National Visions

Abstract

This chapter considers what it calls the “national vision,” or the political regimes that define how the nation is to be rendered in visual form, by focusing on the national irruption of panic surrounding the Stars of David saga that inundated Berlin in the fall of 2005. At stake in this event is the so-called “regimes of visibility”: discourses and practices that govern the politics of visualization. The chapter examines the tactical operations on which the young right-wing extremists draw to manage their own political visibility and to confront dominant visibility regimes, and the ways that they contest dominant visual idioms of commemoration and mourning. Finally, it discusses the sixtieth anniversary of the Reich's surrender to the Allies, an event that illustrated not only the paradoxical logic of visualization that marks the governance of the national vision but also the dimensions of the panic triggered by attempts to challenge it.