Insinuations and Threats of the (new) Extreme Right. Actors’ Biographical Deployment in Visual and Verbal Terms

Explicit and implicit threats against adversaries as well as references to violence in images and rhetoric characterize the extreme right. Focusing mostly on Germany during the last decades, I will point out changes and also continuities of topics and their visual and verbal presentation, by means of different biographical documents. These range from interviews in a research setting to photos taken during political demonstrations and to recent promotional videos of actors of the extreme right.

The self-presentation of women in these videos as main actors denouncing but also insinuating violence raises many questions for the analysis. Another important aspect concerns the relationship between biography and history: going from the explicit denial of the Holocaust and an implicit fascination with its power of destruction to seemingly more “subtle” forms of justification. Thus, as presently among Identitarians and their “post-modern turn”, there is a disposal of history at will, “freeing” one’s biography from its consequences.