Imagining Far-right Terrorism by Josefin Graef

Author:Josefin Graef [Graef, Josefin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Modern, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781000534993
Google: snxTEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2022-02-04T16:18:09+00:00

The trouble with experts

The aftermath of the NSU’s discovery in November 2011 lends support to the observation that the “trouble with experts”, as Lisa Stampnitzky puts it in her conclusion to Disciplining Terror, is that epistemic practices concerning terrorism are both difficult to control and tied to the “nexus of power, politics, morality, and violence” (2013: 201–203). 22/7 had offered a foretaste of the contested nature of terrorism expertise in Germany. Like their Norwegian counterparts, “terrorism experts” working for German press agencies, broadcasters, and online media, under pressure to turn the violent events on that Friday afternoon into a news story, had spoken of an Islamist attack until late in the evening. As soon as the weekend had passed and the first shock worn off, other members of the German writing classes who had been wise (or lucky) enough not to engage publicly in such speculations, taunted their colleagues as “pseudo terrorist experts”. Despite the lack of reliable information (i.e., relevant observations) about the events at the time, they had pretended to have actionable knowledge, much of which implied a limitation of civil liberties. Even worse, the critics continued, the “experts” had failed to explain their kneejerk response in hindsight (DerWesten 2011; Niggemeier 2011; taz 2011; Thiele and Hesselmann 2011).11

Expert knowledge occupied an even more prominent position in the aftermath of the NSU’s discovery. Prior to November 2011, investigators and journalists had amassed a lot of information about both the trio and the series of crimes without producing knowledge of a “homegrown Neo-Nazi terrorist cell”, to paraphrase Eriksen (2014: 285). Beginning in November 2011, the (predominantly White and male) expert community – covering domestic security, extremism, terrorism, and wider issues of social cohesion – was challenged to create this very knowledge and explain why doing so had previously been impossible. As I will show, the responses to this double challenge relied on a tightly knit, cross-forum network of experts and expertise as well as pre-existing constellations of and attitudes towards state power that constrained the ethical potential of the narrative imagination (Meretoja 2017).

I centre my discussion around the work of Tanjev Schultz, one of the nodal points of the organic network of narrative relations surrounding the NSU. As an editor for the SZ specialising in issues of domestic security, Schultz penned hundreds of articles on the NSU and reported from the trial in Munich. On the back of a completed doctorate in Political Science and (other) academic research that he had pursued in parallel to his journalistic work since 2003, Schultz accepted a Professorship in Foundations and Strategies of Journalism at the University of Mainz in early 2016. Besides his scholarly work, in particular on questions of media trust and ethics, he continues to write guest comments and reviews for the SZ and other news outlets, and regularly serves as an interview partner and panellist. As a mediator between journalistic practice and academic research and teaching (or “hackademic”, see Harcup 2011), Schultz lays (legitimate) claim to expertise in domestic security, both as a news beat and as a scholarly field of study that operates with classified documents.

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