Fleeing bodies and fleeting performances: Transience and the nation-state

The concrete Utopias of performance

In 2013 Jenny Edkins and Adrian Kear published their groundbreaking anthology, International Politics and Performance: Critical Aesthetics and Creative Practice. Together with leading theorists of performance such as Diana Taylor, the two scholars brought their respective expertise in international politics and theater into collaboration. They eschewed more conventional interdisciplinary approaches that apply one discipline’s methodology to the other’s textual narratives: for example, “the performance dynamics of politics (their ritual incarnations and modalities of practising citizenship) and the ways in which performance addresses politics and ‘the political’ through staging and interrogating its processes. In this empirically restricted view, we’re still in the territory of examining ‘performances about’ political events, histories, experiences, etc. on the one hand, and explaining political events in terms of the logic of performance on the other” [original emphasis] (Edkins and Kear, 2013: 8). Using Jacques Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics, the editors posit an aesthetic politics which they define as thinking “through politics and performance as modes and practices of aesthetic thinking, and to think them together as modes and practices of aesthetic politics [original emphasis]” (Edkins and Kear, 2013: 8). They contend a method that perceives “performance and politics as ‘folded’ in myriad and complex patterns, interanimating one another as domains of political subjectivation and creative practices of ‘dissensus’ and agentic creation’” (Edkins and Kear, 2013: 8).

Edkins and Kear’s definition of the modes and practices of aesthetic politics reflects the ways in which José Esteban Muñoz’s development of a “queer aesthetics” fuses often separated critical trajectories. In defining this queer aesthetics in Cruising Utopia, Muñoz posits the usefulness of utopian affects, whether spontaneously felt or carefully crafted, countering the general scholarly and activist dismissal of utopian politics. Muñoz specifically argues for Ernst Bloch’s “concrete utopias”: they are “relational to historically situated struggles, a collectivity that is actualized or potential. . .Concrete utopias can also be daydream-like, but they are the hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even the solitary oddball who is the one who dreams for many. Concrete utopias are the realm of educated hope” (Muñoz, 2009: 3). Reading the notion of transient performance through Muñoz qua Bloch, we can not only understand the ephemerality of “transient” as not directionless, happenstance, or apolitical, but rather a trace, memory, or history that its interpreters can construe as the evidence for a liberatory future not yet collectively realized nor yet visible.

Muñoz posits one facet of queerness as fomenting a radical aesthetic politics of utopian futurity because “the here and now is a prison house” (Muñoz, 2009: 1). For Muñoz, the “here and now” is a rigid fixity that forecloses the queer imagination and radical futures. This rigidity is also analogously applicable to official histories and artistic reproductions, to allude to Walter Benjamin’s and Peggy Phelan’s theories of the connections between radical politics and aesthetics. The moment of danger for Benjamin and the disappearing performance for Phelan provide a radically impermanent present that once remembered, reproduced, or otherwise incorporated into history remains the only index of this event. We connect the logic of Phelan’s “unmarked” disappearances that produce performance’s unreproducibility to the radical and vanishing democratic performances perpetuated by people in their daily lives, lived in each moment, and that rehabilitate democratic participation beyond the voting booth or other officially recognized acts.

Transients performing residence

The large-scale influx of refugees in late summer 2015 did not occur in a vacuum. Significant protests and performances had been staged earlier, and one of the most important ones was the occupation of the Oranienplatz (a public square in a gentrifying part of Berlin) and a series of high-publicity artivist acts by the Berlin-based Zentrum für Politische Schönheit [Center for Political Beauty] (ZPS) that drew attention to the borderscape of the EU and the complex ways that borders are performed. Both of these events revolved around the question of mobility and the power to control mobility. The major concern at Oranienplatz was the above-mentioned “Residenzpflicht” to which asylum seekers are subject. This contested rule demands that while their applications are open, their mobility is severely restricted to an assigned area (most often the surroundings of a refugee camp or home), and more often than not, these are located away from cities in smaller towns (since the government employs a distribution ratio to spread out the financial and political burden of hosting the asylum seekers). In these provincial locations, access to information, work, and cultural goods is restricted and isolation can take a psychological toll. In September 2012, the Oranienplatz group left their assigned quarters in Würzburg without state authorization and in a month-long trip they marched to Berlin, where they staked a claim to public space so as to demonstrate their right to mobility and to protest the state’s order to remain in place far from the capital. Refugees and supporters set up a camp that for the next 2 years functioned as a home to a small group of activists who proceeded to “perform” residence despite their transient realities. The organizers intentionally created this spectacle in a public square to draw media attention to the untenable situation—humanitarian but also legal—of migrants caught up in the EU’s Dublin regime. Inverting the private/public divide, the effect of living, cooking, eating and passing time in the public eye was to make the mundane visible. What the performance actually entailed was not a person’s private life, but the refusal of privacy for certain people who found themselves categorized as “non-citizens” (as a number of refugees have taken to call themselves ⁸ ) and apparently, as non-rights holders. The occupation of Oranienplatz barely survived its first winter; the hardships compelled most residents to take shelter in conventional homes for sleeping but the performance continued until the dread of spending a second winter outdoors forced a rather unsatisfactory compromise between representatives of the refugees, the Berlin district of Kreuzberg, and the city of Berlin.

The performance of sedentariness, stability, and “home,” however fleeting, left indelible traces locally and globally. When the state intervened and reinstated order, putting an end to the ad-hoc, spontaneous, self-determined mobility of the refugees, the participants reenacted “home” and “Oranienplatz” in other places, and the traces of their passing through the city and across social media are manifold. Broken up and dispersed to other locations, they continued their occupations as repetitions of the original. Each performance engaged the Berlin and German public as a captive audience and forced political action on the part of the city and the state. Countless hearings, press conferences, and committee sessions have dealt with the issue of migrants’ lack of privacy and home as well as their desire to produce this lack through performance in lieu of possessing it. One of the last occupations stemming from the original has only been ordered cleared in January 2018, more than 5 years onward (Kraetzer, “Ende”). “Oranienplatz” is not just any street square in Berlin anymore, but has come to be associated with the refugee movement. As Olivia Landry summarizes it, “The residual effect of the Oranienplatz occupation has been the indelible transformation of this public space into a political commons [. . .]. Oranienplatz is now synonymous with the struggle for universal human rights and the recognition that the breach of these rights is a threat to justice and democracy everywhere. Indeed, ‘Wir sind alle Oranienplatz’” [We are all Oranienplatz] (Landry, 2015: 411).

This transformation of Oranienplatz into a political commons indexes a longstanding struggle over home and nation that energizes the far-right in Germany, and indeed other European countries. With anti-migrant and neo-Nazi platforms and weekly parades and rallies in Dresden, the far-right in Germany has a growing influence in local and national politics, represented by the electoral successes of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. In this way the Oranienplatz occupation and continuous protests contested these anti-migrant demonstrations, galvanizing debates over EU migration policies, refugees and human rights with international coverage and interest.

The performance of belonging: Refugee-led tours through Berlin

The Geflüchtete or the flee(t)ing ones continue to insert their bodies into the German body politic, claiming a public role and shaping a sense of the city. In a long-running project financed partially through donations, refugees who have received the requisite permits lead guided tours through Berlin in English and German, presenting parts of the city that are relevant to the migrant experience and are not part of a typical sightseeing trip. ⁹ These tour groups walk through Neukölln, one of the 12 boroughs of Berlin and one that has the highest concentration of migrants in the city. The event description for the Refugee Voices tour on the group’s website connects German history to the present:

By using places of historical significance in Berlin, the walking tour seeks to draw parallels between what has happened in the history of Berlin and what is currently happening in Syria. The idea is to make us realise that none of us are immune to turbulent times, that the refugees of today are escaping real danger and that we have the means to offer them a safe place in Europe. By understanding the situation in Syria, we can start to change our attitudes to those fleeing to Europe. (Refugee Voices)

Importantly, this organization brings the fraught past of German nation-building to foster a new national community that explicitly includes refugees.

In repeating first encounters, in retracing the steps of arrival, the tour fosters experiences of forced transience on the German or EU citizen-visitor who by definition is resident and not transient. Even Berlin residents become tourists to their own city. The tour guides determines which elements reach the tourists’ perception; they organize the field of visibility and thus produces a new, emerging political field of what is thinkable. Can this new field become concrete and result in structural change? What does each iteration of the tour guides’ performance accomplish and what trace does it leave? The non-German, non-citizen guides authorize participants to imagine perhaps a connection to the guides themselves, inculcated by tourists’ voluntarily subordinated relation to them. The tour participants can also incorporate these refugees into their imagined community of the German nation: that in their similarity to their own character and individual strivings, refugees belong to German society if not also the body politic. An article published on the official website of Germany’s Refugee Agency ¹⁰ features one of the male refugee tour guides as a positive example, despite the fact that his residency status has not yet been decided and he lives a life suspended in time and space. ¹¹ The government, in an attempt to fix the impromptu possibilities of each performance of a transient life, takes control of the narrative by presenting the actors in this encounter as either grateful (migrant) or benevolent (citizen).

These refugee-led tours of their communities intersect with categories of tourism that exploit the sensational aspects of death, suffering, and poverty. The residents and urban landscape of Neukölln are the people and place of this tourist site, participants and backdrop in the tourists’ experience of “refugeeness,” however brief. In this perceived authenticity, the refugee-led tours parallel the history of and critique posed by “slum tourism,” a trend that, as Fabian Frenzel and Ko Koens have outlined, was popularized in the 1980s with travels to the townships in South Africa and later the favelas of Brazil. Slum tourism exposes the vast inequality and precarity of residents and promises glimpses of human suffering as well as authentic culture, for example samba music and dance that originated in the favelas (Frenzel and Koens, 2012: 197). Similarly, these tours in Neukölln began amid the debates over integration and refugee policies in German politics which galvanized the far-right nativists to form the anti-migrant AfD. Querstadtstein also conducts workshops about refugees for schools, a resource which is more akin to Holocaust education than solely poverty tourism. Moreover, Neukölln has made headlines for its heterogeneous community with a wide array of lifestyles, cultures, and classes:

To some, it is a working-class district where retirees with meagre pensions can comfortably remain within the city; to others, it is a loud, crime-ridden ghetto sinking under piles of rubbish and discarded furniture; to others still, it is a playground of endless possibilities, where the cost of living is relatively modest and tourists and hipsters can while away the days in third wave coffee shops and the nights in fashionable bars. (Somaskanda, 2019)

The tours also alert outsiders to the increasing gentrification of the area that removes affordable housing for both working-class white German pensioners as well as new refugees and residents of migrant background; these trends will change the historic neighborhoods and their residents that tourists have explicitly come to experience. As in other examples of slum tourism, the tourist becomes complicit in a script that ultimately might counteract the good intentions articulated at the start.

However, due to the resistance offered by performance’s inability to “be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations” (Phelan, 2003: 103), one of the possibilities of radical resistance is that both the tour guide and the “guided” will seek conversations and connections with others like them, creating vanishing instances of democratic performances far beyond the present encounter that exceeds the pre-scripted performance offered on the government website. Refugee Voices explicitly hopes to cultivate these encounters and continuing connections: “The tours through different districts and neighbourhoods offer room for dialogue and the opportunity to overcome reservations and reconsider one’s own prejudices.” The fleeting nature of this performance could gesture toward an ephemeral belonging of this migrant to German nation and the fluidity of a more expansive rather than fixed German identity. However, this narrative of the transient who works hard to become a resident and a part of the permanent and eternal German body politic restricts this dynamic possibility of migrant incorporation to only those deemed deserving, an impossible goal for those without residency and work permits.

The inevitable transience of these performances forces a constant reconnection between migrant and citizen, activist and spectator. This interpretation of democracy as transient ethically demands perpetual interconnection rather than the commodification or fixing of experiences and memories in the past. Much like Walter Benjamin’s famous caution of the “moment of danger” in the sixth of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the flash of the performance refuses this cooptation by official history and memory. The ephemerality of performance is the ephemerality of democracy. Undoubtedly more permanent, state-mandated structures might facilitate the perpetuation of democratic institutions; however, the collective commitment of the people not only to engage with these institutions but also to engage politically with one another through and despite differences and to inhabit a common experience of transience that occurs between fixed identities and politics is what Jacques Rancière calls a “political being-together” (Rancière, 2015: 108). The stakes in these performances of democracy can be imagined as potentially revolutionary. Leo Cabranes-Grant asks, “how [can] certain performances contribute to the management and reevaluation of social identities”? Through these repeated intercultural performances between refugees and the citizens that attend their tours, Berlin functions as a “social site[. . .] in which the co-belonging of certain categories (for example, space and time, past and present, local and global, we and them) becomes extremely acute” (Rancière, 2015: 501). Which emergent structures are visible when one looks at events as performance? How can these performances reveal and rearrange constellations of power?

Diana Taylor’s development of “scenarios” as an analytic category in Archive and Repertoire helps to answer these questions. In addition to the long critical genealogies of “narrative and plot,” scenarios demand “that we also pay attention to milieu and corporeal behaviors such as gestures, attitudes, and tones not reducible to language” (2003: 28). The state, like the citizens and refugees, is both actor and audience, as the performative engagement among them is understood through “strategies of display,” “embodiment,” and already established frameworks of refugee history in Germany and the EU, especially after the World Wars and German reunification. ¹² Cabranes-Grant expands on Taylor’s definition of the concept’s political and social effects: “Scenarios are restated both for maintenance (namely, they serve to solidify and adjust hegemonic agendas) and for emergence (instantiating the presence of new formations, deviations, and alliances that are yet to be fully recognized). Scenarios are thus both effective and affective” (Cabranes-Grant, 2011: 517). The state eternally attempts to fix the fleeting nature of emerging subjectivities and collectivities; transients’ performances perpetually need to mobilize affective alliances to give rise to these new social formations.

The particularly flüchtig/transient character of the performances we analyze is that they are ad-hoc and just passing through involving many participants with often conflicting agendas. These performances reveal the function of refugees—the fleeting people or subjects—in our modern society and in our nation-states. Who are the actors, who is in the audience? Given that the traces produced by them are manifold but hard to perceive amid anti-refugee sentiments, some might become more permanent through activism that demands recognition of refugee experiences such as the garden installation erected by the Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (ZPS, Center for Political Beauty) discussed below. This temporary monument has taken on a life of its own; although the ephemerality of performance self-reflexively engages its own temporality, this one nevertheless is unusual in its ongoing duration as a living performance and might have a more lasting impact through its very transience: the dynamism and variability of its form.

Transient performances of concrete utopias in replica memorial gardens

On its English-language website, the German group ZPS describes itself as a “political performance art” group that engages in “actions” to expose the current political milieu in which “the legacy of the Holocaust is rendered void by political apathy, the rejection of refugees and cowardice” (Center for Political Beauty). Founded by activist Philipp Ruch in 2009, the group refers to itself as an “assault team” that contends “art must hurt, provoke, and rise in revolt” in order to promote an “aggressive humanism.” The ZPS accentuates the possibilities of both extremes discussed above to juxtapose the ephemeral and transient with the permanent and concrete. This instance of the political performances or “actions” of the ZPS is Bloch’s concrete utopia literalized: an installation made to look as if it were constructed of concrete. The group’s earlier works featured performances which often consisted of 3-D, video or virtual structures that were placed near the performance site and archived on the ZPS website in English and German (see Gully and Itagaki, 2017). The slabs of the Memorial Garden installation, however, are wooden boxes painted to resemble the concrete stelae of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas or Holocaust-Mahnmal) in Berlin. The ZPS repeatedly alludes to this specific memorial in their work since the ethical and humanitarian issues generated by the Holocaust have remained unresolved in rigid expressions of German civic and racial nationalism.

This “action” by the ZPS substantially differs from its other works: it is a fully realized memorial, however small, rather than the temporary ones that last for a few hours or several days: the symbolic graves dug into the German Parliament’s park, the photographs of African migrants holding a white cross commemorating one of the “Wall Dead” or East Germans killed attempting to cross the Berlin Wall, or photorealistic images and videos of proposed memorials, bridges, or rescue platforms at sea that have made the ZPS internationally famous since 2014. The collective has an iron-clad six-year lease on the property where the memorial now stands, and has exploited a loophole in an ordinance that allows these garden structures to be built as long as they remain under a certain height.

These painted wooden boxes are themselves created to “perform” concrete slabs, specifically the 2711 coffin-like concrete structures (stelae) of the almost five-acre Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe near the Reichstag in Berlin. Since late fall 2017, the public can view these dozens of wooden boxes-as-concrete stelae in the small Thuringian village of Bornhagen, and on Sundays, volunteers supervise, direct, and serve as docents to tourists of the memorial. Visitors, including journalists, come from all over Germany and see not only this replica of the “Mahnmal” but also perhaps new damages to the structures by vandals and the responses of the sometimes hostile neighbors. The Alternative für Deutschland, the far-right political party that has been gaining votes and parliamentary seats, has a strong foothold in this former East German region. Given this geography and history, the AfD politician Björn Höcke’s incendiary comments that spurred the ZPS artivism received more widespread support in this area: for example, his speech in January 2017 called for a “180-degree turn” against the “memorial of shame,” railing against Germany’s continued atonement for the Holocaust. ¹³ His neighbors regularly harassed these perceived outsider-activists, and this abuse becomes part of what the visitors and tourists come to witness themselves. Bornhagen is a 300-person village in Thuringia, 360 km southwest of Berlin. An area known for its past and continuing support of Nazi ideology and its policies, Thuringia is “brown country,” which refers to the “brown shirts” of the National Socialist Party. Thirty-four percent of the area voted for the AfD party in the region, and 80 of the 300 villagers are refugees (Bundscherer, 2017). The tension between villagers and activists and visitors grew so tense that the village considered canceling its famous Christmas market (Bundscherer, 2017). Höcke chose to live in this town as it provided the ideal background for his political ambitions; it is not his hometown. In interviews, he refers to Bornhagen seemingly without irony as his “refugium.”

Because the constitutional guarantee to asylum in Germany is a federal response to the Holocaust and its commemoration, Höcke and the AfD’s platform against refugees is embedded in their opposition to Germany’s politics of memory. Their anti-Semitism fosters their anti-migrant platform. Indeed, the former AfD leader Frauke Petry said that “police should shoot at migrants entering the country illegally” (“Nazi word” [‘Nazi word’ revived by German AfD chief, 2016]). Höcke and the AfD (among other right-wingers) engage in a line of argumentation that links Germany’s post-war asylum law, and especially the so-called “Willkommenskultur” of 2015 to Germans’ continued sense of guilt over the Holocaust. Crucially, the far-right believes this sense of guilt is misplaced and even dangerous in the case of refugee acceptance and inclusion. Directly responding to this argument, the ZPS similarly links Germany’s fascist past to its present in order to call out and remind Germans of their obligation towards today’s refugees as a necessary, perhaps eternal penance for past crimes. As such, the recent ZPS action builds on their earlier performance pieces related to the inhumanity of EU borders and the humanity of drowned refugees.

If we think of transience in terms of temporality, the replica of the 2005 Mahnmal by the ZPS evokes similar responses: the original memorial’s meaning of honoring the Jews killed in the Holocaust and serving as a reminder to never again cause or facilitate this mass death marks a new faultline in the life of the nation-state. The AfD, sensationally articulated by Höcke, promotes moving on from, even forgetting, the past and its legacy of obligatory reparations, diminishing the importance of remembering and redress for Jewish victims and survivors of the Nazis, and rewriting history in order to purge the present and future of guilt and shame for crimes against humanity. ¹⁴ The ZPS’s repetition of the Mahnmal also moves it to a different space: from the capital metropolis of Berlin to the rural village of Bornhagen, from public national spaces to private domestic or residential ones. The performance questions how fixed events such as the Holocaust and Germany’s post-World War II perpetual atonement are as part of its national identity when the AfD can reject these legacies so easily. The ZPS engages in the AfD’s contentious debate in order to invest the past and its treatment of WWII-era refugees with new meanings for this era and its new demands on the German nation.

Performances, more conventionally understood, involve repetition with an aim for sameness regardless of the audience. In this performance of the Mahnmal replica in the Bornhagen village, the public performances and the often clandestine ones have unwitting actors and performers: the police, the vandals, neighbors, Höcke, his family members, and the visitor-tourists who interact with them. These visitors possibly come as much to pay homage to this smaller-scale allusion to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe as they come to experience firsthand the controversy and outrage these “outsiders” have provoked in the village residents. They also witness the new damage done to the memorial garden as well as the hostility of the village locals. Generating even more publicity, interpersonal conflicts between the locals and the activists appeared in national newspapers when Höcke’s wife Nora sued the group to remove the memorial, arguing that the ZPS had breached her privacy. She cited as evidence a grainy photograph taken of her husband allegedly viewing the memorial garden from his property that was published on social media sites and newspapers. Because the image could only have been taken while on the Höckes’ property, the Höckes alleged that ZPS activists had trespassed; however, it was soon determined that it was one of the Höckes’ neighbors and supporters, “Hangman Willi,” who was the source of the image. These kinds of public interactions between the Höckes and their neighbors, among village residents and their unwanted tourists and provoked by the wooden stelae constitute the performance. The lawsuits further publicize the group’s memorial, making it likelier that visitors will witness a defaced monument or hostile responses and thereby becoming part of the ongoing performance.

Not only is Höcke forced to see the memorial from his home daily, but on Sundays, he is also forced to witness the visitors who come to pay homage to a memorial built in response to the anti-asylum, anti-refugee, and anti-migrant sentiment explicitly expressed by him and his party. As his words incite other Germans to denounce or even harass migrants and those Germans “of migration background,” he must confront the daily presence and the weekly pilgrimage of his constituents and other Germans to his quiet village. What emerges is a form of democratic exchange that the ZPS forces into view ¹⁵ : these confrontations, although heated and threatening, are still forms of communication. Akin to thanato-tourism that marks pilgrimages to WWII death camps which are often surrounded by prosperous suburbs whose former inhabitants stayed silent to the mass murders in their midst, tourists visit the village, community, and milieu precisely to experience the people and region that gave rise to the political far right in Germany. Like the installation itself, their visits represent a national and international rebuke and scrutiny of Höcke’s anti-migrant sentiments and of his neighbors who support him and the AfD. The presence and interactions of the tourists in this small village are a significant part of the ZPS performances.

Titled by one journalist, “Bornhagener Stelengrundstück” [“The Slabs of Bornhagen”] (Leber, 2018), the memorial garden has become an aggregation of past, unwitting performances and improvisational political acts since the structures first went up. There are the performances around the performances: “At the opening there were riots, Höcke’s friends chased journalists by force from the property, ‘Hangman Willi’ [Schlingen-Willi] kicked one of the artists in the back. In the weeks following, masked people slashed car tires, sneaked onto the property at night, and damaged one of the slabs. Schlingen-Willi was caught stealing one of the surveillance cameras. The camera recorded it.” ¹⁶ Headquartered in Berlin, ZPS activists and protest participants—generally not from Höcke’s home village of Bornhagen—are reviled by the AfD’s regional leader as “outsiders” with the American connotation of “outside agitators” that has been used to criticize protestors’ political agendas as illegitimate and unrepresentative of local populations.

Peggy Phelan’s distinctions between performance and its recordings can usefully redirect audiences of this memorial garden and its critics to the performances in the construction, maintenance, and response to the memorial itself. She cautions that descriptions of the performance are not synonymous with it, just as its memory is insufficiently a reproduction of it: “The description itself does not reproduce the object, it rather helps us to restage and restate the effort to remember what is lost. The descriptions remind us how loss acquires meaning and generates recovery—not only of and for the object, but for the one who remembers. The disappearance of the object is fundamental to performance; it rehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs always to be remembered.” (Phelan, 2003: 103). This process is relevant on two levels: (1) The disappearances of the Jews during the Holocaust that is memorialized, and (2) the disappearance of the sentiments of shame, reconciliation and atonement for Germany’s crimes against humanity and the emboldening of the criticism and attacks on these sentiments and their political outcomes such as “Willkommenkultur” and liberal asylum policies. The ZPS is concerned that without the “rehearsal” and “repetition” of these feelings of shame, Germans will no longer be vigilant against the rise of another mass murdering dictator and his political party such as Hitler and the National Socialists. Much like AfD events that have their supporters and their critics—on-site protesters challenging the right-wing’s anti-refugee policies in the public sphere—the presence of these groups and their debates are part of democratic deliberation. The ZPS’s action in Thuringia brings the past and present of the European refugee crisis to this region, this village’s people, reminding them that they are part of the nation that collectively decided on this memorial and upholds the asylum provisions in the German Basic Law or its federal constitution (Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland). Although not a written description but a visual imitation, the stelae replicas and the volunteer docents help “restage and restate the effort to remember what is lost” (Phelan, 2003: 103) in Höcke and his supporters’ rejection of Holocaust memorials, in this case, the nation-building sentiment of “Willkommenskultur.”

Specifically, then, what are visitors to Bornhagen hoping to witness? Most media coverage implies that visitors come to remember the “murdered Jews of Europe” (Leber, 2018), but treat the actions and reactions around the “Bornhagener Stelengrundstück” as distinct from the “activist actions” themselves. In the privacy suit pursued by Höcke’s wife, the violation of the family’s privacy is the semi-permanent public reaction to her husband’s politics. The security cameras around the garden also capture the unwitting and illegal performances of the vandals and thieves such as the Bornhagen neighbor “Hangman Willi” who was caught stealing the very camera that captured his theft (Leber, 2018). In this way it is a living monument with new defacements and damage to the property and the villagers’ evolving frustration with their unwanted national and international attention for the incendiary politics of an infamous long-term resident. The hostility, sometimes physical, is directed at the activists and journalists, and neighbors and perpetrators see these actions as necessary battling and expelling these outsiders from their community. Because the damage defaces this replica of the Holocaust Memorial, the activists, visitors, and journalists bear witness to these anti-Semitic, anti-migrant and anti-Muslim parts of Germany. It is their potential engagement with these other German citizens who echo neo-Nazi concepts and politics such as the AfD’s controversial support of using the word “völkisch” ¹⁷ that constitute the performance itself, again and again.

Conclusion

The fleeing and fleeting connotations of transient performance expose important assumptions about national identity and nation-building. In terms of movement and belonging, the good citizen contrasts to the bad migrant: the citizen is good in terms of fixity and stasis or state-sanctioned moves within the nation-state or EU, places to which the citizen belongs; the migrant is bad in terms of mobility, in essence going to where they are thought not to belong. These performances are filtered through mainstream news reports (the refugee protest in Oranienplatz and “Slabs at Bornhagen”) and government websites (the refugee-led tours), and we use the fundamental dichotomy between transience and residence to consider how this conflict structures German audiences’ reactions. As a productive kind of redundancy and renewal, democratic deliberation or democratic acts are themselves ephemeral and constantly disappearing. The institutions that increase the likelihood of a durable democracy still require our constant and public democratic performances. Transient performance re-establishes the perpetual, vigilant, and repetitive nature of our democratic responsibilities.