ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how civil society initiatives have challenged elite practices of narrative control in relation to the German Neo-Nazi cell National Socialist Underground (NSU) since its discovery in November 2011, and how political elites have responded to these challenges. In 2016, the anti-fascist network NSU-Komplex auflösen (“Unravelling NSU Complex”) commissioned Forensic Architecture, a research and human rights agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, to produce counter-forensic evidence concerning the NSU's ninth serial murder in a tele-internet-café on 6 April 2006, during which an agent of the German domestic security service was present. The discussion shows how Forensic Architecture’s work purposefully crossed the boundaries between different spaces of public contestation to challenge grand narratives of “the state vs. the terrorists” and defy the claim that the liberal-democratic state produces “neutral” (non-positioned) knowledge. The chapter also discusses the ways in which Forensic Architecture’s exhibition work allowed narrative imaginations of the NSU to travel beyond the German context, highlighting the agency's first solo exhibition in Scandinavia: “Design as Investigation” at the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg, Sweden (2020–2021).
