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Theater 32.3 (2002) 61-67



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Out with the Right!
Or, Let's Not Let Them in Again

Thomas Irmer
Translated by Claudia Wilsch

[Figures]

Germany is full of earnest attempts to tackle the problem of right-wing radicalism. The most serious effort seems to be the motion to ban the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). Thus ends an era in which parties like Die Republikaner (an extreme-Right, neo-Nazi party) were more or less tolerated as an ugly side effect of the democratic state and its political culture. Even if a ban on specific political parties succeeds and their illegality has only moderately nasty consequences, everything is happening much too late. The 1990s, a decade that will be remembered as the awkward phase of reunification, saw the unprecedented growth of a modern, right-wing radical subculture. Even now, with legal maneuvers to ban political parties, one cannot ignore how the alarming growth and bold confidence of the right-wing radical scene has been continually indulged by an overly tolerant judiciary.

This pattern can be demonstrated by one example: the Battle of the Nations memorial in Leipzig commemorates one of the most important battles against Napoleon, which took place near the city in 1813. The memorial was dedicated as a German national monument in 1913. A relatively apolitical lookout tower whose nationalistic aura was attributed to Kaiser-era pomp, the memorial was maintained by the GDR as a symbol of Leipzig. After 1990, the plaza in front of the monument quickly became a popular parade ground for right-wing groups. Clearly, their presence wasn't about the commemoration of anti-Napoleonic battles. The plaza, with its architectural bombast and historical connotations, was used as the ideal backdrop for the right-wing group's staging of their own battle. The city of Leipzig tried to defend itself against these scenes with demonstration bans—but in vain, as the judges of the Highest Administrative Court, 150 kilometers away in Bautzen, lifted the bans with regularity. [End Page 61]

There is little talk in Germany about this widespread culture of aiding and abetting. Instead, one encounters mediated images of the demonstrators: East German youths in bomber jackets marauding through drab dorm cities. Through various and constant portrayals, the media suggest that these youths epitomize the entire phenomenon; they are neatly packaged as the GDR's trash, products of an earlier ideology that can't be integrated into the reunified state.

Germany is also full of earnest attempts to make theater political again. Christoph Schlingensief is the only person, however, who theatricalizes politics. In 1998 at the Prater—one of the Berlin Volksbühne's smaller venues, where he was resident director and producer of wild, anarchic political revues—Schlingensief founded a political party called Chance 2000. The party was created to mobilize apolitical outsiders of the market economy: the unemployed and other disenfranchised groups were supposed to elect each other and thus expose the cold professionalism of established parties like the left-wing PDS (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus, or Democratic Socialist Party), developed after reunification out of East Germany's only ruling party, the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or Socialist Unity Party of Germany). Political content and theatrical strategy were practically indistinguishable, and in this ambivalent zone between politics and theater Schlingensief succeeded again and again in creating events that exposed and challenged German society's political helplessness. Ultimately, he wasn't able to change the political landscape through Chance 2000, but for a moment Schlingensief was a source of friction in the political machinery. The "proper" parties felt compelled to object to an outsider, although it wasn't clear whether he was really playing politics or merely performing them. In the end, he fooled everybody. [End Page 62]

His Foreigners Out project in Vienna two years ago (officially titled Please Love Austria) represented an extreme of political-theatrical ambivalence. Sitting in a container—just as in the TV show Big Brother—were real foreigners whom passersby in downtown Vienna could select for deportation. What had obviously...

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