About our project – NSU reappraisal in Saxony
Within the project Offener Prozess we develop formats for the NSU reappraisal in Saxony, Germany. Offener Prozess is dedicated to a critical reflection of the NSU and promotes the necessitiy of social confrontation with the crime. We want to give access to a complex topic in an understandable and emotionally appealing way for a broad audience. The project is an investigative contribution to the commemoration of the victims of the NSU. Hence we aim for creative spaces of action for a collective discussion and memory of the NSU crime. An exhibition planned for this year gives space for research and archiving, a space for encounters, networking and education. Furthermore, we are aiming for permanent learning enviroments on this topic at school. Offener Prozess connects already existing reappraisal initiatives and involves their long-standing work. The project is a contribution to a vidvid memory in which the perspectives of those affected by right-wing violence are sensitized and the continuities and conditions of the development of right-wing terrorist structures are illuminated.
Contact
Do you want to learn more about the project? Are you interested in developing a cooperation? Do you have a question?
Feel free to contact us:
Hannah Zimmermann & Jörg Buschmann
Mail: offener-prozess@asa-ff.de
Pillars of the Project
The commemoration of the victims of the NSU should become more permanent in Saxony and especially in southwest Saxony with the aim of creating sustainable and lasting spaces of remembrance. Despite the fact that the NSU was able to go underground in Saxony, there are no memorials and monuments, no renaming of streets or squares that commemorate the victims of the NSU. By means of educational trips, we want to get to know the commemorative processes in other cities related to the NSU and stimulate a transfer of knowledge to the cities of Chemnitz and Zwickau. In addition, we and people from the network of “Offener Prozess” offer city tours in Chemnitz and Zwickau to the places with a reference to the NSU, in order to promote a lively remembering and dunning in the respective urban societies.
Commemoration and reappraisal must be thought of together, as well as the overall social dimension of the NSU complex, which can only be dealt with in a multidimensional and societal way. As Mrs. Charlotte Schwalb from the initiative “Keupstraße is everywhere” already emphasized, a “living remembrance” of the victims of the NSU is needed. Living remembrance means process, continuation of the discourse, participation of different social groups, integration of the victims’ perspective, support by institutions, cities, municipalities and local funding pots, and visibility through large and broadly effective networks. The projects already developed in Saxony and the active key actors represent an already existing network on whose ideas and projects we should continue working.
Part of the exhibition will also be film interviews with victims of right-wing violence who had to live in Saxony at the hotspots of the Blood&Honour scene at that time and who experienced right-wing hegemonies as potential victims and enemies of the Nazis. The films will be integrated into the modules of the exhibition as well as into workshops and educational programs.
The process of coming to terms with the NSU complex as an entire society requires a continuation of educational work. There are still many gaps in both – the scientific and the school-based examination of the NSU.
During the project, three creative research projects with students at Saxon universities will be realized. In order to promote interdisciplinarity and science-practice transfer, these will be led in tandem by an artist and a scientist. The results will be integrated into the planned exhibition.
The core of the work of “Offener Prozess” is the development of an exhibition that highlights the specific Saxon references of the NSU. The permanent exhibition deals with gaps and open questions concerning the reappraisal of the NSU crimes on a legal, parliamentary, institutional and civil level. The collected facts from the NSU trial and the NSU investigation committees (among others) are filtered, visualized and made tangible with a special focus on Saxony. This work will be based on existing forms of reappraisal in Saxony and supplement them with new creative research projects (e.g. media analysis, reform processes in the police and judiciary).
The “Open Process” project promotes the networking of local reappraisal initiatives. Adsitionally, networking and exchange meetings are held regularly. Besides the support for networking, an important core task is to advertise the content, events and publications of the cooperation partners and key actors in the civil society that deals with the NSU reappraisal via the homepage and Facebook of “Offener Prozess”.
Each year, we organize educational trips to other cities with NSU-related issues, which serve the exchange of expertise and nationwide networking. The main focus is what forms of commemoration for the victims of the NSU were chosen in other cities, which types of migrant-situated knowledge concerning the NSU complex is available, how the social reappraisal is going, what conclusions political leaders have drawn from this, and what the right-wing scene and the support environment looked like and still looks like now.
Understanding the NSU as a caesura means keeping an eye on the behavior of authorities in new cases of right-wing violence, pointing out the lack of social outcry and supporting civil society attempts to come to terms with the situation, and observing and problematizing the continuities of right-wing activities. In this area of preventive work, the nationwide exchange of expertise is an important cross-sectional task of the project.
About ASA-FF e.V.
In November 2016, five years after the self-disclosure of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), we organized the theater meeting “Undiscovered Neighbors” in Chemnitz and Zwickau as a group of theater makers, conflict researcher and administrative scientist. “Undiscovered Neighbors” aimed to make the continuities of the NSU support environment visible and the voices of those affected heard. It networked communal, regional and nationwide remembrance initiatives at the interfaces between culture, civil society and science. The goal was to open up creative spaces for critical monitoring of the reappraisal processes on the legal, parliamentary, institutional and cultural levels in Saxony. The follow-up program “neue unentd_ckte narrative” further develops the method of Creative Discourse Transformation. The theater meeting was initiated by the Grass Lifters – art activists who “don’t want grass to grow” over the crimes of the NSU and who repeatedly provoke public discussions in Saxony through targeted interventions. The ASA-FF e.V. (built in 1979) sees itself as a platform for current discourses around global learning. More than 160 members of the ASA-FF e.V. are scattered around the globe and are active in a wide variety of leadership positions & industries – business, research, culture, non-governmental organizations, administration and international organizations.