77sqm_9:26min [electronic resource].

Forensic Architecture Goldsmiths, University of London 2017

Open access content

Shortly after 5:00pm on 6 April 2006, 21-year-old Halit Yozgat was murdered at the desk of his family-run internet café in Kassel, Germany. His death was the ninth of ten murders committed across Germany between 2000 and 2007, by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU). It was not until 2011, however, that the NSU and their killing spree was exposed, when two members of the group committed suicide after being pursued by police from the scene of a bank robbery. In the months and years that followed, more than a dozen parliamentary inquiries and Germany’s longest post-war criminal trial would expose the shocking extent to which Germany’s security services were aware of the NSU, and in constant contact with many of its supporters. Those revelations laid bare what became known as the ‘NSU Complex’—the structural racism and institutional blindness that ignored the situated knowledge and experience of the country’s immigrant communities, and comprehensively failed to apprehend a violent terror cell over more than a decade, leading to the deaths of ten German citizens. The seventy-seven square metres of the internet café, and the nine-and-a-half minutes during which the incident unfolded, can be seen as a microcosm of the NSU Complex. At the time of the killing, an intelligence officer named Andreas Temme was sitting in the next room. Temme was at the time an employee of the Verfassungsschutz, the intelligence agency for the German state of Hessen. Temme’s use of a computer in the café that day tied him to the scene. Temme was briefly arrested and questioned. Under interrogation by police, he denied being a witness to the incident. Specifically, Temme claimed he didn’t hear the gunshots, didn’t smell the gunpowder, and didn’t see Yozgat’s body. He would later repeat those denials in court, and in front of multiple inquiries. A few weeks after the murder, investigating police declared that Temme was no longer a suspect. Years later, the German cou
https://www.librarystack.org/77sqm_926min/?ref=unknown

Space (Architecture)
Racism
Terrorism
Violence

Text

Forensic Architecture
Eyal Weizman
Christina Varvia
Stefanos Levidis
Omar Ferwati
Ortrun Bargholz
Eeva Sarlin
Nicholas Masterton
Simone Rowat
Yamen Albadin
Franc Camps-Febrer
Hana Rizvanolli
Sarah Nankivell
Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Chris Cobb-Smith