Placing the Extremes: Cityscape, Ethnic ‘Others’ and Young Right Extremists in East Berlin

Abstract

Based on fieldwork in young right extremist street milieus in East Berlin, this article aims to advance debates on the European far right by approaching my subjects as intricately embedded within German society and within a broader ethnicization of political identities. The politics of young right extremists, I argue, hinge upon senses of place and sensualities of otherness that weave ethnic stereotypifications into geographies of difference in the multi-ethnic city. Particularly, right extremist subjectivities rely upon the figure of an ethnicized collectivity of ‘Turks and Arabs’. In turn, the quotidian right extremist negotiation of a racist nationalism and a multi-ethnic landscape reveals itself to mimic far broader European debates on immigration and cultural toleration, breaching the presumed boundaries that ostensibly define right extremism as a distinct political domain. The ethnographic purview shows how ultra-nationalists live out rather than resolve the contradictions of a situated bigoted politics and questions conventional approaches to European racist nationalisms that employ abstract political categories.