Faculty of Philosophy at Chemnitz University of Technology cooperates with Offener Prozess
On 19.05.2026, the start of a cooperation between Chemnitz University of Technology and “Offener Prozess – – a documentation center on the NSU complex in Saxony” took place in the form of a critical walk in the former Fritz Heckert area.
The Critical Walk is a neighborhood walk conceived by Offener Prozess that deals with the architectural, social and political history of the neighborhood – with a focus on the neighborhood as a place of residence, networking space and crime scene of the so-called NSU.
All students and lecturers were very open and interested, but also very concerned: on the one hand, in view of the profound change in status that the Fritz-Heckert area (now Hutholz) had to undergo due to reunification and emigration, but on the other hand also very concerned in view of the open right-wing extremist dominance in the neighborhood at the time, which made it possible for the NSU members to continue committing their crimes undetected.
The walk ends with a commemoration of all the victims of the NSU terror at the mural of the Freiraumgalerie Halle “In Unserer Mitte”. The objects depicted are symbolic reminders of those murdered and a memorial plaque names them: Enver Şimşek, Abdurrahim Özüdoğru, Süleyman Taşköprü, Habil Kılıç, Mehmet Turgut, İsmail Yaşarar, Theodoros Boulgarides, Mehmet Kubaşık, Halit Yozgat and Michèle Kiesewetter.
This time, Julian Meinelt and Hanna Thuma guided us through the district.
Focus: “Baseball bat years”
This year, the “Collecting & Sharing” section of Offener Prozes, which is responsible for documentation, research and archives, is focusing in particular on coming to terms with right-wing violence in East Germany and is collecting, among other things, interviews with witnesses of right-wing violence in the 1990s in Chemnitz and south-west Saxony. The aim is to build up an oral history archive that will be made accessible to the public.
In the summer semester of 2026, Chemnitz University of Technology will also be examining the so-called “baseball bat years” from various perspectives in relevant seminars. To this end, students will visit the Offener Prozess permanent exhibition, research and work with materials from the archive and the research department and talk to the staff. In addition, the students analyze the interviews with contemporary witnesses from various perspectives and make the results available to the emerging archive:
- Who owns memory in a society? What is remembered? What roles do racism and identity play in this? Dr. Manuel Peters (Intercultural Communication) explores these questions together with students in the seminar “Whose memory? Memory, racism, belonging in (East) Germany”. In doing so, they specifically look for gaps in prevailing memory discourses and continue to ask about the consequences of these omissions.
- In the seminar “Growing up in the “baseball bat years” by Dr. Theo Döppers (also General Educational Science), Master’s students examine various groups of people who were victims of right-wing violence in Chemnitz in the early 1990s, with a focus on topics such as migration and youth cultures.
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“(Right-wing) youth violence and pedagogical professionalism”, Prof. Dr. Ulrike Deppe from the Department of General Educational Science addresses, among other things, the concept of “accepting youth work” – an approach that allows right-wing youths to stay in youth centers unconfronted and presumably radicalize each other. Unlike in the 1990s, the perspectives of the victims of (right-wing) youth violence should also be taken into account.
The cooperation between Chemnitz University of Technology and Offener Prozess combines research, teaching and documentary practice. It creates spaces for critical debate, strengthens the visibility of marginalized perspectives and contributes to making knowledge about right-wing violence publicly accessible.
