Problematizing Political Violence in the Federal Republic of Germany: A Hauntological Analysis of the NSU Terror and a Hyper-Exceptionalized “9/11”

This chapter discusses the lives and deaths of some of the forgotten victims of far-right violence in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; West Germany). Specific focus will be on three brutal killings committed by the German neo-Nazi terror group Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (National Socialist Underground; NSU) in 2000 and 2001, which were overshadowed by the violent events in the US in 2001 that made global headlines as “9/11.” The September 11 attacks are often described as a caesura or turning point in the history of terrorism and political violence. As we will show, however, in the FRG they reinforced a preexisting tendency among the white German majority to forget about victims of far-right violence. While the September 11 attacks were conceptualized as a hyper-exceptional event—as “9/11”—supposedly changing the course of history forever, the NSU killings were wrongly classified as ordinary crimes committed by foreigners. As we shall see, they were labeled “Bosphorus murders” by investigating authorities and derogatively referred to as “kebab murders” in the German press. While the police response, media reaction, and NSU trial (re)traumatized the victims, they gave the (white) majority a sense of closure.

In what follows, we analyze the affect-laden “lingering trouble” that the NSU killings and their problematic reception history provoke through a critical (new) materialist hauntological perspective. Such trouble requires a hauntological perspective, we would like to argue, as hauntology not only captures the immaterial characteristics of that trouble as they unsettle spatiotemporality, but, in addition, it captures the material events that provoked said trouble and allows us to show how some of the most horrific home-grown terrorist acts in the postwar Federal Republic have been prescribed an “exotic violence [from] elsewhere” status. As a space-time–crossing perspective, hauntology sheds a different light on the hyper-exceptionalized September 11 attacks vis-à-vis NSU’s exoticized terror, as it disturbs the narrative of linear temporal progression that supports the construction of 9/11 as “9/11”; that is, as the most important caesura in the contemporary history of terrorism and political violence. It does so by zooming in on moments pre-, during, and post-NSU murders in nonlinear, diffracted ways, showing that there was a tendency to link crime and terrorism to imagined and real violence in other parts of the world. To unpack and problematize this “exoticizing elsewhere” dynamic and its many haunting materializations across space-time, we therefore rely on the materialist methodology of diffraction, that, because of its particular philosophical roots and queering nature, neatly complements such a hauntological point of view.

By diffractively weaving together critical theoretical snippets on the troubling powers of hauntology and the September 11 attacks’ presumed hyper-exceptionalism and caesura status (9/11 as “9/11”); vignettes and other affect-laden phenomena that paint a fuller picture of the NSU terror; and some of the Federal Republic of Germany’s Annual Security Reports, we piece together how this “exoticizing elsewhere” dynamic is constituted.