Abstract
This article examines the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of artistic grief work in the 2014 text assemblage Blumen für Otello by contemporary German Jewish artist and activist Esther Dischereit. Dischereit’s work offers a complex engagement with racialized violence in post-unification Germany, tackling the murders perpetrated by the Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (National Socialist Underground, NSU) between 2000 and 2007. In their response to the crimes, the German authorities wilfully obstructed investigative efforts and ultimately failed to deliver justice. This situation was exacerbated by a public and media discourse that consistently trivialized the crimes and dehumanized their victims. Against this backdrop, Dischereit’s text offers an artistic intervention into the hierarchies of ‘grievability’ (Butler) and care that enabled such failures in the first place. Drawing on theorists Judith Butler, Çiğdem Inan and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, I propose that Blumen für Otello develops and champions an aesthetics, ethics and politics of dispossession. Employing strategies of transveral affectation and mourning, multi-layered translation and post-catastrophic improvisation, Dischereit’s approach has the potential to undo the division between grievable and ungrievable lives. As such, it may foster reparative modes of agency and relationality that enable the (re-)construction of alternative fields of care.
The future belongs to those who are ready to take in a bit of the other, as well as being what they themselves are (Stuart Hall, ‘Subjects in History’)Footnote1
Introduction: ‘Feeling Down’ or The Potentials of Negativity
This article explores what aesthetic, ethical and political potentials might arise from a position of negativity, understood as both a state of denied subjecthood and precarious citizenship — of being ‘less than’ — and the ‘debilitating’ affects and effects produced by this experience.Footnote2 I will investigate this issue in relation to migrantized and racialized subjects in contemporary Germany and their affective responses to what sociologist Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez describes as ‘migration-coloniality necropolitics’.Footnote3 She defines the coloniality of migration as ‘the reactivation of colonial residues in the logic of cisheteropatriarchal ableist racial capitalism, manifested in the governance of migration, migration policies and laws as well as in the cultural production of Europe’s racialized-migrantized other’.Footnote4 Necropolitics, according to Achille Mbembe, who coined the term, entails ‘contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death’.Footnote5 Necropower governs ‘who may live and who must die’, resulting in ‘vast populations [being] subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead [italics original]’.Footnote6 Both theorists grapple with the fact that certain populations are systematically produced as less-than-human in historical and present-day configurations of racism, (post-)coloniality and of the migration-asylum-nexus, asking what these ‘new and unique forms of social existence’ mean for established conceptions of subjectivity, agency, relationality, and resistance.Footnote7
Having to forge a life when one’s existence is seen as ‘disposable’Footnote8 produces a profound sense of ‘feeling down’, to quote José Esteban Muñoz.Footnote9 This can encompass emotional states such as terror, anger, grief, melancholia, heartbreak, and despair. My contribution to this special issue asks what happens when individuals and collectives are unwilling or unable to let go of such negative feelings, because the violence that causes them is ‘ongoing’ or endemic rather than exceptional.Footnote10 How can one go on in the face of such ‘ongoingness’, and what might a going on look like that sustains the refusal to let go, while remaining open to the possibility of things going differently in the future?
I will examine this question through the lens of Esther Dischereit’s Blumen für Otello.Footnote11 Dischereit’s 2014 text is an assemblage of poems, dialogue, narrative passages, and archival materials that offers a complex artistic engagement with post-unification racially motivated violence, particularly the murders perpetrated by the Nationalsozalistischer Untergrund (NSU) between 2000 and 2007. The NSU was a far-right terror group which was active in Germany between 1999 and 2011 and whose crimes included bombings, bank robberies and fatal attacks on nine German citizens and residents of Turkish, Kurdish and Greek ancestry, as well as a German policewoman. The crimes of the NSU became publicly known in 2011 and some of its members were put on trial from 2013 to 2018.Footnote12 The official and public responses to these racist attacks and their victims were, for the most part, characterized by what Ayşe Güleç und Johanna Schaffer denounce as ‘strukturelle […] Empathielosigkeit’.Footnote13 This lack of empathy stemmed from a ‘differential distribution of grievability’, to use Judith Butler’s terminology,Footnote14 resulting from the devaluation of certain lives under regimes of ‘migration-coloniality necropolitics’.Footnote15 Since the victims were constructed and perceived as less-than-human, their deaths did not register as such and could not be mourned by either their families or the broader public.
Dischereit’s work offers an artistic intervention in precisely these dynamics of unequal distribution and devaluation, fostering receptivity to the destruction of life and potential entailed by the NSU crimes. This endeavour, on the one hand, appears rooted in Dischereit’s long-standing concern for social justice and driven by an ethics of coexistence and recognition, which sees the victims first and foremost as ‘Nachbarn’ or ‘Mitmenschen’.Footnote16 On the other hand, Jewishness also underpins Dischereit’s engagement with the crimes, particularly in relation to Holocaust memory: Dischereit’s desire to collectively grieve for the NSU victims was also motivated by post-war Germany’s inability to mourn the victims of the Holocaust and frantic urge to ‘move on’: ‘Es war mir ja schon im Zusammenhang mit den Ermordeten der Shoa klar geworden, wie schmerzhaft es für Überlebende ist, dass dieses neue Wir sie nach wie vor ausgrenzt und nicht empathisch begleitet’.Footnote17 Throughout her entire oeuvre, Dischereit therefore understands her Jewishness as a call for solidarity, based on a commitment to linking, exposing and intervening in past and present forms of racism as well as interrelated practices of dehumanization, such as misogyny, ableism or classism.Footnote18
In Blumen für Otello, these interventions centre on negative emotions, particularly grief and despair. The following article investigates these affects as sites for the emergence of alternative conceptions of agency, subjectivity and relationality, which have the potential to undo the dehumanizing ‘metrics of grievability’ and foster transversal solidarities.Footnote19 The grief work in Dischereit’s Blumen für Otello thus has a resistant and reparative quality, if we understand repair, with Muñoz, as the desire ‘in the wake of the negative’ to ‘reconstruct a relational field’.Footnote20
Unrecognizable Subjects and the Impossibility of Grief
To build my argument about the potentials of grief work in Dischereit’s text, it is necessary to engage more deeply with the dominant political, cultural and affective response to the NSU murders. Dischereit herself, as well as a range of activists and scholars who are preoccupied with the crimes and their aftermath, have repeatedly emphasized that reactions by the state, the media and the wider public were neglectful and dehumanizing.Footnote21 The investigating authorities categorically ruled out a racist motive or links behind the murders for several years, instead casting suspicion on the victims and their families. Once the NSU group was officially uncovered, making a racist background of the crimes increasingly hard to deny, the German Verfassungsschutz (domestic intelligence service) colluded in the destruction of evidence. This happened, in part, to hush up the role that its undercover agents had played in the consolidation of post-unification right-wing extremism. These investigative failures were accompanied by media coverage that perpetuated racist stereotypes and contributed to the trivialization of the crimes and their far-reaching implications for the state of German democracy.Footnote22 The initiative Tribunale — ‘NSU-Komplex auflösen’ speaks of a ‘composite of neo-Nazi terror and institutional racism’ that both enabled the crimes and stood in the way of their discovery, prosecution and potential reparation.Footnote23
The sociologist Çiğdem Inan notes that these acts of obfuscation amounted to a ‘sekundäre Viktimisierung’ of those targeted by the murders.Footnote24 Dischereit goes even further when describing them as a second, ‘nachfolgende[s] Verbrechen’.Footnote25 Inan is particularly interested in the affective repercussions of such practices of denial, arguing that ‘the failure to perceive racist violence and the injuries it causes intercedes into grief and renders it impossible’.Footnote26 This produces what she calls dispossessed grief,Footnote27 which affects both the families of the victims and the broader public sphere. Inan draws on Butler,Footnote28 who famously establishes a link between the grievability and the intelligibility of lives: ‘Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, “there is a life that will have never been lived,” sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost’.Footnote29 Butler emphasizes that the resource of grievability is unequally distributed, excluding and devaluing a range of non-normative subjects who fall outside dominant frames of ‘recognizability’.Footnote30 Under conditions of ‘migration-coloniality necropolitics’, of which the ‘NSU-Komplex’ is one manifestation, certain, mostly non-white, populations are thus cast as ‘other than life’,Footnote31 so that their deaths are not experienced as a loss of life. For the families, this leads to a situation of denied grief and sustained negative affectivity, since their losses can neither be mourned nor processed. The broader public, by contrast, responds with ‘affective disconnection’,Footnote32 since the dead are not perceived as proper citizen subjects and part of the national collective.
The important question raised by Inan concerns the potentials for agency and relationality under such conditions of dispossession and disposability. For this, she turns to Butler and other theorists,Footnote33 to differentiate between two kinds of dispossession that are at play in the context of the ‘NSU-Komplex’. One is the result of practices of necropolitical governmentality that confer upon certain populations the status of ‘other than life’-ness or ‘thingness’.Footnote34 The other mode of dispossession refers to an ontological condition of being ‘ecstatic’, as Butler puts it in Giving an Account of Oneself, meaning that ‘we cannot exist without addressing the other and without being addressed by the other, and that there is no wishing away our fundamental sociality’.Footnote35 Butler here (and elsewhere in their work) critically engages with conceptions of subjectivity that cast it as stable, transparent, bounded, and sovereign. The notion of ecstasy, by contrast, highlights that the subject is always dislocated, ‘repeatedly find[ing] itself outside itself’, by virtue of its ontological entanglement with various real and symbolic Others.Footnote36 Certain experiences, such as desire, or indeed, grief bring to the fore this constitutive interrelatedness and can therefore be understood as ‘ecstatic’, as also proposed by Isabell Lorey: ‘Ekstatische Erfahrungen und Emotionen entsprechen dem Prekärsein jedes Lebewesens, das nie gänzlich autonom und sich zu eigen sein kann, denn es ist von anderen und Umwelten abhängig und deshalb sozial’.Footnote37
Inan builds on these insights when suggesting that grief work therefore may harbour the potential for a different relationality and politics that undoes the separation between grievable and ungrievable lives. The dislocation and dispossession of the sovereign subject in grief, if embraced rather than disavowed, may prompt a ‘refusal of the powerful fictionality of autonomous subjectivity itself’.Footnote38 This refusal ‘opens up space for the contagion, affectation, and receptivity that make transversal solidarizations […] possible in the first place’.Footnote39 The notion of contagion is noteworthy here, since it is oppositional to the anti-relational, violent immunization that, according to Inan, drives the affective politics of racism.Footnote40 Such immunization enables selective acts of ‘affective disconnection’ from certain others, in the service of upholding fictions of separateness, purity and autonomy.Footnote41 Contagion furthermore implies a state of being affected, which, in its passivity, scopes out modes of agency that differ from established, sovereign conceptions of (political) subjectivity. These may include practices of refusing and not reproducing, of staying-with and sharing, of dwelling and attending to, of improvising, and of going on despite everything.
Aesthetics, Ethics and Politics of Dispossession in Blumen für Otello
I now turn to Esther Dischereit’s Blumen für Otello, using dispossession as a lens to engage with the ‘Klagelieder’-section of this work. I will centre my analysis on questions of listening, voice and receptivity on the one hand, and on practices of translation and improvisation on the other. As mentioned previously, Dischereit’s Blumen für Otello is composed of different parts and genres: a set of poems at the beginning of the text entitled ‘Klagelieder’; a libretto comprising scenic and narrative passages; and an appendix, which contains various documentary materials. Apart from its mix of textual genres and fictionalized as well as documentary parts, Blumen für Otello stands out for its inclusion of a Turkish translation of almost all its parts. The importance of translation as a practice, concept and mode is also highlighted by the fact that, since 2014, Dischereit has staged public performances of this work in collaboration with the Turkish German DJ İpek İpekçioğlu.Footnote42
In the genesis of Blumen für Otello, the ‘Klagelieder’ came first and were initially publicized as a radio play aired on Deutschlandradiokultur in 2013.Footnote43 This choice of a public-facing and communal medium resonates with Dischereit’s stated intention of rebalancing the unequal economies of attention and grievability outlined previously: on the one hand, Dischereit wanted to counter the dominant focus on the perpetrators by making visible ‘die Betroffenen und die Getöteten’.Footnote44 On the other hand, she chose the age-old genre of the lamentation to instigate an overdue process of collective and public mourning (I will return to the genre of the Klagelied in my discussion of translation below). This ‘öffentliche […] Trauer [italics original]’ comprises a significant ethical and reparative task for her:Footnote45 ‘Die Frage ist, ob wir als “Wir” auch trauern können. Ich denke, das muss geschehen’.Footnote46 In relation to grieving, the poems can hence be understood as performative, in that they enact what they describe. They are a form of social action through speech.Footnote47
Grieving, as a mode of affective engagement with the crimes, and in its artistic rendition as ‘Klagelieder’, is central to the labour performed by Blumen für Otello. On a thematic level, the poems focus not so much on the murdered victims of the NSU but rather on their friends and families and on life in the aftermath of tremendous loss. Highly evocative images of milk that has turned sour (BfO, 14), tea that has turned cold (BfO, 18) or a comb with broken-off teeth (BfO, 20) conjure up the violent severing of everyday relationality. This imagery is matched by the poem’s fragmented linguistic and typographical style which makes palpable arrested and dispossessed futures, which entail the destruction of potentiality, as exemplified here:
By homing in on the quotidian, affective repercussions of loss, the poems also call to mind the second kind of dispossession identified by Inan, which reveals our fundamental affectedness by others. By dwelling in and on experiences of grief without offering resolution, Dischereit’s poems express and invite affectedness, rather than disavowing it, as is the case for racist immunization. This resonates with Johanna Vollmeyer’s observation that the poems, by virtue of their elliptical style, call for and, I would argue, call forth an empathetic and receptive reader.Footnote49 Dischereit has stressed ‘dass die Opfer unser aller Tote sind’,Footnote50 and the poems seek to nurture receptivity to this insight. They thereby encourage what Gutiérrez Rodríguez, also drawing on Butler, calls ‘transversal mourning’, which challenges dominant distributions of grievability and care.Footnote51 Transversality implies that the destruction of life and potential entailed by the murders affects not only the victims and their families but all of society. It urges us to grieve for those who we do not consider ‘one of us’,Footnote52 ultimately undoing such binaries in favour of ‘a certain intertwinement between that other life, all those other lives, and my own ↓ one that is irreducible to national belonging or communitarian affiliation’.Footnote53
Under conditions of ‘migration-coloniality-necropolitics’, such intertwinement (with certain others) is systematically disavowed, which is why the cultivation of receptivity becomes such a crucial ethical and political task. In Dischereit’s work, practices of listening are integral to this endeavour, as already implied in the term ‘Klagelieder’. Both the lament and the song rely on the sense of hearing, which might explain why Dischereit’s writing was first performed in a radio play. These observations tie in with the importance of voice for how Blumen für Otello was conceptualized. As Dischereit herself claims, writing is a multi-sensory process that includes the aural sphere: ‘Ich höre immer etwas, wenn ich schreibe. Vor allem Stimmen’.Footnote54 Voice(s) is/are indeed central to the poems, many of which foreground the perspective of a lyrical persona who addresses the dead. The mode of lyric address is a key feature of Dischereit’s lamentations, as already illustrated in the passage cited above (‘verstehen Sie/aber jetzt ist er/ist er ich meine er ist/warum ist er jetzt’, BfO, 30). The salience of this mode is significant: lyric address expresses and performs the exploration of and search for relationality, even when this quest, in the case of the poems, must remain largely unsuccessful. Address, exchange and dialogue also feature prominently throughout the rest of the text: in addition to the poems, Blumen für Otello offers various dialogues between fictionalized characters as well as a series of portraits, which give voice to a selection of people advocating for a different handling of the crimes, and an interview with Dischereit herself. Blumen für Otello can thus be read as a collection of voices which decentre or — one could argue — dispossess the authorial persona of Esther Dischereit. This also becomes obvious in the performances of Blumen für Otello, in which both Dischereit and İpek İpekçioğlu read out and embody certain passages of the text in a neutral, almost detached tone and with minimal body language, almost becoming vessels for, and letting themselves be affected by, the various voices in the text.
The significance of voice for the ‘Klagelieder’ raises the question of who speaks, and is allowed to speak, for whom.Footnote55 Dischereit has explicitly addressed this issue of representation in the following interview comments: ‘Die Frage war also: Wie rede ich nicht über die Betroffenen, sondern von ihnen’ and ‘Ich wollte in meinem Schreiben den anderen ‘aufnehmen’, nicht an seiner statt sprechen, das ist etwas anderes’.Footnote56 The notions of ‘aufnehmen’ and ‘von jemandem sprechen’ are crucial in this context. They imply non-sovereign practices of letting oneself be affected, undone and dispossessed by the other rather than attempts to master the other through authoritative representation. This is more obvious in the case of ‘aufnehmen’ which evokes a range of meanings such as: to include, to take in or ingest, to provide shelter but also to record. Dischereit’s distinction between speaking ‘über die Betroffenen’ and ‘von ihnen’ is more difficult to convey, as both translate as talking about someone. ‘Über’, however, implies a position from above and therefore a certain superiority, in the sense of speaking for but also potentially of talking over someone. ‘Von’, by contrast, may suggest an approach that extends from and towards the other if translated, somewhat unidiomatically, as ‘speaking from’. Like ‘aufnehmen’, the notion of ‘speaking from’ implies permeability, in that it takes up and takes in something that comes from the other. Both phrases point to a state of receptivity, understood as the relinquishment of fictions of autonomy and sovereignty.
What Dischereit describes here is, in essence, a process of translation, especially so when keeping in mind the origin of the word in the Latin ‘translatio’, which means carrying or bringing over/across.Footnote57 Understood in this way, translation, too, is a process of ‘aufnehmen’, which might explain why its practices and methods are such a central feature of both the textual assemblage Blumen für Otello and the emotional and ethical labour performed by it. I have already mentioned that Dischereit’s work features a Turkish translation of almost all its parts. This can be read as an acknowledgement that the book is written for the victims and their families, as well as for the wider Turkish German community, in a gesture of what Dischereit describes as ‘Anteilnahme’.Footnote58 Again, the phrasing is significant here, as ‘Anteilnahme’ implies not only acts of care but also, if understood more literally, a process of taking part in and, potentially, taking in a part of what affects the other.
Translation, however, also shapes the book and overall project in less literal ways. As suggested in the title, Dischereit’s text is an adaptation or translation of Shakespeare’s Othello, who also appears as a character in the libretto section of the work (BfO, 67–77). Initially, Dischereit felt drawn to Othello because of the contrast he seemingly provided — socially, historically and culturally — to the lives of the victims: ‘Er war ein angesehener Feldherr, er hatte Ruhm und Ehre erworben, er war ganz “oben”’.Footnote59 However, upon closer inspection, Dischereit noted similarities between Shakespeare’s fictional character and the victims of the NSU murders. All of them were, in her words, ‘poisoned’,Footnote60 by sustained racist discrimination and dehumanization, making them into what the surrounding society had continuously projected onto them (i.e. ‘other than life’). The book stages an encounter between Otello and the character Enver, who is reminiscent of but not to be equated with the NSU murder victim Enver Şimşek, in which the characters forge a bond of solidarity, based on the insight ‘dass sie beide an dem gleichen Leide zugrunde gegangen sind, nämlich an der schwarzen Haut bzw. an den ähnlichen Fremdzuweisungen, die ihnen minderwertiges oder unwertes Leben attestieren’.Footnote61 The term ‘unwertes Leben’ also calls to mind National Socialist euthanasia programmes and the genocide of the Jews, drawing lines of continuity between past- and present-day necropolitical practices of producing and obliterating populations that are cast as ‘less than’-human or ‘other than life’,Footnote62 particularly so in the German context. At the same time, the missing ‘h’ in the book’s title avoids the conflation of Shakespeare’s character with Dischereit’s Otello, and of Otello and Enver, remaining mindful of the different temporalities and positionalities of the populations at play. The missing letter directs attention to the very process of translation, understood as an attempt to tease out and establish connections and resonances without equating different histories and circumstances.Footnote63
The influence of canonical cultural forms also manifests in the subtitle of Dischereit’s work (‘Klagelieder’), which references the ancient form of the lament, found across many different cultures. Faced with an unprecedented crime, coupled with a lack of adequate forms or spaces for mourning victims, Dischereit turns to previously established cultural templates, seeking to adapt them ‘under the force of the present conjuncture’.Footnote64 This needs to be understood as an act of translation — and not of imitation — as also highlighted by Brod: ‘Dischereit überschreitet die Charakteristika der Gattung in formaler Hinsicht, indem sie z.B. keine elegischen Distichen, sondern reimlose Texte verfasst […]’.Footnote65 Dischereit’s lamentations are also different from other examples of the genre in their strong focus on the everyday and on subjects — and subject matter — that conventionally would not be mourned in this way. Rather than perpetuating the canon, these adaptations perform an improvisational gesture that loosens, undoes and dispossesses these established forms, making them permeable to the concerns of the present-day. Similarly to Othello/Otello, Dischereit’s text uses these examples of high culture to find experimental solutions to the pressing issue of how to represent and grieve racialized violence when it is simultaneously unprecedented and deeply intertwined with German history, painfully omnipresent for its victims and largely unacknowledged by the rest of society.
In addition to engaging with the canon of World Literature, Blumen für Otello also offers a compelling translation of various legal and courtroom documents, which is a topic that cannot be covered in the space of this article.Footnote66 Instead, I want to focus on translation as a practice that also reaches beyond and extends — or even dispossesses — the written text. Ever since its print publication in 2014, Dischereit has regularly translated Blumen für Otello into live performances and, within these performances, into other media, particularly sound and movement. As mentioned previously, Dischereit collaborates with DJ İpek İpekçioğlu during these events, which often feature a live reading of select passages of the book in German and in Turkish, interlaced with various pieces of music composed by DJ İpek İpekçioğlu.Footnote67 As Ela Gezen has noted, these performances are not only about interlingual and intermedial translation but also about co-creation, in that they conjure up ‘a public space to mourn the victims while at the same time re-establishing the victims and their families as part of the collective from which they had been excluded in the media and by the investigating authorities’.Footnote68 They thus are intended to model and generate improvisational publics that may be able to carry out grief work and engage in collective mourning. Blending aesthetics, ethics and politics, these translations of the text into performance establish and trial new modes of relationality and sociality, grounded in an ‘Affirmation und Improvisation des gemeinsam geteilten Prekärseins’,Footnote69 that is, an embracing of dispossession. Diametrically opposed to racist immunization and the violent (re-)establishment of fictions of sovereignty, these alternative relationalities carry a reparative promise. This promise resides in their potential to recalibrate dominant ‘fields of recognizability’ and (re-)construct networks of care.Footnote70 My usage of the word ‘promise’ is crucial here, in that it emphasizes the aspirational and experimental quality of these performances. There are no guarantees that the process of collective affectation and dispossession will ‘work’ and have any effect beyond the immediate context of the singular performance.
I suggest reading these translational, improvisational and aspirational components of Blumen für Otello as part of an aesthetic, ethical and political strategy of dispossession. This strategy establishes Dischereit’s text as an open, continuously transforming and unfinished process (much like grief work), that is intertwined with a multiplicity of legacies, languages and other forms of artistic expression. Rather than offering authoritative interpretations of the events surrounding the NSU murders, alongside reassuring solutions for how to come to terms with them, Blumen für Otello emerges out of a moment of affectedness, driven by the need to somehow respond to the magnitude of these crimes without fully knowing how to. In the face of this, Dischereit’s work trials an aesthetically and ethically precarious approach of ‘risking […] oneself in complex encounters [with other subjects, histories, languages, texts, media] that, rather than pre-emptively formulating what community constitutes, pose community as a question continuously anew’.Footnote71
How to go on? Reparative Practices in a Damaged Present
The notions of precariousness and risk return me to the significance of listening, and the sense of hearing, for approaching the ‘Klagelieder’. Hearing may also constitute a non-sovereign practice of dispossession if approached as an encounter with and receptivity to what the voices of others carry, both in terms of content and affect. Our sense of hearing also makes palpable our exposedness to others and to the world more than any of the other senses, by sheer virtue of the fact that we cannot close our ears. At the same time, hearing or listening can have a particularly reparative quality, if understood as a listening out for what has been silenced or is hard to hear, for what is unsayable or for what has been left unsaid. Dischereit herself sees the collective encounter with the NSU crimes as a failure to listen, which produced a profound sense of abandonment in those affected:Footnote72 ‘Die Angehörigen konnten ihre Leiden vor keiner unabhängigen Instanz schildern, deren Hauptzweck es gewesen wäre, ihnen zuzuhören, […]’.Footnote73
These reflections on hearing lead me back to the question of repair raised in the title of this article. Attempting repair is both a central and exceedingly difficult task when the initial rupture cannot be overcome or healed. As noted in my introduction, the NSU crimes are not a singular act of exceptional violence. Lines of continuity can be drawn to the attacks in Hoyerswerda, Rostock-Lichtenhagen, Mölln and Solingen in the 1990s and to recent shootings in Halle (2019) and Hanau (2020).Footnote74 These connections illustrate that the ‘NSU-Komplex’ is still active, even if the NSU as such might have been dismantled. The fact that the German state and broader public refuse to acknowledge and react to the ‘ongoingness’ of right-wing violence in post-unification Germany leaves migrantized and racialized subjects abandoned and unprotected.Footnote75
When considering the potentials of repair in this context, it is therefore crucial not to understand it as a nostalgic return to earlier, allegedly more harmonious times. Repair also does not mean overcoming the present, in anticipation of a utopian resolution in a different place or time. Rather, repair needs to be approached as an oftentimes frustrating and exhausting everyday practice that, in the here and now, stays with and works through the ‘violence of the unequal ordinary’.Footnote76 Repair listens out for what alternative relationalities and possibilities may be conceived and enacted from a place of brokenness, stuckness or belatedness (for the worst has already happened). Scholar and activist Maurice Stierl, reflecting on his ‘grief-activism’ in the Mediterranean, notes that his work ‘must necessarily be formulated around a multitude of impossibilities’.Footnote77 He describes his activism as a form of risk-taking that requires the relinquishment of sovereignty and accepts the possibility of failure. Conceiving of repair as such an ‘impossible’ task echoes the thoughts of Laurent Berlant and Lee Edelman in their jointly authored essay ‘What survives?’.Footnote78 They stress repair’s inherent connection to negativity and rupture, while showcasing it as a minor, quotidian and improvisational method and practice that ‘could induce unpredicted infrastructures for relationality in the world’.Footnote79 The use of the subjunctive in this quote reminds us of the non-sovereign gestures underpinning Dischereit’s poetry and the aspirational quality of its reparative promise. Berlant and Edelman’s formulation is also reminiscent of Muñoz’s previously introduced definition, which sees repair as interconnected with a desire to ‘reconstruct a relational field’ ‘in the wake of the negative’.Footnote80 The notion of reconstruction is central here: re-construction implies and accepts that something has been destroyed and cannot be restored to its original form. The reconstructed object is brought into existence by and carries over and across — in the sense of ‘aufnehmen’ or translating, as explained above — traces of a ruined world or relationship, attempting to re-make something of it. When I therefore describe Blumen für Otello as reparative, I want to draw attention to its improvisational quality as a text that, through artistic intervention and grief work, seeks to provide precarious shelter to the unmourned dead in the here and now, while labouring to shift our frames of perception for the future. The aim is to challenge existing and (re-)construct alternative fields of relationality, grievability and care. While such repair work will not end the ongoing violence of ‘migration-coloniality-necropolitics’,Footnote81 it might be an important precondition for not reproducing it.
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Notes on contributors
Maria Roca Lizarazu
Maria Roca Lizarazu is Assistant Professor in German at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on contemporary German-language literature, with a focus on German Jewish cultures as well as (post-)migration, transnationalism, and citizenship. Maria also has an interest in questions of remembrance and futurity, especially in the context of violent histories. She is the author of Renegotiating Postmemory. The Holocaust in Contemporary German-language Jewish Literature (Camden House, 2020).
Notes
1 Stuart Hall, ‘Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities’, in Selected Writings on Race and Difference, ed. by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), pp. 329–38 (p. 338).
2 With the term ‘debilitation’, Jasbir K. Puar aims to expand discussions of bio-/necropolitics and governmentality, which tend to centre on the opposition of life and death, with death being seen as ‘the ultimate assault’ (xviii). Puar argues that this spectrum needs to be extended by considering forms of population control that entail neither life nor death. Such practices of debilitation are aimed at keeping certain (often racialized) populations in a state of perpetual precarity, slowly wearing them down by ‘making them available for maiming’ (xvii). An important case study for Puar is Israel/Palestine, and some of her statements about the ongoing conflict have caused controversy. See Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
3 Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Decolonial Mourning and the Caring Commons: Migration-Coloniality Necropolitics and Conviviality Infrastructure (London: Anthem Press, 2023).
4 Ibid., p. 11.
5 Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15.1 (2003), 11–40 (p. 39).
6 Ibid., p. 11; p. 39.
7 Ibid., p. 39.
8 Ibid., p. 27.
9 José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position’, Signs, 31.3 (2006), 675–88.
10 I borrow the notion of ‘ongoingness’ from Lauren Berlant, particularly the posthumously published On the Inconvenience of Other People (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), p. 8.
11 Esther Dischereit, Blumen für Otello (Berlin: Secession Verlag, 2014); henceforth cited in the text as BfO.
12 For a more detailed account see, for example, Imke Schmincke and Jasmin Siri, ‘NSU-Morde’, in Lexikon der ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ in Deutschland: Debatten- und Diskursgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus nach 1945, ed. by Torben Fischer, and Matthias N. Lorenz (Bielefeld: transcript, 2015), pp. 391–94.
13 Ayşe Güleç and Johanna Schaffer, ‘Empathie, Ignoranz und migrantisch situiertes Wissen: Gemeinsam an der Auflösung des NSU-Komplexes arbeiten’, in Den NSU Komplex analysieren: Aktuelle Perspektiven aus der Wissenschaft, ed. by Juliane Karakayali et al. (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017), pp. 57–79 (p. 59).
14 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2016), p. 34.
15 Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Decolonial Mourning.
16 Esther Dischereit, ‘Die Gesichter der Nachbarn’, in Geheimsache NSU: Zehn Morde, von Aufklärung keine Spur, ed. by Andreas Förster (Tübingen: Klöpfer und Meyer Verlag, 2014), pp. 293–303 (p. 301).
17 Herbert Voglmayr, ‘Die Schriftsetzerin des kollektiven Gedächtnisses: Die Schriftstellerin Esther Dischereit im Porträt’, nu. Jüdisches Magazin für Politik und Kultur, 17 June 2015 <https://nunu.at/artikel/die-schriftsetzerin-des-kollektiven-gedaechtnisses/> [accessed 7 October 2023]. On the intersections between Holocaust memory and Dischereit’s engagement with the NSU crimes see also Anna Brod, ‘Shoah und NSU-Morde — “racism past and present”: Ko-Erinnerung bei Esther Dischereit’, in Ko-Erinnerung: Grenzen, Herausforderungen und Perspektiven des neueren Shoah-Gedenkens, ed. by Daniela Henke, and Tom Vanassche (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 119–34.
18 I do not have space here to explore the topic of Jewish solidarity with other minorities (especially non-white, Muslim) in-depth, which has acquired new layers of complexity since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023. Dischereit herself recently signed an open letter composed by several (left-wing) Jewish artists and intellectuals in Germany, which was published in the taz newspaper in October 2023. In defence of ‘Die Freiheit der Andersdenkenen’, the letter denounced the crackdown on pro-Palestinian discourse and protest in the German public sphere, arguing that suppressing freedom of speech in this way contributed to deepening divisions, while also occluding the fact that most anti-Semitic crimes are perpetrated by right-wing German nationals. See ‘Die Freiheit der Andersdenkenden’, taz.de, 22 October 2023 <https://taz.de/Offener-Brief-juedischer-Intellektueller/!5965154/> [accessed 15 November 2023].
19 Sarah Shin, ‘‘‘Mourning Becomes the Law’—Judith Butler from Paris’, versobooks.com, 16 November 2015 <https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/2337-mourning-becomes-the-law-judith-butler-from-paris> [accessed 15 August 2023].
20 Muñoz, ‘Feeling Brown, Feeling Down’, p. 683.
21 See for example the interview with Dischereit in the appendix of Blumen für Otello: ‘“Mein Text muss Bestand haben vor den Augen der Betroffenen”: Die Schriftstellerin Esther Dischereit im Gespräch mit Insa Wilke’, in Blumen für Otello, pp. 189–201. On the failings of the state apparatus see Aktionsbündnis ‘NSU-Komplex auflösen’ (eds.), Tribunale — ‘NSU-Komplex auflösen’ (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2021).
22 For a critical engagement with the press coverage see Elke Grittmann, Tanja Thomas and Fabian Virchow, ‘“Das Unwort erklärt die Untat”: Die Berichterstattung über die NSU-Morde — Eine Medienkritik’, Otto-Brenner-Stiftung, 10 January 2015 <https://www.otto-brenner-stiftung.de/otto-brenner-stiftung/aktuelles/das-unwort-erklaert-die-untat.html> [accessed 15 August 2023].
23 See <https://www.nsu-tribunal.de/en/nsu-komplex/#newsmodal> [accessed 8 August 2023].
24 Çiğdem Inan, ‘NSU, rassistische Gewalt und affektives Wissen’, ZRex — Zeitschrift für Rechtsextremismusforschung, 2 (2021), 212–27 (p. 212).
25 ‘“Mein Text muss Bestand haben vor den Augen der Betroffenen”’, p. 192.
26 Çiğdem Inan, ‘“Not this Time”: On the Dispossesion of Grief’, Texte zur Kunst: Trauern/Mourning 126 (2022) <https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/126/cigdem-inan-not-this-time/> [accessed 13 November 2023].
27 Ibid.
28 In particular: Judith Butler, Frames of War and Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
29 Butler, Frames of War, p. 29.
30 Ibid., pp. 22–28.
31 Gutiérrez Rodríguez uses the term ‘thingness’ to describe a similar dynamic. See Decolonial Mourning, p. 15.
32 Ibid, p. 17.
33 In addition to Butler, Inan draws on theoretical works that explore the (im-)possibility of Black subjectivity from an ‘afro-pessimist’ angle, especially Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother. A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2021), Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016) and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (London: Minor Compositions, 2013).
34 Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Decolonial Mourning, p. 15.
35 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 33.
36 Ibid., p. 28.
37 Isabell Lorey, ‘Ekstatische Sozialität’, engagée, 2 (2015), 20–23 (p. 21).
38 Inan, ‘Not this Time’.
39 Ibid.
40 Inan approaches racism as ‘immunitäre Operation […], die das soziale Aufeinanderverwiesensein leugnet und zerstört, diese Leugnung am Anderen abreagiert und den Verlust migrantischen Lebens aus dem gesellschaftlichen Wahrnehmungsfeld verbannt’. See Inan, ‘NSU, rassistische Gewalt und affektives Wissen’, p. 223.
41 The term affective disconnection is used by Gutiérrez Rodríguez in Decolonial Mourning, p. 17.
42 For a detailed analysis of these performances see Ela Gezen, ‘Poetic Empathy, Political Criticism, and Public Mourning: Esther Dischereit’s Klagelieder’, Gegenwartsliteratur: A German Studies Yearbook, 17 (2018), 313–30.
43 On the genesis of the work see Anna Brod, ‘Fiktionale Zeugnisse von Verlust und Trauer? Esther Dischereits Klagelieder über die Opfer des “Nationalsozialistischen Untergrunds” (NSU)’, in Visualisierung von Gewalt: Beiträge zu Film, Theater und Literatur, ed. by Dagmar von Hoff et al. (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018), pp. 211–27.
44 ‘“Mein Text muss Bestand haben vor den Augen der Betroffenen”’, p. 189.
45 Ibid., p. 193.
46 Ibid.
47 John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1962). Anna Brod also notes this performative dimension when speaking of the construction of a ‘Trauergemeinschaft’ that includes both the producer and the recipient of the text. See Brod, ‘Shoah und NSU-Morde’, p. 127.
48 Brod, ‘Fiktionale Zeugnisse’, p. 214. See on this Gezen, ‘Poetic Empathy, Political Criticism, and Public Mourning’.
49 Johanna Vollmeyer, ‘“Das tat so weh” — Konsequenzen strukturellen Rassismus aus Sicht der Opfer: Esther Dischereits Textkompendium Blumen für Otello’, in Rechte Gewalt erzählen: Doing Memory in Literatur, Theater und Film, ed. by Matthias Lorenz et al. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2022), pp. 153–71.
50 Sylvia Wendrock, ‘“Die Sache selbst wird durch das Nahetreten etwas zeigen”’, hagalil.com, 29 August 2014 <https://www.hagalil.com/2014/08/dischereit-3/> [accessed 11 August 2023].
51 Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, ‘Political Subjectivity, Transversal Mourning and a Caring Common: Responding to Deaths in the Mediterranean’, Critical African Studies, 10.3 (2018), 345–60.
52 Going back to FN 18, the issue of transversality in Dischereit’s work has certainly acquired additional layers when considering the recent outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war. Current reactions tend to be shaped by the political endorsement and mobilization of ‘our’ dead, with often-times divisive results, and an inability to accept the grief of and grieve for the perceived ‘Other’, highlighting the very real challenges of attempting transversal grief work.
53 Judith Butler, ‘Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 26.2 (2012), 134–51 (p. 140).
54 ‘“Mein Text muss Bestand haben vor den Augen der Betroffenen”’, p. 199.
55 Vollmeyer, for example, is cautious about Dischereit’s attempt to give voice to the victims, arguing that it risks ‘die Opfer erneut in die Unmündigkeit zu verbannen’, see Vollmeyer, ‘“Das tat so weh”’, p. 169.
56 ‘“Mein Text muss Bestand haben vor den Augen der Betroffenen”’, p. 193.
57 See entry ‘translate’, in: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. by T.F. Hoad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) <https://www-oxfordreferencecom.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/view/10.1093/acref/9780192830982.001.0001/acref-9780192830982-e-15902> [accessed 13 November 2023].
58 Voglmayr, ‘Die Schriftsetzerin des kollektiven Gedächtnisses’.
59 ‘“Mein Text muss Bestand haben vor den Augen der Betroffenen”’, p. 191.
60 Voglmayr, ‘Die Schriftsetzerin des kollektiven Gedächtnisses’.
61 Ibid.
62 Butler, Frames of War, p. 15.
63 In ‘Subjects in History’, Stuart Hall introduces the notion of the ‘“the changing same”’ to express a relationship with previous histories and traditions that is based on a ‘reworking’ ‘that transmits the capacity to be both the same and different’. This, to me, seems to encapsulate Dischereit’s approach to translation, see Hall, ‘Subjects in History’, p. 333.
64 Ibid.
65 Brod, ‘Fiktionale Zeugnisse’, p. 213.
66 Brod touches upon this, particularly in relation to questions of witnessing, but a systematic engagement with the role of legal discourse in Dischereit’s work is still outstanding. See Anna Brod, Opfer — TäterInnen — Theaterpublikum: Szenarien von Zeugenschaft in Theaterstücken zum NSU (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020).
67 For a more in-depth engagement with the shape of these performances, and the musical elements in particular, see Gezen, ‘Poetic Empathy, Political Criticism, and Public Mourning’.
68 Ibid., p. 326.
69 Lorey, ‘Ekstatische Sozialität’, p. 23.
70 Butler, Frames of War, pp. 1–12.
71 Maurice Stierl, ‘Contestations in Death: The Role of Grief in Migration Struggles’, Citizenship Studies, 20.2 (2016), 173–91 (p. 174).
72 Human Rights scholar Jill Stauffer describes the condition that ensues from such failures to listen as ‘ethical loneliness’, defined as ‘a condition undergone by persons who have been unjustly treated and dehumanized by human beings and political structures, who emerge from that injustice only to find that the surrounding world will not listen to or cannot properly hear their testimony — their claims about what they suffered and about what is now owed them — on their own terms. So ethical loneliness is the experience of having been abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard’. See Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 1.
73 Dischereit, ‘Die Gesichter der Nachbarn’, p. 301.
74 On these continuities see Çağrı Kahveci and Özge Pınar Sarp, ‘Von Solingen zum NSU: Rassistische Gewalt im kollektiven Gedächtnis von Migrant*innen türkischer Herkunft’, in: Den NSU Komplex analysieren, pp. 37–55.
75 On this sense of abandonment and the concomitant loss of trust experienced by migrantized and racialized subjects see also Deniz Utlu, ‘Vertrauen’, in Eure Heimat Ist Unser Albtraum, ed. by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah (Berlin: Ullstein, 2019), pp. 38–55. These sentiments resonate with Stauffer’s notion of ‘ethical loneliness’ as detailed in Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness.
76 Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People, p. xi.
77 Stierl, ‘Contestations in Death’, p. 174; p. 187.
78 Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, ‘What Survives?’, in: Ibid., Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 35–61.
79 ibid., p. 56.
80 Muñoz, ‘Feeling Brown, Feeling Down’, p. 683.
81 Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Decolonial Mourning.