The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

cal utterances by leftist protesters transpose racial violence into a medium of opposition.
For instance, in West Berlin, in January 1989, immediately after the senate
elections, antifascist activists and members of the Green/Alternative Party assembled
in protest. Their anger was directed against the militant right-wing party
of Republicans, which had unexpectedly gained eleven seats in the Berlin Senate.
The protesters organized nightly demonstrations, where they displayed banners expressing
their political sentiments. One banner showed a clenched human fist
smashing a swastika, fragmenting it. Another banner, a white cardboard poster fastened
to a stick, showed a tightly closed fist squashing (with a top-down movement)
a black swastika, crushing it beneath. One banner, made to resemble a national
flag, fashioned from red and green cloth (the emblems of the urban environmentalists
and the Old Left), showed a large fist smashing a black swastika (hitting it
dead center, fragmenting it). Other banners demanded the annihilation of political
opponents—that is Nazis, fascists, or right-wing supporters—by reducing them
to muck or dirt: brown filth (see Figure 9.9):
Hack/smash away the brown filth!
(Hau weg den braunen Dreck! )
The enemy’s reduction to filth, specifically excrement, taps into race-based fantasies
of “elimination”—a legacy of the Holocaust. Until 1945, under Hitler, German
anti-Semitism was promulgated by an obsessive concern with scatology: Jews
were equated with feces and dirt, a symbolic preoccupation that encoded Germany’s
drive for “racial purity” (Dundes 1984). The protesters’ banner, which demands
the violent erasure of “brown filth”—a circumlocution for Nazis (for example,
Brown Shirts, or SA, Hitler’s militia) as fecal waste—is accompanied by a
large skeletal figure. The skeleton (made of cardboard and paper) reiterates this
connection between filth and fascism: the emblematic “death’s-head” (Totenkopf ),
this iconography of skull and bones, was the insignia and symbol of Hitler’s terror-inspiring
elite troops (SS, or Schutzstaffel ). The “skeleton” conjures images of the
persistent existence of Nazi perpetrators: life-takers, death-givers. Extermination
or the removal of “filth” (neo-Nazis) is rendered by leftists as the legitimate disposal
of an enduring threat.
In an another instance, leftist opposition to right-wing extremism, accentuated
by the smashing of a swastika, is made verbally explicit (see Figure 9.10). One banner,
carried by several protesters, reads:
University rage against the Nazi brood!
(Uni-Wut gegen Nazi-Brut! )
the holocaust and german politics of memory 257
The sign’s red-lettered text appeared on a white cloth, which, as its centerpiece,
displayed a black swastika smashed (broken) by a clenched fist. The slogan names
the protesters’ target of wrath: “the Nazi brood!” (Nazi-Brut). In this instance, violent
opposition is directed not against fascism but its postwar legacy: Hitler’s