Victimhood Visualized: The German New Right, Social-Mediatized Commemoration and the Orchestration of Far-Right Affects

This paper argues that digital, audio-visual material of events commemorating victims of Islamic terror or crimes committed by non-ethnic Germans are a central tool for the articulation of collective German victimhood among the contemporary ‘New Right’ in Germany. Besides their attractiveness to online audiences, these images and videos contain carefully orchestrated invitations to certain affects. Abovementioned material thus constitutes an audio-visual repertoire that enables the ‘New Right’ to communicate not only a narrative, but the far-right affective disposition of Germans as ethnic community of victims. The cultural and tactical repertoires of memory activism such as the language of victimhood and ritual performances are increasingly instrumentalized and ideologically incorporated by extreme-right actors. Here, memory activism becomes a tool to articulate the status of a white majority as victim of contemporary global migration - a core element in the ‘Great Replacement’ narrative that is central to the ethnopluralist and cultural essentialist ideology of the contemporary ‘New Right’ in Germany and Europe. Crucially however, events commemorating victims of Islamic terror and crimes committed by non-ethnic Germans are not (primarily) staged for their immediate impact on site but rather to be filmed and photographed, thus providing audio-visual content that can be selected, edited and distributed via Social Media. To advance an understanding of how such images and videos become a tool to articulate the myth of German victimhood in the digital era, this paper offers an explorative methodological approach of how to read far-right visual material for affects. The central idea here is that an extremist-right world view is not (only) understood as discursive entity defining how the world is and should be but as a landscape of affective dispositions. Therefore, it is necessary to understand images and videos not (only) as discourses and thus look at their grammar and meaning (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006) but to ‘read’ (Berg et al. 2019) for the affective dispositions they invite. Focusing on two mayor actors within the German ‘New Right’ sphere, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as well as the Identitäre Bewegung Deutschland (IBD), the German branch of the pan-European Generation Identity Movement, this paper analyzes how a far-right affective landscape is articulated via audio-visual material of commemorative performances. More specifically, this paper aims to shed light on the orchestration of extremist-right affects by analyzing the visualization of (fictional) bodies, objects and relations in the social-mediatized commemoration of German victims. It furthermore shows that images and videos of a march of silence co-organized by the AfD in the city of Chemnitz in September 2018 and a symbolic funeral performed by activists of the IBD in front of the Reichstag in November 2018 produce a culture of German victimhood not through the imposition of ideological text but through a “ambiguous depiction of an ‘affective’ experience” (Forchtner and Kølvraa 2017: 271).