Escape Artists: Germany, Fortress Europe, and the Situationist Rescripting of Travel

"Mobility is our Goal" is the motto displayed on the homepage of Schleuser.net, the official Internet home of—and the shorthand for—the German public relations firm and lobbying organization Bundesverband Schleppen & Schleusen (Federal Association for Trafficking and Human Smuggling), which was established in 2002. The slogan appears against a light blue background dotted with the fleeting image of swiftly moving cirrus clouds. Below the organization's motto appears its logo, which smartly combines its name with a two-dimensional triangular orange arrow that guides the viewer toward the entry of the Web site. Appropriate for an organization committed to serving an international clientele, Schleuser's Web portal provides one with the choice of learning about its services in either German or the international business lingua franca, English.

On its main navigational page, viewers encounter the same cirrus-cloud-lined sky theme from the front page. The Schleuser logo is here enhanced by a white, cometlike flash moving through its center at intervals of a few seconds (Figure 1). The page is overlaid with a navigational chart of the Web site in the form of a seemingly borderless, multidimensional map in which each path dissolves into the background (Figure 2).

Readers can learn more about the organization's lobbying activities, conferences, and ad campaigns, as well as how to contact its central communication team, sign up for exclusive training workshops, or buy genuine Schleuser-brand merchandise such as books, printed tote bags, flashlights, or balloons.

The design of these first navigational pages reveals the care with which this young organization seeks to establish brand recognition

Figure 1.

Schleuser.net. Image courtesy of Bundesverband Schleppen & Schleusen.

Figure 2.

Schleuser.net's services. Image courtesy of Bundesverband Schleppen & Schleusen.

and customer loyalty. For Schleuser, whose public-relations activities transpire in the travel sector, this entails a mixing of global and generally empty "movement" signifiers: the easily recognizable orange triangle; an interactive road map; the soft, pleasing cirrus clouds; and a set of broad slogans in praise of the vague term "mobility."¹ We might expect the mediation of a universal signifier such as "mobility" in the marketing of, for example, automobiles, cell phones, or other commodities; however, Schleuser's marketing strategy here is simply to dispense with the mediation between commodity and its sensuous presentation—its aesthetic appeal—by offering up the empty notion of "mobility" itself as an exchangeable commodity. Evoking such a collectively identifiable yet exceedingly pliable signifier is part of the group's repertoire of discursive interventions.

Schleuser surely keeps up its appearance as a reputable business enterprise on these first couple of navigation pages, but the clever deception quickly begins to unravel the moment one navigates to the page entitled "About Us" in which the organization makes its business purpose abundantly clear: Bundesverband Schleppen & Schleusen "is a lobbying organization for business enterprises specializing in undocumented cross border human traffic. . . . The explicit objective of Schleuser is image improvement for 'SchlepperInnen und SchleuserInnen' (men and women who facilitate undocumented cross border traffic)." The suspicion that many viewers of the Web site undoubtedly must have felt about the organization's name thus quickly turns out to be confirmed: Schleuser's stated mission is to help legitimize human smuggling and decriminalize those coyotes or human smugglers—negatively referred to as "Schleuser" and "Schlepper" in common parlance—whose work the organization, with a degree of provocative bravado, sees as part of a legitimate effort promoting universal human rights and the free movement of people across national and supranational (i.e., European Union) borders. In their broad repertoire of activities, from the Web site to educational seminars and installation art, the collective behind Schleuser parodies the use of international marketing language and commodity aesthetics and thereby questions the shifting conditions and valences with which terms such as "mobility" and "security" are applied to the international flow of capital, goods, and people. The official name of the organization, Bundesverband Schleppen & Schleusen, reveals the organization's masquerade as...