Transformative Listening: An Aesthetic Proposal to Justice – The 2017 NSU Tribunal in Cologne

Abstract

This article introduces transformative listening as a political and aesthetic practice of justice, developed from the 2017 NSU Tribunal in Cologne. At its center stood the survi-vors and the relatives of the victims of the racist terror of the neo-Nazi network National Socialist Underground (NSU). Building on and extending Dianne Otto’s (2017) notion of political listening in civil society tribunals, the organizers of the ‘Unraveling the NSU Complex’ Action Alliance shifted the focus from recognition by authority to collective transformation beyond legal settings. In the article, transformative listening is under-stood as a political and aesthetic practice that disrupts the “order of the audible,” fosters self-transformation through solidarity, reshapes the institutional imaginary, and aims at social transformation, en visioned as “Society of the Many.” I draw on ethnographic field-work, interviews, and archival material to show how the practice of transformative listen-ing emerged both as a critical response to the exclusionary and marginalizing dynamics of the official NSU trial in Munich and as an organic outcome of grassroots organizing around Cologne’s Keupstraße.