The NSU Trilogy – In the Middle of Germany

Contextualising the screening of Fatih Akin’s In the Fade at the East End Film Festival, the Goethe-Institut London will be screening In the Middle of Germany – a three-part fictitious exploration of the murders carried out by the neo-Nazis group NSU across Germany between 2000 and 2007. The victims were mostly small business owners of Kurdish, Turkish and Greek origin, and a policewomen. The failure of the police to find the perpetrators, the unjust suspicions against the victims and their families, as well as the revelations about connections between the German domestic intelligence service and the neo-Nazi scene stirred up major debates in Germany and form the background Akin’s angry drama.

If you are interested in this subject we also recommend that you visit the exhibition Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London until 13 May 2018. As part of this exhibition Forensic Architecture (based at Goldsmith, University of London) presents their investigation into the presence of Andreas Temme, an agent of the German domestic intelligence service (Verfassungsschutz) in the internetcafé in Kassel, Germany, at the time of the murder of the 9th victim, Halit Yozgat, on 6 April 2006. Temme claimed not to have witnessed the murder. Commissioned by Unraveling the NSU Complex, Initiative 6 April, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), and documenta 14, Forensic Architecture examined the available evidence to verify the truthfulness of Temme’s testimony. Their analysis was presented to the German Parliamentary Inquiry (June 2017) and to the Hessen Parliamentary Inquiry (25 August 2017) into the crimes of the NSU in Hessen, Germany. Watch 77sqm_9:26min to see how Forensic Architecture proceeded in reconstructing the scene in the internet café in their counter-investigation of Temme's account.