What Makes Violence Political? A Narrative Approach to the German Terrorist Group National Socialist Underground (NSU)

Between September 2000 and April 2007 the three members of the group National Socialist Underground (NSU) murdered nine immigrant workers and a police officer in different German cities and committed two bombings in Cologne with a total of 23 casualties. While the crimes were considered to be unconnected, the search for the perpetrators was uniformly focused on the “criminal milieu of foreigners”. This interpretation changed in early November 2011 when by chance the cell was discovered and its members identified as right-wing extremists, the crimes defined as elements of a strategic violent campaign, and both perpetrators and their violent acts subsequently re-categorised as right-wing terrorism. This paper takes a narrative approach to show that NSU terrorism is explicitly defined as unpolitical vis-à-vis other incidents of terrorism in German history. Focusing on the national news media and the period November 2011 to March 2012, it discusses how and why the acts of violence committed by the NSU in the past acquire a new meaning through a complex process of re-narration. It draws on the notion of violence as communication to explain the emergence of the narrative of NSU violence as “unpolitical terrorism” that is rooted in a separation between the political dimension of perpetrators’ intentions, the potential effects violence can have on a society, and the state’s response to this violence. The analysis of the NSU case will illustrate that the definition of violence as “political” often depends on how societies make sense of violent events in order to uphold normative ideas of themselves by drawing on various narrative resources.