Placing the Extremes: Cityscape, Ethnic ‘Others’ and Young Right Extremists in East Berlin NITZAN SHOSHAN University of Chicago, USA ABSTRACT Based on fieldwork in young right extremist street milieus in East Berlin, this article aims to advance debates on the European far right by approaching my subjects as intricately embedded within German society and within a broader ethnicization of political identities. The politics of young right extremists, I argue, hinge upon senses of place and sensualities of otherness that weave ethnic stereotypifications into geographies of difference in the multi-ethnic city. Particularly, right extremist subjectivities rely upon the figure of an ethnicized collectivity of ‘Turks and Arabs’. In turn, the quotidian right extremist negotiation of a racist nationalism and a multi- ethnic landscape reveals itself to mimic far broader European debates on immigration and cultural toleration, breaching the presumed boundaries that ostensibly define right extremism as a distinct political domain. The ethnographic purview shows how ultra-nationalists live out rather than resolve the contradictions of a situated bigoted politics and questions conventional approaches to European racist nationalisms that employ abstract political categories. KEY WORDS: right-extremism, urban space, ethnicity, tacism, Berlin Introduction A bony 20-year old with short, light hair and a brash attitude, Sebastian 1 belongs to a clique that routinely congregates at a small public square in a GDR era high-rise neighbourhood on the southeastern fringes of Berlin. He lives with his mother and subsists on the remittances of a mandatory welfare-for-work programme. His daily life unfolds largely in his neighbourhood, dubbed the ‘Ghetto’ throughout the district for blatantly signaling rapid post-reunification socio-economic decline. He spends his time at friends’ apartments, at the public square or here in Little Istanbul, a local Turkish restaurant-bar where he and his friends Danny and Klaus take turns at the slot machines as we sit to chat on an August afternoon. Flipping through his wallet he exposes an election sticker of the National Democratic Party of Germany 2 (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, NPD) attached to its inner lining and pauses briefly, as if ascertaining that I perceive the careful provocation. The cautiously placed sticker more or less summarizes his formal political commitments. Some three months earlier he and a friend were chased ‘with carving knives’ and banned from Little Istanbul after rioting and threatening its owners. Such incidents recur every so often, but invariably end with the renewal of amicable relations maintains 1478-2804 Print/1478-2790 Online/08/030377-15 q 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14782800802501013 Journal of Contemporary European Studies Vol. 16, No. 3, 377–391, December 2008 Downloaded By: [Shoshan, Nitzan] At: 02:48 2 December 2008