Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the communicative processes by which young neo-Nazis render the threat of violence in urban space legible for particular publics, as well as attempts to intervene upon and transform this semiotic landscape by oppositional actors.

Paper long abstract:

The emergence of urban spaces notorious for racist violence and considered dangerous for ethnic minorities has been a salient preoccupation in both public and scholarly debates in Germany. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork with extreme right groups in East Berlin, this paper examines the communicative practices--performance, visibilization, erasure--with which they contest urban space and generate areas of fear for particular publics. I look at the deployment of semiotic techniques for the inscription of violence into the aesthetics of urban landscapes through the use of material elements: the body and bodily accessories, graffiti, propaganda items, or direct political actions. Providing a sophisticated repertoire of tactical possibilities, they enable the weaving of violence into aesthetic forms in ways that differentially address distinct audiences and perceptual sensibilities; alarming and hence effectively exclusionary for some, they remain hardly visible for others. At the same time, the paper also considers forces that seek to disrupt these semiotic landscapes by purifying them from indicators of violent potentialities. Such efforts at reconfiguring the aesthetics of urban space employ operations of erasure to conceal signs that may provoke anxiety and fear; as well as tactics of exposure that aim to exorcise sites of their menacing significations precisely by rendering their violence visible. In particular, I analyze how activists regularly embark upon excursions in which they remove racist and nationalist signs from the urban landscape, as well as a local mobilization by a coalition of state-like organizations in opposition to a neo-Nazi march.