Narrating Violent Crime and Negotiating Germanness: The Print News Media and the National Socialist Underground (NSU), 2000-2012 by JOSEFIN GRAEF A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Political Science and International Studies (POLSIS) School of Government and Society College of Social Sciences University of Birmingham October 2016 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis examines how the German print news media negotiate notions of Germanness by narrating the acts of violent crime committed by the right-wing extremist group National Socialist Underground (NSU) between 2000 and 2011. Combining Paul Ricœur’s textual hermeneutics with insights from narrative criminology as well as violence and narrative media studies, I approach the NSU as a narrative puzzle. I thereby investigate how the media narrate a murder series of nine men with a migration background, a nail bomb attack in a Turkish-dominated street and an (attempted) murder of two police officers. I compare the narratives constructed both before and after the identification of the perpetrators in November 2011. Through an extensive narrative analysis of news media discourse, I examine how notions of Germanness are negotiated through the construction of relationships between perpetrators, victims, society and the state. The key argument is that the NSU has not affected dominant perceptions of Germanness, but reinforced existing ones through the creation of a hierarchy of “‘Others’ within”: immigrants, East Germans, and (right-wing) extremists. The findings show that the interpretation of acts of violent crime, especially over extended periods of time, is rooted in everyday practices of story-telling and identity construction. For my mother, Martina Graef, and my grandmother, Dr Elfriede Graef, who taught me that strong people are always their own worst critics ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Doing a PhD is both a very lonely task and a collective adventure. I am indebted to many people for making this journey as exciting, educational and enjoyable as it has been for me. I therefore want to thank my supervisors Dr Sara Jones and Dr Isabelle Hertner for welcoming me to the IGS team, for believing in my abilities and for helping me to grow as a researcher; my IGS colleagues, in particular Dr Charlotte Galpin, Dr Leila Mukhida, Dr Nick Martin and Dr Julian Pänke, for their advice, support, collegiality and friendship; the IGS, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the University of Birmingham’s School of Government and Society for their funding support; Ivor Bolton for being a very special person and a wonderful friend and colleague; Dr Raquel da Silva for being my “partner in crime” and for her positive, inspiring energy; Sophie Schwarzmaier and Marlene Schrijnders for the many uplifting talks, for helping me to stay connected to Berlin/Brandenburg and for making my nomadic life a lot easier by offering me sanctuary in Berlin on more than one occasion; my PhD colleagues, in particular Dr Annie Gibney, Zhiting Chen, Polina Manolova, Philipp Lottholz and Dr Corina Filipescu as well as Dr Renia Kartsonaki, Bruno Dalponte, Rubens Duarte, Louis Monroy Santander, Sam Warner and Dr Daniel Rio Tinto, for making the proverb “a problem shared is a problem halved” come alive; my family for supporting me unconditionally; and Fredrik Rydström, for giving me a reason to keep going no matter what. CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST UNDERGROUND AS A NARRATIVE PUZZLE .............................................................................................. 1 The NSU Five Years On: A Concise Overview of the Literature ......................................... 4 A Narrative Approach to the NSU: Violent Crime and Germanness ............................... 10 Relevance and Contribution ............................................................................................ 12 Thesis Structure ............................................................................................................... 15 CHAPTER 2 VIOLENT CRIME, THE NEWS MEDIA AND GERMANNESS: CROSS-DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ........................................................................... 20 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 20 The NSU: More than “Common Crime”? Legal and Political Dimensions ....................... 21 The Relational Nature of Concepts of Violent Crime....................................................... 25 Interpreting Violent Crime: The News Media and Collective Identities .......................... 36 Collecting Data on Violent Crime ................................................................................. 37 The Communicative Dimension of Violent Crime ........................................................ 40 Violent Crime and the News Media ............................................................................. 42 Violent Crime and the Narrative Approach ................................................................. 47 Violent Crime and Germanness ................................................................................... 52 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 53 CHAPTER 3 ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK: FROM PAUL RICŒUR’S TEXTUAL HERMENEUTICS TO NARRATIVE DISCOURSES OF VIOLENT CRIME IN THE PRINT NEWS MEDIA ................... 55 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 55 From Language to Texts as Works of Discourse .............................................................. 57 Narrative Texts, Stories and Human Time ....................................................................... 61 Narrating Violent Crime: Conceptual Networks of Action and Bodies of Knowledge .... 66 Action as Text ............................................................................................................... 66 The Agent-Motive-Intention-Nexus ............................................................................. 67 Narrative as a Mode of Knowledge and Discourses of Violent Crime ......................... 71 The Print News Media as Genre: Institutionalised Story-telling in Violent Contexts ...... 73 Violent Crime and the Integrative Function of the News Media ................................. 73 Narrativity in the Print Media: Creating “News” ......................................................... 76 News Articles as Archive and Re-Narration ................................................................. 85 Summary: The News Media as Story-Teller ................................................................. 88 News Media Discourses and Narrative Identities ............................................................ 89 The Role of Ideological Closure .................................................................................... 89 The Imagined (News) Community: Journalists, Characters and Audience .................. 91 Narrative Analysis as Method and Empirical Material .................................................... 98 Reading Stories of Violent Crime ................................................................................. 98 Media Selection, Text Corpus and Data Collection .................................................... 103 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 110 CHAPTER 4 STORIES OF VIOLENT CRIME SEPTEMBER 2000-OCTOBER 2011 AND THE NARRATIVE CREATION OF THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST UNDERGROUND ................. 112 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 112 Murder Series September 2000 – April 2006 ................................................................ 114 Dynamics in Coverage ................................................................................................ 114 Establishing the Serial Murder Script ......................................................................... 117 German Discourses of Integration and the Homogenisation of the Victim Group ... 119 From Guest Workers to “Persons with a Migration Background” ............................. 121 Narrating Difference and Labelling ............................................................................ 126 The Victims as Deviants .............................................................................................. 128 Immigrants as Victims and Perpetrators .................................................................... 130 Silence and Invisibilities in Parallel Worlds ................................................................ 133 Between Trust and Suspicion: The Difference-Deviance-Nexus ...............................