Nitzan Shoshan

From the back cover:
Since German reunification in 1990, there has been widespread concern about marginalized young people who, faced with bleak prospects for their future, have embraced increasingly violent forms of racist nationalism that glorify the country’s Nazi past. The Management of Hate, Nitzan Shoshan’s riveting account of the year and a half he spent with these young right-wing extremists in East Berlin, reveals how they contest contemporary notions of national identity and defy the clichés that others use to represent them.

Shoshan situates them within what he calls the governance of affect, a broad body of discourses and practices aimed at orchestrating their attitudes toward cultural difference—from legal codes and penal norms to rehabilitative techniques and pedagogical strategies. Governance has conventionally been viewed as rational administration, while emotions have ordinarily been conceived of as individual states. Shoshan, however, convincingly questions both assumptions. Instead, he offers a fresh view of governance as pregnant with affect and of hate as publicly mediated and politically administered. Shoshan argues that the state’s policies push these youths into a right-extremist corner instead of integrating them in ways that could curb their nationalist racism. His point is certain to resonate across European and non-European contexts where, amid robust xenophobic nationalisms, hate becomes precisely the object of public dispute.

Powerful and compelling, The Management of Hate provides a rare and disturbing look inside Germany’s right-wing extremist world, and shines critical light on a German nationhood haunted by its own historical contradictions.

See: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10882.html

Not strong enough to govern at the national level or in large cities, the far right in Germany today finds itself in a position very different from India, Brazil, Turkey, the Philippines, or other countries where authoritarian right-wing populism has consolidated its grip on power. Its relationship to urban space and its capacity to shape city planning therefore contrast with these other cases. Yet, while arguably more limited, the discussion below aims to show that they are nevertheless significant. To be sure, the political sway of right-wing populists in Germany has surged in recent years. In the early 2000s, the virulently right-wing extremist National-Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) provoked panic when it won a handful of state parliament seats. In hindsight, such gains appear negligible as compared with the current triumphs of the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which in 2017 became the third largest in the Federal Parliament. Yet right-wing populists have largely remained in the opposition. Especially in larger constituencies—such as the Federal or state levels or in the big cities—they have so far fallen short of winning sufficient support for staking claims to lead governing coalitions. As importantly, and for reasons linked with Germany’s relationship to its National-Socialist past, all other political forces shun any form of collaboration with them even where they do score relatively high results. Their lot therefore contrasts, too, with numerous other European countries where the far right has sometimes been quite successful in consolidating political power at subnational scales. In Germany, by contrast, periodic far right gains—and its contemporary meteoric rise—have instead sparked calls for increased government commitment to and investment in the struggle against its further expansion.

The 2015 “migrant crisis” paved the way for the rise of the far right party,
Alternative fur Deutchland (AfD), in Germany. While economic insecurity is
often quoted as a key contributor to the party’s popularity, the dynamics are
far more complex.

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Die Ankun! von fast eineinhalb Millionen Migrant*innen und Asylsuchenden in den
Jahren 2015 und 2016 führte innerhalb der Europäischen Union sowie in vielen ihrer
einzelnen Mitgliedsstaaten zu einer politischen Krise. In Ländern wie Deutschland oder
Schweden, wo eine verhältnismäßig hohe Anzahl von Menschen aufgenommen wurden,
führte dies auf lokaler Ebene, in Dörfern, Städten und Regionen zudem zu logistischen
Krisen. Fast ein halbes Jahrzehnt später sieht es in Deutschland so aus, als hätte sich
die Situation beruhigt. Sporthallen wurden geräumt und erfüllen schon lange wieder
ihren eigentlichen Zweck. Viele der Migrant*innen sind in eigene Wohnungen gezogen,
sprechen genügend Deutsch, um zurecht zu kommen, und haben Arbeit gefunden, auch
wenn die Arbeitslosigkeitsrate und Unterbeschä!igung unter Ge"üchteten immer noch
signi#kant höher ist als im Rest der Bevölkerung (Bundesagentur für Arbeit 2020). Und
auch wenn die ö$entliche Angst vor islamistischem Terrorismus und Immigrantenkriminalität
(nun ›Klan-Kriminalität‹ genannt, z.%B. Bundeskriminalamt 2019) bestehen bleibt,
haben einige tödliche Zwischenfälle kürzlich die Aufmerksamkeit auf die o$enbar sehr
viel größere Bedrohung gerichtet, die von rechtsextremer Gewalt ausgeht. Diese Attacken
durch Neonazis haben die ö$entliche Wahrnehmung einer allgemeinen Harmlosigkeit
der Rechten als ober"ächlich entlarvt, als ein Ausdruck von Zögerlichkeit, von Fragilität
und Resignation, von Zweifel und Reue. Man ist weit entfernt von einer konsequenten
Entschlossenheit, die ein tiefgreifendes politisches Umdenken anzeigen würde.

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This special issue examines welfare programs as key sites for interrogating the
contested convergences of discourses, ethics, and politics of citizenship in
Europe. The “parenting encounters” that the authors so compellingly analyze
stand where neoliberal innovations in the governance of the social meet the contemporary
politics of diversity. They open up scenes for contested enactments of
citizenship and belonging, solidarity and care, hope, and fear. Ostensibly, such
encounters deploy affective interpellations and idioms of publicness to extend
state effects throughout the intimate sphere of child-rearing. In this light, they
may appear as policy correlates of racialized and gendered public preoccupations
about reproductive politics and social fragmentation. In fact, however, as the
reader of the articles presented here soon comes to see, parenting turns out to
operate as itself a legally and institutionally administered site of activation. Put
differently, it is not only the target of technologies of intimate governance but also
itself a device for pulling in migrant parents to far broader projects of citizenship.
It becomes a summoning, a bind that recruits participants in performances of
social reconstitution and renovation that both express and respond to fears
about national futures.

How have recent political developments impacted the practice and ethics of ethnographic
research, especially given the growing anthropological interest in studying the far right? Drawing on my
own experience as a researcher under a false name, in this article I reconsider the ethical imperatives of
full disclosure and informed consent in the context of ethnographic fieldwork. I argue that such ethical
standards presume an untenable notion of the speaking subject by granting the ethnographer a fixity
and objectivity that, furthermore, we ordinarily deny our interlocutors. Instead, I ask, how do we draw
our interlocutors into webs of complicity as we withhold or obfuscate information in our transactions
with them? How, in turn, do they call upon us to reciprocate by upholding their own dissimulations?
In particular, I look at four problems of identity and transparency in ethnographic fieldwork, which I
call coherence, performativity, secrecy, and complicity. While conducting ethnographic research under a
pseudonym brings into exceptionally sharp relief the intensive metapragmatic labor entailed in positioning
oneself in the field, I argue that the questions it raises are of a more general nature for ethnographic
research. Indeed, such questions saturate social life at large and hence, necessarily, ethnographic approaches
to its study.

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This article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in
particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in
today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England,
Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative
understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive
constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even
far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military
failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline
Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as
contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and
extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity
for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity.
Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as
Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek
to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism
introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous
fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be
particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended
notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering
afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.

en el presente artículo se presenta la reflexión sobre la poca atención que los antropólogos han prestado a temas desagradables. Las explicaciones existentes de dicha laguna, se argumenta, son válidas pero insuficientes. Con base en experiencias de trabajo de campo etnográfico con jóvenes neonazis en Berlín, el artículo sugiere que la evasión de temas difíciles en la antropología es resultado de tres fuerzas interrelacionadas: en primer lugar, las normas éticas y académicas que han dominado la disciplina; en segundo, su ubicación en la economía de producción del conocimiento académico, en gran medida externa a la antropología, y por último, las contradicciones e impases del campo etnográfico.

Con base en trabajo de campo con grupos de jóvenes extremistas de derecha en las calles de Berlín, este artículo contribuye a los debates en torno a la derecha extrema europea al abordar a los sujetos de la investigación como incrustados plenamente dentro de la sociedad alemana y de la etnicización de las identidades políticas. Argumento que la política de los jóvenes de extrema derecha depende de sentidos de lugar y de sensualidades de la alteridad que entretejen estereotipificaciones étnicas en las geografías de la diferencia de la ciudad multiétnica. Esta política hace referencia particularmente a una colectividad etnicizada de “turcos” y “árabes”. A su vez, la negociación cotidiana de un nacionalismo racista y de un paisaje multiétnico por parte de los extremistas de derecha hace eco de debates europeos bastante más amplios sobre la inmigración y la tolerancia cultural. Esto borra las fronteras que ostensiblemente definen a la derecha extrema como un terreno político distinto. La mirada etnográfica revela cómo los ultranacionalistas viven con, en vez de resolver, las contradicciones de una política situada saturada de prejuicios, y cuestiona las aproximaciones convencionales al nacionalismo racista europeo, mismas que emplean categorías políticas abstractas.

The governance of young right-extremists in Germany has spawned a proliferation of therapeutic procedures for their political rectification. This article examines three such efforts in order to expose the excesses and paradoxes that dovetail with, and at times seem to overwhelm, the presumed biopolitical rationality of governance. The penal regimes that bear on young right-extremists call into being a peculiar figure: the political delinquent. In turn, these regimes form part of what I call the management of hate, a wide field of knowledge/praxis invested in governing the relation of German publics to cultural alterity. The elaboration and administration of corrective methods to political delinquents, key to the management of hate, thus reveals itself as inscribed within cultural and political aporias, rather than as fundamentally concerned with the economistic management of populations. Specifically, the intractable specter of  National Socialism and the troubled relation of contemporary German nationalism to immigration and difference haunt these therapeutic regimes, which often end up inciting precisely those affective dispositions they seek to curb. The governance of hate in Germany, I conclude, reveals itself as a politically-charged social field, suffused with historical specters and cultural antinomies, and generative of tautological irrationalities and inexorable excesses.

This article reconsiders the question of nostalgic consumption in East Germany as embedded not within a national or a regional (post-socialist) politics of time, as much literature has done, but rather within a global post-Fordist reconfiguration of the relation between time, consumption, and politics. Examining an underclass East Berlin neighborhood that has come to epitomize ‘pastness’, I show the salience of material prosperity – or its lack – in shaping the senses of time of its inhabitants. Especially for the younger generation, nostalgic commodities mediate the growing abyss between loss and accumulation, futures and pasts, nostalgic longings and unrealistic aspirations. I argue that the nexus of time, politics, and consumption has been transformed with the fading away of what has been called the future perfect (the political temporality of utopian projects) and its metamorphosis into what I term here the past conditional, the temporality of lost futures, irredeemable opportunities, and vanquished political imaginaries.

Con base en trabajo de campo etnográfico realizado junto con activistas locales del pueblo de Santa Fe, en el Distrito Federal, el presente artículo argumenta que una configuración temporal particular de la crisis y el trauma ejerce un impacto duradero y negativo en los compromisos con proyectos culturales y políticos. Se busca contribuir a debates académicos contemporáneos sobre la transformación de los imaginarios y las experiencias temporales, así como sobre críticas académicas a la gobernanza urbana neoliberal y a las políticas de la democracia participativa en las ciudades.

Spain Unmoored: Migration, Conversion, and the Politics of Islam
Mikaela H. Rogozen-Soltar (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2017)
Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin
Sareeta Amrute (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016)
White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race
Gloria Wekker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016)

Elections will be held in the German states of Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt on 13 March, with some commentators viewing the elections as an effective vote of confidence on Angela Merkel’s policy on refugees. Nitzan Shoshan assesses the political response to the incidents which took place in Cologne and other German cities on New Year’s eve. He states that while some of the issues raised by political actors, such as reforming Germany’s laws on sexual assault, are undoubtedly justified, there is a danger of mainstream parties inadvertently legitimising the narratives of the German far-right.

A large number of rallies have been held in Germany over recent months by the ‘Pegida’ movement (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West). Nitzan Shoshan notes that while Pegida have made headlines across the world, they are by no means the first far-right movement in Germany to protest against immigration and Islam. He writes that the experiences of previous far-right groups provide some insights on the potential harm that such movements can cause in local communities.