able to receive material compensation.²⁹

It is important to emphasize that these changes have strengthened a central motif of the basic story: ‘After the war, the NS-past was successfully addressed and processed. Germans have learned from their past. […] Post-war Germany is pluralistic and open’.³⁰ This motif has also lead to the belief and acceptance that occurrences of racism and right-wing violence are not core elements of German political culture any longer. Rather, the basic story, to stay consistent, ignores the long tradition of racism in general and right-wing violence in particular in the history of both German states.³¹ In hegemonic speech, racism has either been viewed as something from the past or as something that occurs outside of the German national state (such as in the United States of America or Apartheid South Africa).³² The hegemonic dealings with the pogrom in Rostock-Lichtenhagen as part of the wave of violent racist attacks also exemplify how racist and right-wing violence is either depoliticized or pathologized, has been contained as a pedagogical subject of German history or has been portrayed as a social fringe phenomenon.³³

On October 18, 1991, the then Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble, who also served as a member of the German Parliament, opened a parliamentary debate about racist violence and asylum. After he briefly condemned the wave of violent right-wing attacks, he stated: ‘Over the past 40 years, we learned to live peacefully and amicably with our neighbors and with our foreign residents. […] The Federal Republic of Germany is a friendly country for foreigners’.³⁴ The protocol of the session notes the applause of all parliamentary parties, except the delegates of the PDS/Linke Liste (left list).

Because of the broad support of this position articulated by former Minister of the Interior Schäuble, it was possible to deny the racist motivations of those throwing the rocks and Molotov cocktails in Rostock in 1992 as well as of those applauding and cheering on those actions. Dieter Heckelmann, then Minister of the Interior in Berlin, said this about the crowd applauding the violence and cheering it on: ‘The acts of support do not demonstrate right-wing extremism, xenophobia, or even racism; they demonstrate the justified resentment of the abuse of the right to asylum’.³⁵ Similarly, the public prosecutor tasked with investigating the right-wing violent attacks in Rostock-Lichtenhagen didn’t view these acts as racially motivated, just as an ‘unloading of frustration’.³⁶ It is no coincidence then that out of the criminal investigations into the Rostock pogrom, only 44 resulted in a conviction, and out of those, the majority consisted of sentences with low probation periods or of juvenile detentions.

The experiences and views of those who faced and were affected by the violence were not heard by mainstream society. This is especially true for the Romani individuals and families who were dispelled from their lodgings in Rostock-Lichtenhagen. The various violent incidents of the early 1990s as well as the long history of experiencing racism of migrant Germans and non-German migrants gave many migrant commentators and activists’ reasons to contemplate the possibility and necessity of (r)emigration. Messages from the German Chancellor‘s office added to that. Its spokesperson Dieter Vogel, for example, justified Chancellor Kohl’s non-attendance at the memorial service for Bahide Arslan, Yeliz Arslan and Ayşe Yılmaz, who had been murdered in Mölln, with the explanation that the Chancellor had ‘by far much more pressing appointments’ to attend to and that he didn’t want to ‘participate in “condolence tourism.”’³⁷ In light of the large number of violent racist attacks and such comments by high-ranking politicians, a lot of youth with Turkish from Turkish origin backgrounds withdrew to their own communities. Others criticized that opportunities for political participation were unequally distributed. Mevlüde Genç, who lost her two daughters Gürsün Ince and Hatice Genç, her two grand-daughters Saime Genç and Hülya Genç and her niece, Gülüstan Öztürk, in an arson attack in Solingen, and whose comments on reconciliation have been repeatedly cited in media outlets after the city of Solingen’s annual commemorative ceremonies, has asked ‘Where are our rights? Where is our right to vote?’³⁸

The racist mass violence in Rostock has created a variety of memory practices that media outlets have picked up and disseminated. For example, during the first years after the pogrom and even until today, many media outlets have taken up the image of the then 38-year-old unemployed Harald Ewert who approved the racist violent attacks with one of his arms raised in the Hitler salute while wearing urine-stained sweatpants. The photograph has even been included in the collections of the Haus der Geschichte (house of history) in Bonn and of the German Historical Museum in Berlin. It has also surfaced in artistic performances at the Bundesvision Song Contest, a song competition with participation from artists from all 16 German states; in song texts by bands like Broilers, a punk rock band from Düsseldorf; or in tweets by Jan Böhmermann, a German satirist, journalist and podcast and TV host.³⁹ This photograph, as a symbolic, even iconic image of racist violence in Rostock, has portrayed right-wing violence for the longest time as East German, socially marginalized and apolitical – it was emphasized over and over that Ewert isn’t a Nazi – his arm just automatically rose up.⁴⁰ As a result, the majority of those living in Germany can easily distance themselves from such individuals. Since racist violence is presented and understood as a problem among youth,⁴¹ as a problem among East Germans,⁴² and as a result of social problems,⁴³ racism as a fundamental societal problem is denied and ignored.

2. Basic story and doing memory on right-wing violence in public spheres

Each basic story consists of a number of short stories and mini narratives that, depending on the theme, highlight certain aspects and contextualize them. The separation of a basic story into its mini narratives provide microscopic access – for example, to controversies around the praxis of memory about right-wing violence – that help understand how the basic story is reproduced and changed. Besides the hegemonic narrative, it’s also about the effectiveness and impact of competing discursive interpretations: ‘Collective memories do not only stabilize and homogenize the way that a nation reproduces cultural and historical meaning; they also need to take into account that contemporary societies are highly hybrid asynchronous as well as globalized and regionally differentiated constructs. These constructs include a multitude of rivaling versions of diverse pasts that compete for attention and media presence’.⁴⁴ Thus, the processes that construct the past via remembering also always include that what has been forgotten.

In a broad sense, Doing Memory on right-wing violence takes on many different forms and abides by diverse political agendas. It aims at denunciating right-wing violence, wresting it from the threat of being forgotten as well as referencing its societal roots, while also being visible as a warning voice of dissent. We understand Doing Memory not as a practice of remembering an act or of archiving and storing concluded and thus static pasts, but as a performative practice of a permanent (partial) (re)writing of ideas about the past⁴⁵ – in sum, the attempt to alter the basic story and political culture. The practices of Doing Memory by official municipal representatives, on the one hand, are often privileged in terms of material resources and the means of generating public interest; civic and activist groups, on the other hand, contribute moral resources when different concepts of remembering right-wing violence compete against each other. As a result, Doing Memory on right-wing violence and systemic racism in society can cause conflict in numerous cities. Actors representing these two different groups (official representative versus civic groups) often make different decisions about what (and what not) will or should be remembered or forgotten.

As the quotation by Dan Thy Nguyen, German-Vietnamese director, actor, writer and singer, cited at the beginning of this chapter demonstrates, the individuals affected by the attacks on the Sonnenblumenhaus have been mostly invisible in public discourses about the pogrom. Romani refugees’ experiences of the racist attacks, according to the director of the project Lichtenhagen im Gedächtnis (‘In Memory of Lichtenhagen’) Martin Arndt, are ‘blind spots’.⁴⁶ Via conceptualizing forms of forgetting as automatic, but also as selective, punishing, defensive, eventually also as constructive or therapeutic, current research discusses why and under which circumstances certain social facts are forgotten.⁴⁷ Until today, it is remarkable that in both West and East Germany, the contribution of migrants to the social life and economic success in general as well as their experiences of racism and right-wing violence in particular have been visualized and listened to in astonishingly limited ways.⁴⁸ In light of the thesis on constitutive significance of forgetting about racism in Germany’s basic story, the distinction between different ‘negating’ strategies of forgetting, as introduced by Oliver Marchart, is particularly useful; he makes a clear distinction between repression, denial and dismissal. While denial in hegemonic discourses includes reactions of resistance to, negation or denunciation of memories that oppose the basic story, it at least identifies them. Repression, on the other hand, overrides such memories and silences them: It becomes ‘quiet around what has been repressed (the unthinkable or taboo)’.⁴⁹ These rejected memories are, in Marchart’s view, those that had to be excluded from a hegemonic project so that ‘it wouldn’t collapse in its totality’.⁵⁰ Consequently, this attitude makes it possible that Hans Ewert, whose photograph has become a continuous representation of the pogrom in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, is seen not as an ideologically motivated actor, but only as a proletarian, drunk East German – a symbol of what is rejected – which makes it possible to describe the violence in Rostock-Lichtenhagen neither as racist nor as deeply embedded in society.

Ewert’s photograph exemplifies the persistence of the basic story as a central element of political culture in Germany, which expands to the institutionalized, public, as well as deeply embedded rejection of racism as a constitutive element. Since public spheres create the context for this persistence, while also creating room for possible interventions to alter the basic story via Doing Memory on right-wing violence, we connect our analyses with the ongoing discussion about a structural transformation of the public inspired by the works of Jürgen Habermas.

Moreover, Habermas has shaped, as Alexander Filipovic observes when discussing the ethics of public communication, which also is of interest to us, until today, the reflections of good and proper public communication.⁵¹ There are good reasons for this in light of what Habermas introduced as the procedural concept of a theory of morality and as his discourse ethics, which capitalizes on the practical discourse of communicative action and an argumentative redemption of validity claims to moral norms in public spheres. Habermas turns his attention to the bourgeois public sphere as a complex of institutions and activities where interlocutors can participate in what he terms the process of public opinion-formation; in his theory of communicative action, Habermas embedded the possibility of resolving contentious issues as an emancipatory potential, thereby facilitating the possibility to challenge hierarchical power relations.

Building on Habermas, Negt and Kluge 1972 questioned early on how the bourgeois public sphere excludes the ‘non-bourgeois’, thereby demonstrating how interests; modes of experience, emotion and perception; and value settings contradict each other in the struggle for public spheres.⁵² With today’s lens of intersectionality, the theory of democracy focuses on doing justice to the particularity of experiences; as a result, feminist and postcolonial theories in particular have responded to Habermas' suggestions and concepts by striving for the integration and participation of everyone who lives in a political collective, or those who are affected by political decisions. In her analysis of Habermas' works, Nancy Fraser, for example, has identified multicultural recognition and social equality as conditions for a functioning participatory democracy.⁵³ This perspective demands that everyone must be integrated into the public life within a given community that has discarded the Keynesian-Westphalian frame in order to establish the status of a subject and the political domain.⁵⁴ Early on, it became clear that an ‘actual democratic structure can only emerge through communication focused on the common good and collective bonds’.⁵⁵ In light of our interests in possibilities of publicly remembering experiences of racism, racist violence and the associated suffering, we incorporate these ideas into our work and want to draw attention to Seyla Benhabib’s demand to view others as concrete others, in other words as ‘individuals in the flesh with minds and bodies, with voices as well as emotions’.⁵⁶ Imke Leicht summarizes Benhabib’s position as follows: Leicht doesn’t just demand (formal) justice in terms of access and negotiation, but also in terms of communal and need-oriented aspects like compassion, sympathy and solidarity.⁵⁷ Intensive communication from a place of equality with others who are different and the common concern for the democratization of direct democracy forms the basis for such a position.⁵⁸

Intensive communication, however, has been jeopardized by the processes of digitization. According to Klinger, this debate has been characterized by two perspectives.⁵⁹ One emphasizes the extension of the public sphere, with public sphere being described as interactive,⁶⁰ transnational or global,⁶¹ dynamic and complex.⁶² The other stresses the fragmentation of the public sphere,⁶³ as expressed in concepts like the networked public sphere,⁶⁴ the quasi-public sphere⁶⁵ or personal publics.⁶⁶ Both perspectives emphasize that the public sphere goes beyond local and national contexts. This development further demands the necessity of expanding the conceptualization of the public sphere as limited on the territorial state, as originally conceptualized by Habermas. Already in 2007, Nancy Fraser addressed this based on her findings on a transnationalization of the public sphere; she observed a growing wedge between the ways that concern and belonging were conceptualized in Habermas' theory of the public sphere, which leads to the need to newly develop the idea of inclusivity. In Fraser’s view, because of the altered circumstances in modern territorial states, normative legitimacy and political effectiveness of the public opinion need to be conceptualized so that they can save the critical function of the public sphere. Nancy Fraser as well as Seyla Benhabib have represented that demand to not just include institutionalized politics as part of civil society, but also the practices of social movements and groups.⁶⁷ In the German-speaking realm, Ulla Wischermann has long described the public sphere more as a societal process of negotiations about norms, values and ideas in heterogenous public spheres;⁶⁸ this idea connects contemporary understandings of the public sphere as necessary to how a society understands itself, a process based on managing conflict – like, for example, the concept of ‘dissonant public spheres’⁶⁹ – to an expanded understanding of politics. This idea ultimately attempts to do justice to the social reality and the conditions for a critical digital public sphere in a society shaped by (im)migration.

This view of a potentially heterogeneous and dissonant public sphere – empirically based and grounded in discourse ethics – allows, with respect to our question about ways to intervene with a culture or nation’s core stories, a different consideration of diverse public spheres that are ‘overlapping, appropriating, interacting, and affecting each other’, a consideration that can be phrased as a question about the conditions and practices for ‘the existence of, the process of becoming, and the making of’⁷⁰ memory and the forgetting of experiences of right-wing violence. We want to further zero in on this question and ask this: Who can how, in light of the German basic story that excludes racism, make experiences of right-wing violence public and, even further, can make them be heard? Our next section will engage with the importance of not just speaking, but also that of (hegemonic) listening in a post-migrant democracy and the forms of a Politics of Listening in public spheres.

3. Doing memory and the politics of listening: Public interventions in the basic story

Practices of memory about right-wing violence – which we call ‘Doing Memory’ – have the objective to influence the hegemonic basic story and its rules; which and whose memories are articulated in public spaces, as well as how and which are relevant in a society. Inevitably, such practices generate conflict. This conflict is visible at the many places where those affected by right-wing violence and those supporting them have been excluded from Doing Memory on right-wing violence. In 2012, Kien Nghi Ha described the dominance of White⁷¹ political actors during the 20^th anniversary to commemorate the pogrom in Rostock-Lichtenhagen as an ‘asymmetric culture of remembrance’ and highlighted that ‘the opportunities of cultural representation and political articulations are highly regulated and limited by societal power structure and racialized access to resources’.⁷² He commented that the perspectives of the victims of the racist attacks were mostly absent, which he described as ‘a structural element of the hegemonic culture of remembrances that is characterized by dominant German perceptions and interpretations. Similar to other prominent racist incidents, White mainstream (and majority) society only allows the processing of this program as a time-limited special issue’.⁷³ However, the prevention of making the ‘situated knowledge’⁷⁴ of those affected by the violence heard cannot by itself explain why the public remembering of the suffering caused by right-wing violence has been a taboo for so long. Even when individuals affected by right-wing or other (political) violence speak offensively and make demands, their claims are often met with ‘selective hearing’ or ‘strategic deafness’.⁷⁵ Gayatri Spivak takes us along her widely cited question about the subaltern’s ability to speak, which is really meant to illustrate the futile attempts to make oneself heard, to a question about the ‘framework’ of being listened to⁷⁶ and thus to its significance in terms of inclusion and participation in a participatory democracy.

For example, after the crimes of the NSU⁷⁷ became obvious to the general public, former and new anti-racist activists, coalitions and alliances made the painful experiences of right-wing violence visible and audible to the public via varied practices of remembering.⁷⁸ Relatives and those standing in solidarity with those affected by right-wing violence were often not just interested in recognition – recognition of victims, in the sense of the theory of democracy introduced above, who, as political subjects, can demand the right to mourn.⁷⁹ They are also interested in not being viewed as having been somehow involved in the crimes, a narrative that police investigations and the media spread; this was especially salient in the more recent past regarding the relatives of the NSU victims. Still, the opportunities of remembering right-wing violence from the perspective of those affected by the violence remain tenuous, and not just because of a lack of resources.

Just as (mediatized) visibility is not achieved by representation or is not the same as recognition and ability to act,⁸⁰ being listened to is not the same as the ability to speak; nor is it achieved by listening to individuals as part of hegemonic listening. In Habermas’ theory of communicative action, we find thematizations of (communication-oriented and strategic) speaking and (understanding and accepting) listening; listeners are theorized as being in a position informed by speech-act-theory. Also, ‘the listener’ understands ‘this [position]’ as a correctly perceived act of speaking, ‘takes a position toward what [this position] demands, and directs her actions according to the “conventionally defined obligations.”’⁸¹ To focus more strongly on ‘listening-as-action as a sensitivity of corporeal beings who interact with each other’,⁸² we can also connect to Seyla Benhabib’s understanding of communication, which also integrates human corporeality.⁸³ Human beings don’t just hear sounds, but hear something that is an identifiable event, which leads Grüny to argue that hearing can be understood as an interpreting and culturally regulated process of socially and culturally situated subjects whose hearing is embedded in power relationships.⁸⁴ Accordingly, the political dimension of individual and societal listening manifests fundamentally as a result of responsiveness. What can be revealed via hearing and how that what is being heard is perceived, is – as we want to argue in analogy to Judith Butler’s concept of acceptability – integrated into regulations, conventions and rules that are conditions of what can be heard.⁸⁵

With respect to the role that listening plays for democratic coexistence, Grüny refers to Susan Bickford who has moved hearing to the centre of political philosophy, as well as to Benjamin Barber whose concept of democracy designed for participation clearly expresses a demand for political listening.⁸⁶ Barber describes ‘listening’ as ‘mutualistic art that by its very practice enhances equality’,⁸⁷ which has led Grüny to connect this idea to the publication Voice matters – Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism by Nick Couldry, a widely read text in media and communication studies.⁸⁸ More than Barber, who sees listening as a communication strategy to override the power structures in institutions, Bickford views listening not just as a communication strategy, but as ‘part of a conception of adversarial communication’⁸⁹ and thus as a possibility ‘to introduce possible actions in situations characterized by conflict and “dissonance”’.⁹⁰ This resonates with our demand to recognize differences in dissonant public spheres.

This nuanced concept of listening allows, as Leah Bassel emphasizes, to acknowledge another’s point of view not just as legitimate, but also to acknowledge and accept another’s point of view as constituting their position in society.⁹¹ The forms of hearing and listening that are discussed here are obviously not just automatic by-products of multiplying opportunities to express oneself in digital media cultures. Instead, we need to analyze structures and practices of hegemonic non-listening, deliberately question them, and overcome them. To do that, the challenge emerges not just for those affected by right-wing violence to have their experiences and views heard; those who are recognized as part of dominance culture⁹² must oppose any form of a racist ‘complicit silence’⁹³ so that the current non-hegemonic knowledge of racism can be become a subject of public discussion and the remembering of the consequences of right-wing violence can give rise to transformations in society.

The example of Rostock-Lichtenhagen exemplifies that stepping out of hegemonic speaking and listening is seldom successful as a linear process; actually, local Doing Memory in local public spheres that follows such a linear progression is often dismissed in public spheres beyond local regions. In 2002, during the city’s commemoration ceremony to remember the 10th anniversary of the pogrom, the then Lord Mayor of Rostock, Arno Pöker, warned to ‘not dismiss the event as history, but to see it as a challenge for the present and future’. During the 20th anniversary of the pogrom, which attracted the attention of many (mass) media outlets, on the other hand, the then Federal President of Germany, Joachim Gauck, advocated for a clean break to move on, a typical attitude to address racially motivated attacks of the past: ‘What makes us come together today in Lichtenhagen lies in the past – what we remember, what we bemoan, what makes us ashamed: all that happened 20 years ago. It is the past’.⁹⁴

It can be unmistakably stated that public, societal and cultural remembering in Germany – a de facto immigration country to which individuals with and/or without their own of familial migration experiences can and want to feel connected – rarely occurs. There have been such attempts, for example, when the city of Rostock, while thinking ahead to the 25^th anniversary of the program in 2017, clearly articulated that it wanted to reflect on the violent attacks of 1992 and to dedicate public spaces to do so. The city’s municipal council decided to establish a competition to design a memorial; the process to create the memorial as well as the memorial itself can be seen as an expression and materialization of hegemonic modalities of listening. The design of the artist group Schaum (‘Foam’) won the bid, entitled ‘Yesterday – Today – Tomorrow’. The goal of their design was not to focus on accusations or finger pointing, as the group expressed on their website about the memorial project, but to ‘ask about the actions of the individuals. How would we have acted – how did we act – and how will we deal with this issue in the future’.⁹⁵ Five columns made of white marble were ordered from Tyrol, and in 2017, these were placed in different locations in Rostock’s city centre and officially dedicated as the city’s memorial. Each of these columns is meant to represent a different area of failure – ‘politics’, ‘state authority’, ‘mob justice’, ‘media’ and ‘society’. It took until August 2018 for a sixth column to be dedicated. This sixth column was neither initiated nor financed by the city of Rostock (unlike the other five columns), but by the association Waldemar Hof e.V., an organization of local activists and concerned citizens, located on Waldemarstraße (Waldemarstreet) in Rostock, that also houses the association Diên Hồng – Gemeinsam unter einem Dach (‘Diên Hồng – Together under one roof’), an association that was started already in 1992 by Vietnamese people and their supporters, two months after the pogrom. The incentive to add this sixth column developed out of the criticism that the original five columns of the memorial focused exclusively on the perpetrators and mainstream society and had made the victims invisible. This sixth column, labelled ‘empathy’, designed by the same artist group and placed in the city centre, was meant, in the words of the artists, to appeal to ‘a positive interaction with all human beings in the sense of Tomorrow’.⁹⁶

We see the demand for this sixth column to remember the victims as an example for an attempt to reclaim the memory of those affected by the pogrom. The original direction by the city and the artists remained, both during the competition and the execution of the memorial, initially focused exclusively on the hegemonic ‘we’. The sixth column continues the lack of visibility of victims' perspectives, just like the first five columns. The sixth column, both via its title ‘empathy’ as well as its design, centres once again on the hegemonic experience of the pogrom. The two sides of the column are hollow, mimicking the bodily shapes of two individuals embracing each other, and they allow visitors to put their (‘normal sized’) bodies into one of the two hollow sides. The artist collectively describes it as follows: ‘Visitors can take on the posture of an embrace. An embrace is a universal human gestures; it is an invitation to communicate. It is an apology to the victims and is meant to […] appeal to a positive interaction with all human beings’.⁹⁷ When the sixth column was officially dedicated, the event’s media coverage didn’t include any voices of those directly affected by the pogrom, but included those of the city’s representatives, emphasizing that the message about ‘recognizing and empathizing with feelings and emotions of others’⁹⁸ is directed at everyone.

This act of Doing Memory initially forgot about the victims. It was an act of Doing Memory that didn’t hear those affected by the racist violence, neither in the initial conceptualization of the project nor in its execution. The conflict that arose from the initial design and dedication of the five columns gave voice to the institutions that failed to prevent the pogrom; but conflicts remained as hegemonic listening is also inscribed in the realization of the sixth column. Hegemonic listening assimilates the unheard who are imagined as passive and because of its (failed) attempt to compensate for what was forgotten and its general appeal; hegemonic listening is barely qualified to provide those affected by the pogrom and their relatives with recognition and inclusion in public spheres.

In the spirit of Iris Marion Young, who suggests alternative communication practices like storytelling in order to create ‘opinion forming publics’,⁹⁹ the art project Gedenkstücke (‘commemoration pieces’), a performative project based on archival texts about the 1992 pogrom set to music, pushes against hegemonic listening. It was implemented in Rostock in 2019 by Stefan Krüskemper, Oscar Ardila and Michaela Nasoetion. The accompanying web-app allows access to visual and audio recordings from the 2019 performances and, via an interactive map of Rostock, provides information where the performances took place. On the app, one can listen to the audio recordings of the performances where individuals from Rostock transformed the archival texts into acapella songs. This practice of remembering facilitates listening, it lets experiences be heard, and it provides those singing and listening a corporeal experience – this practice establishes prerequisites for the developing of communal connections in a participatory democracy. The 48 texts selected to commemorate the pogrom were set to music in five categories, the Rathaus (town hall), the Ostsee-Zeitung (‘Baltic See Newspaper’ – the local paper), the JAZ (Jugend Alternativ Zentrum – the local youth centre), the Polizeiinspektion (the police station) and the Sonnenblumenhaus. Most of the texts that were used come from excerpts of TV news reports or from reports of the press spokesperson of the political party SPD, the then director of the police station, and the then commissioner for foreigners (Ausländerbeauftragte). Again, the voices of those affected by the pogrom are again almost completely absent, and this project falls prey yet again to hegemonic hearing and listening. Still, first signs of a change around Doing Memory that make allowances for a critique of systemic racism and of the systems of hegemonic listening are visible in this Rostock project; however, such critiques don’t just develop automatically, but have been and had to be fought for by activist, artistic and media-based interventions in dissonant public spheres.

4. Summary

Using the racist pogrom at Rostock-Lichtenhagen in August of 1992 as an example, this chapter proposes an expansion of Habermas’ conceptualization of the public sphere and democratic discourse. Theoretically, we introduce a politics of listening in order to show empirically that diverse practices of remembering right-wing violence can only change the basic narrative surrounding Germany’s post-war society if persistent structures of hegemonic listening are revised.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Tanja Thomas

Notes

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