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Fantasizing Violence
Author(s) -
Linke Uli
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
city and society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.308
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1548-744X
pISSN - 0893-0465
DOI - 10.1525/ciso.1997.9.1.135
Subject(s) - legitimacy , nazism , politics , german , narrative , rhetoric , resistance (ecology) , the holocaust , state (computer science) , identity (music) , sociology , sign (mathematics) , political science , gender studies , criminology , law , aesthetics , history , art , literature , theology , philosophy , ecology , mathematical analysis , archaeology , mathematics , algorithm , biology , computer science
Anti–Establishment activists and members of the Green/Alternative party in Berlin (Germany) tend to promote the use of fantasized violence as a medium for political contestation. A range of highly charged image schemata, focused on death, silencing, and physical brutality (typified by the swastika, SS sign, gallows, Nazi rhetoric, death camps) are appropriated as anti–symbols, transformed into a “language” of resistance against the German state. Fantasies of violence, directed against the political other are thereby not merely historicized, but reproduced as templates for action and identity. Based on fieldwork in Berlin (1988–89, 1991, 1994), this paper explores the cognitive aspects of such fantasizing, and analyzes the resulting political process, with its paradoxes of legitimacy and contestation. [Germany, narrative violence, history and memory, national identity]