Heritage Mobilisation as Radical Politics in a Left-Wing Social Movement

ABSTRACT

Left-wing movements are said to invest mainly in class struggle to address global capitalism and the growing dominance by the far right. Recent left-wing movements, however, increasingly invest in culture. This article explores this investment with a focus on the mobilisation of heritage (historical architecture, cultural traditions, histories, and narratives). Through the case of Dresden’s No-Pegida movement, I show that heritage is an often-unrecognised sphere of mobilising radical politics from the left. Attention to how the left mobilises heritage can indicate that investments in culture occur in intersectional and transversal ways. This article uses examples from a qualitative study of No-Pegida to discuss heritage mobilisation in demonstrations and community work. I show that heritage comes to matter for the left when responding to heritage populism from the far right. The left’s heritage mobilisation can be understood as a refusal of authoritarian populism and an opposition to the far right’s spatial cleansing attempts. It is further an important step for reconfiguring the local creative middle-class through the inclusion of refugee and migrant artists and for centring subaltern philosophies about culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage mobilisation
• Dresden
• left-wing
• social movement
• radical politics

Introduction

In the context of Europe, far right¹ groups have grown into movements (Wodak 2015: 13) that construct a ‘politics of division fuelled by nostalgia and fear’ (Niklasson and Hølleland 2018: 122). Far right movements portray themselves as protectors of liberty and liberal society values and rules that they see under threat by multiculturalism and Islam (Reynié 2016: 51). They do so by capitalising on culture to strengthen the antagonism between a European or Western way of life and ‘some kind of ethnic/ religious/ linguistic/ political minority [that they instrumentalise] as a scapegoat’ (Wodak 2015: 23). The identity politics (Benhabib 1996: 3) of far right movements employ culture through a nationalist-populist argumentation to restore national sovereignty, identity, and prosperity (Mouffe 2018). To form a common rational consensus (Woodly 2015) on the idea of an imagined true ‘national’ ‘we’, far right populists mobilise narratives that revive and drive cultural racism, nativism, and authoritarianism to create this politics of difference and maintain it (eds. Wodak et al. 2009; Wodak 2015). Such investments in culture are reactionary because they are responses to the failures of the existing democratic system, one that is commonly associated with the democratic struggle of the left² (Robin 2017).

Chantal Mouffe, however, states that the left, too, ‘wants to recover democracy to deepen and extend it’ (2018: 1). She argues that the left developed its own populist strategies, meaning strategies to respond ‘to the crisis of neoliberal hegemony and the growing social inequality it has promoted’ (Mouffe 2018 in Schmidtke 2020: 3) to conduct radical politics on the grassroots level (Rama and Santana 2020). Left-wing populists tend to invest more in social-class-related drivers compared to far right populists that focus on culture, migration, civilisation, religion, and race (Kaya 2019a: 69). Recent investigations into left-wing groups in Germany (Schmidtke 2020: 10) show that the selected class-based approach to social inequality falls short. It fails to construct and mobilise a strong sense of collective identity because it channels less emotional energy. Moreover, the left struggles with internal fragmentation. It fails to build the same kind of continuity in populist efforts over time that can be observed in far right groups. Thus, left-wing movements tend to disperse more quickly and lose political salience.

At the same time, left-wing grassroots protests, such as the Aganakitsmenoi in Greece and the Indignados in Spain, the Occupy Movement, Nuit Debout in France, Black Lives Matter, Fridays for Future and more recently Die Letzte Generation in Germany, indicate that radical politics on the left are changing. Mobilisation is no longer limited to class concerns but includes culture, race, the environment, migration, and gender equality. This approach to the struggle against global capitalism is a rather recent turn. Activists on the left increasingly respond to intersecting critical events or crises (for example, economic crises, racist murders and violence, Islamophobism, severe environmental disasters, human rights violations, and LGBTQ rights restrictions) by merging a multiplicity of struggles in ad-hoc protests. The consolidation of different investments in one movement or in cross-movement solidarities occurs when different notions of crisis intersect so that different emotionally charged features reinforce each other.

The aim of this article is to document the role that heritage takes in intersectional discursive mobilisations by the left. I argue that under the pressure of far right heritage populism, the left capitalises on cultural traditions and histories to destabilise the far right’s dominance over heritage in the social movement setting. Using heritage in disruptive ways, the left seeks to prevent the far right from becoming an authority over historical memory. I discuss this practice through the example of one left-wing movement (No-Pegida) in Dresden, Germany, that formed in response to a local far right movement (Pegida³). This paper derives this argument from qualitative fieldwork in Dresden to show that heritage mobilisation by No-Pegida is a discursive political construction that seeks to build a local identity in radical, intersectional ways. I argue that this is a left-populist strategy to build up and broaden modes of radical politics through mobilising multiple heterogenous demands beyond the class struggle. Class-centred approaches are broadened by involving authorised heritage sites⁴ and subverting far right ‘spatial cleansing’ strategies⁵ (Herzfeld 2015) in street protests. In addition, a recodification of the creative middle class occurs when the community level acts integrative to migrant and refugee artists.⁶

The city of Dresden was chosen for this investigation due to its unique characteristics with regard to the establishment of collaborative left-wing mobilisation and its use of cultural heritage. Dresden is a rather unusual research site apropos intercultural collaborative projects. Similar to other eastern German cities such as Chemnitz (Carstensen-Egwuom 2011), Dresden can be classified as a ‘down-scale city’ (Glick Schiller and Caglar 2009) as to its relevance to international migration and the small number of transnational networks among migrants. That means intercultural collaborations are rare. The visibility of different cultural heritages is limited to intercultural festivals, temporary exhibitions, and food in the city. Further, politicised urban segregation leads to different hostilities towards immigrants and other negatively racialised groups, which makes the city an unattractive destination for long term settlement. Dresden has been recognised as ‘significant for understanding right-wing populism’ (Kaya 2023: 319). I argue that the city is also significant for understanding how cultural heritage begins to matter for the left.

Heritage scholars increasingly examine contemporary far right heritage policy (Niklasson and Hølleland 2018) and heritage populism in far right groups (Reynié 2016). Media studies scholars focus on the circulation of far right movement ideology in popular culture (Atton 2006; Deerman 2012; Froio 2018) and youth development scholars analyse cultural heritage use in far right youth mobilisation (Edelstein 2003; Miller-Idriss 2017). Working-class studies investigate the identity struggles that occur when working-class heritage is omitted from authorised heritage discourse (e.g. Barrett 2012; Smith et al. 2012; Smith 2020). However, heritage use as radical politics by the left is underexplored. By adding this perspective, this article contributes new dimensions to critical heritage studies (Harrison 2010) and new working-class studies (Smith et al. 2012) to better understand heritage as a resource of power in the contemporary reactionary left. I theorise heritage mobilisation by the left as a form of radical politics that reconceptualises how citizens articulate their protests and egalitarian visions. Heritage mobilisation must therefore be understood as a radical strategy of the left intended to reshape the political imaginary and its territories.

Context and Methodology

The materials discussed in this article derive from my doctoral project: a larger study of musical citizenship and musical activism, conducted through extensive ethnographic research in Dresden 2017–2021. The project explored how people used music and other forms of artistic expression to stage anti-right-wing activism in Dresden and support the formation of No-Pegida solidarity networks. With a focus on the transmission of artistic practice into the activist setting, the project studied the kinds of voices this practice produced and how they interacted with each other.

No-Pegida started as a counter-protest to marches by Pegida in early 2015 in Dresden. Pegida is part of the larger far right movement in Europe (Vorländer et al. 2017; Volk 2022). It politicised ‘Europe’ by criticising the organisation of the European Union and blaming the ideology of plurality for current economic and political crises. The movement sought to reimagine Europe without Islamic culture (Kaya 2019b) and used the crises that Europe experienced to create a populist language for a new patriotic community ‘based on a common history rather than a modern, liberal and pluralist political entity’ (Volk 2022: 249).

No-Pegida was not integrated into broader rights-based networks at first. Instead, it was a localised grassroots protest, formed by people who consider pluralism and multiculturalism essential to their European identity. The movement was able to build on the activism of anti-racists and anti-fascists. The majority of No-Pegida organisers and supporters were part of Dresden’s left. Dresden’s left consisted largely of students and adults in their 20s–50s, most of them live in the Neustadt, a district that is a marker of the city’s cultural plurality and alternative culture based on the marketing of ethnic differences in fashion and food. Stine Marg et al. observed in their study of political ideology in the movement (2016: 69) that besides the pluralists, many conservative citizens joined No-Pegida. This group viewed itself as the political centre, which they defined as the political actor that values the constitution and democracy. Resistance against Pegida was a necessary political act for this group because the centre wanted to prevent any kind of extremism, including from the far left.

Cultural actors could be found across these groups, often collaborating on the same projects. The collaboration between different cultural associations and institutions, local artists, and community projects gave No-Pegida visibility. This collaborative work shaped the local creative middle class. Many No-Pegida actors invested in community workshops, intercultural artist collectives, and educational projects. Community-level actions reshaped existing cultural networks and enabled new collaborations across formal and informal cultural sectors. Combined, these efforts made possible cultural left-wing interventions in segregated districts. While community projects are independent of each other, No-Pegida was the place where they first came together as a provisional public that shared a common interest in resisting the far right. Even though, No-Pegida no longer assists as a movement, the informal network that developed from the protests continues to sustain collaborations. The network therefore can be understood to transcend competition logic that is modelled on nation-state frames (Torp 2020). Collaboratively different actors subverted far right propaganda and ruptured its far right populist discourse. Artists took primary roles in that. In the years since individual actors continued to participate in street-level action although ‘HOPE-fight racism’ has become the primary organiser.

As a local researcher, the author had access to the neighbourhoods and networks and was able to conduct field research in the local language. Five No-Pegida actors (see Table 1) were interviewed to discuss: a gradual development of radical politics through critical activations of forgotten or erased traditions and histories, collaborations with ostracised refugee musicians to reshape the creative middle-class locally, and the creation of artistic networks in hostile environments to subvert the far right’s spatial cleansing attempts. Banda Comunale was directly recruited due to its public involvement in local activism (14 interviewed musicians). Purposive snowball sampling was used to recruit additional initiatives in music and theatre (Paradiesorchester, SingAsylum, Vierteltonorchester, and Montagscafé), who were active in demonstrations and developed anti-Pegida, pro-immigration, and pro-diversity projects. The author identified these initiatives as relevant to the research through a textual analysis of the Dresdner KULTURMAGAZIN, a local arts and culture magazine in which projects were described and advertised, and by surveying posters throughout the city, as well as Facebook profiles and websites.

Table 1. Overview of interview sample.

	Engagement type	Markers	Type of activities	Places of activity
Banda Comunale/Internationale	Brass and String Ensemble	All men Migrant and non-migrant musicians	Rehearsals and performances in demonstrations, concerts, party events (Social Democratic Party, Green Party, Left Party, Christian Democratic Union), and city-/facility-organised solidarity events Workshops in schools and youth facilities Social media activism	Dresden Germany European brass networks
SingAsylum	Choir	Men and women Migrant and non-migrant singers	Rehearsals and public performances in concerts and city-/facility-organised solidarity events	Dresden Germany
Viertelton-orchester	String Ensemble	Men and women musicians Migrant musicians		Dresden Germany European Syrian String Orchestra Network
Paradies-orchester	Multi-instrument Ensemble	Men and women Migrant and non-migrant musicians	Rehearsals and performances in concerts and private events	Dresden
Montagscafé	Theatre Project	Men and women participants and organisers Migrant and non-migrant participants and organisers	Workshops with local and international guest artists Community space for gathering	Dresden

Study participants received a detailed description of the research and were asked for informed consent. Semi-structured interviews took place in interviewees’ homes, cafés, parks, backstage between performances, and after workshops. Open-ended questions posed to musicians and project convenors inquired about their relationship to music and theatre in Dresden, and their different projects (for example, workshops in schools). Participating musicians and project convenors chose to appear with their names in the scholarly work that would be derived because they wanted others to learn from their experiences. The interviews were analysed by the author using conventional methods of analysis to identify tropes through which participants describe creative interventions in the social movement, how they relate it to their understanding of local cultural heritage, as well as their roles as performers and convenors in the process. The fieldwork involved further observations of rehearsal practices and concerts, as well as data mining from social media platforms and websites. Names and other identifying information of participants present during the fieldwork in public events and in educational settings have been changed to protect participant confidentiality and anonymity, especially for minors. This study received IRB approval from the Ohio State University (2017E0360).

Fieldwork further showed that heritage is also a rhetorical device in Pegida. To better understand the collected data in relation to larger heritage populism in Dresden (Reynié 2016; Niklasson and Hølleland 2018; Kaya 2019a, 2023), additional data was collected using the methods of virtual ethnography (Murthy 2008; van Ryn et al. 2017). This approach helped eliminate the security concerns of the field researcher. To account for limited data availability due to algorithmic restrictions based on user profile, a new user profile with no previous watching history was used (Pietrobruno 2013).

Through a keyword-based search with the term ‘Pegida’, the author identified 442 channels that host related content. A total of 405 channels were relevant to the research because they contained videos of Pegida activities or commentary about them, 138 channels contained footage on Pegida in Dresden, and 11 channels showed Pegida engaging in cultural heritage use during demonstrations. The most common cultural practices used were Christmas songs during the annual Christmas Singing (n = 8). These channels contained 13 videos that provided footage from Pegida’s Christmas Singing between 2015 and 2018 in different locations throughout the city. Table 2 illustrates that most footage showed Pegida’s Christmas activities at the Theatre Plaza and that the 2015 A live stream recorded the full event including activities prior and after the gathering. The online footage provides a sufficient overview of Pegida’s singing practices, including song choices, statements related to the songs, and the political speeches that followed. Some channels contained footage of protestors singing the Pegida anthem and the German national anthem in Dresden (n = 2). Another contained footage of anti-Pegida hymns (n = 1).

Table 2. Overview of the YouTube sample of 8 channels that host 13 videos related to Pegida’s Christmas Singing.

		2015 A	2015 B	2016	2017	2018	2019
Place	Theatre Plaza		3	3	1	2	1
	Elbe Meadows	3
Video length	Less than 1 minute	2
	1–2 minutes		2
	3–5 minutes		1	1	1	1	1
	5–10 minutes			1
	10 minutes or more	1		1		1
Footage type	Assemblage of different video segments of the singing, edited				1	1	1
	Panning camera, no editing	2	2	3		1
	Full event	1
Footage content	Singing activity	2			1
	Political speeches		2			1
	Singing activity and political speeches	1		1		1	1
	Events leading up to the singing	1		1
	Events that followed the singing	1		1
	Commentary		1

In the following, this article will characterise reactionary heritage mobilisation between Pegida and No-Pegida. To that effect, the concepts of heritage populism and heritage mobilisation will be discussed. I delineate the forms of radical politics each mode uses to integrate different audiences into the movement. The following two sections present examples of strategic heritage use at the street level and on the community level. In section one, I show that authoritarian heritage populism by Pegida, such as the annual Christmas Singing ritual, sparked reactionary heritage mobilisation by the left. I draw on interviews with study participants to discuss the staging of brass music (Banda Comunale) and light projections (Montagscafé) in front of authorised heritage sites in the city during public demonstrations. Second, I examine Banda Comunale’s 2015 performance ‘Neujahrsputz’ where the band mobilised migranticised⁷ working-class and local creative middle-class histories to oppose Pegida’s spatial cleansing. The next section turns to two intercultural orchestras (Paradiesorchester and SingAsylum) that use integrative intercultural music-making to rebuild the creative middle class in radical ways. Whereas Paradiesorchester carves out new opportunities for migrant musicians, SingAsylum reclaims far right territory in Dresden’s cultural scene. Finally, I discuss how musicians of the migrant-led string ensemble Vierteltonorchester reconceptualize the meaning of musical heritage through the lens of the subaltern in music education.

Heritage Mobilisations as Radical Politics of the Left

Dominique Reynié (2016) explains that the far right increasingly engages in heritage protection, and Sabine Volk (2022: 250) notes that authorised heritage sites such as the ‘Frauenkirche’ in Dresden are deliberately chosen as backdrops to protests against the political establishment to betoken the intellectual heritage of the true ‘nationals’. Such use of heritage by far right groups, Reynié (2016: 47) writes, ‘combines hostility toward elites with opposition to the European Union, immigrants, and Islam’. The implementation of the political logic of nativism in popular-democratic heritage discourses follows the populist logic that frames itself as the only solution to popular discontent (Laclau 2005). Heritage populism is thus a form of authoritarian populism, a concept that Stuart Hall (1988: 136) developed to explain Thatcherism as ‘the increasing reliance on coercive authority and the repressive apparatuses of the state in disciplining the economic and the political struggle, in the context of crisis’. Authoritarian heritage populism constructs popular consent through heritage politics. It seeks to build a popular consensus over national identity by forcefully constructing a nativist alternative. Heritage becomes the site of struggle itself. Michael Herzfeld (2015: 6) convincingly states that heritage is appropriated in populism because as

essentially a legalism modeled [sic] on the concept of property inheritance (see Handler 1985a, 1985b), [it] can be, and often is, the object of strenuous contestation, belying its idealizing representation as a collective and clearly defined right.

Heritage populism is a strategic form of visual, material, rhetorical, as well as political mainstreaming of a supposedly European or Western ‘set of values, principles, and rules … such as individual freedoms, gender equality, and secularism’ (Reynié 2016: 51) through culture. Staging far right protest around heritage turns heritage into a political concern.

Following Hall (1988), the left-wing political project must therefore remobilise popular sectors to construct the counter-hegemonic project. The lens of heritage reveals that the left identifies the ideological struggle surrounding heritage as an opportunity ‘to construct an alternative to populism’ (Colpani 2022: 234; emphasis in original) through its own radical politics. The far right’s instrumentalisation of heritage creates a multitude of dilemmas for different agents of the left. Multicultural agents fear their authority fading in the design of the pluralist society. Subaltern agents who are already marginalised, on the other hand, fear the new faces of far right oppression. Both observe the dominant neoliberal hegemony feeding off the far right’s cultural struggle. In the context of Norway, for example, Elisabeth Niklasson and Herdis Hølleland (2018: 137) describe political leaders’ mimicking the far right’s conspiratorial rhetoric. Leaders implement far right interest in heritage policies and ‘“heritagize” claims of social insecurity’ to justify nationalist strategies that protect the identity of the national community.

The left-wing political project must therefore remobilise heritage to reveal the coerciveness of authoritarian heritage populism, and secondly resituate heritage in the popular consensus in intersectional ways. Remobilisation of the popular, therefore, means re-imagining the ways in which heritage can be staged to represent the different demands and needs of different groups that are the left. Remobilisation also means addressing the ‘struggles about different forms of subordination without attributing any a priori centrality to any of them’ (Mouffe 2018: 1). Heritage mobilisation is then radical politics when it is a transversal mode of subversion, when it is an agonistic intervention in the authoritarian appropriation of heritage as a nativist concern and when it exposes the erasure of heritage of a ‘multiplicity of struggles against different forms of domination’ (Mouffe 2018: 1).

Radical Politics at Street Level

Authorised Heritage as a Backdrop in Protest

After its formation in 2014, Pegida quickly began to build its populist rhetoric around local heritage. Sabine Volk (2022: 247) explains that local conservative tendencies and strong traditionalist orientations in the city’s relationship to culture helped Pegida ground its fight against the cultural decline in Europe by recurrently heralding ‘Dresden as “the capital of resistance”’.

The annual Christmas Singing is a form of public ritualising that Pegida stages against the backdrop of Dresden’s famous historical architecture in the Old City. The event recovers the audience’s relationship with the city’s Saxon traditions and its conservative Christian heritage. The ritual stages the practice of recovery as necessary for regaining ‘a functional state of strength, health, mind, or meaning-making in a situation where the state of functioning has broken apart as a result of adversity and crisis’ (Danbolt and Stifoss-Hanssen 2017: 335). A review of Pegida’s recordings of the annual Christmas Singing shows that collective identity at these events is structured around the affirmation of songs as common cultural knowledge, a shared song heritage. Individual singers take the stage of the wagon in the centre of a demonstration, indicating that the lyrics are known to the audience. After 2015, recordings of the event are from within the audience so that the voices of those filming are interlaced with the sound emanating from the speakers that the video shows. The choral staging of traditional songs like ‘Oh, Christmas tree’ and ‘Silent Night’ construct a social bond between the singer on stage and those in the audience. Even though the singing activity makes up less of the event than the speeches in between songs, it is with reference to the songs that Pegida’s speakers construct a collective experience of togetherness in an exclusive anti-refugee society.

The ritual practice of starting the winter season with the annual Christmas Singing is an affirmation that Pegida stands strong in Dresden year after year. The event further symbolises that the continued presence of Pegida in Dresden is the bandage needed to recover what the city has lost in the face of plurality. Therefore, the singing event can be seen as a simultaneous performance of preservation and alarm. Singers preserve the traditions by performing them. That performance signals the alarm that the city’s future is at stake if traditions are overruled by multiculturalism.

Similar interventions through ritualised performances of local song traditions can be seen through the example of the nativist singing association Volksliedertafel Dresden. This association recurrently joins Pegida protests and folk festivals in the Old City to affirm that traditions and associated nativist values can be preserved if the music is practiced. On the association’s YouTube channel, the performers suggest that their performances strengthen the bond of the individual with their cultural roots. The group further expresses pride in its collaborations with Pegida, which they view as important steps in the recovery of tradition in society.

During demonstrations, No-Pegida actors expressed that they perceived the city as complicit in Pegida’s nativist project. Many actors took issue with the ways in which Pegida mobilised Saxon traditions and Christian heritage to recover national and urban identity. Banda Comunale musicians, for example, noted being frustrated with the municipality which continues to accept Pegida protests in the cultural heart of the city. Musicians stated this frustration spurred their will to reconquer the streets with their own music. Banda Comunale is a local brass music ensemble that started its street activism with the public concert series ‘Postplatzkonzerte’ (January–May 2015) and the performance action series ‘Neujahrsputz’ (January–March 2015) and ‘Angsthasenprozession’ (March 2015). Banda Comunale also organised workshops and concerts with the theatre project Montagscafé, a Neustadt-based cultural hub that provided cultural programmes to refugees, migrants and longer settled Dresden residents. Some Banda Comunale musicians are members of the ska-reggae ensemble Yellow Umbrella, which composed the ‘No-Pegida’ hymn for the movement.

Banda Comunale’s music belongs to the genres of global brass⁸ and popular music. The musical style encompasses different musical traditions such as cumbia, Afrobeat, New Orleans rhythm and blues, Klezmer, and Ethiopian jazz. This music can be understood as an agonistic intervention in the far right’s depiction of interculturality as a threat to local cultural identity. Banda Comunale performs global popular music in demonstrations and in race-critical music education workshops. The band thereby reshaped political brass music as a popular sector that can reinvent where migrants’ cultural heritage can exist in the city. One example of that is the band’s performance at the ‘Postplatzkonzerte’ in early 2015. The band performed ‘Ihmail Ya Khail’, a song that gleans from the Klezmer and marching styles of its original by Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Allstars. Exhibiting relations to Klezmer traditions on stage situated the band as provisional Klezmorim, performers of traditional music who provide musical quality to human emotions. Banda Comunale used the way music could emotionally move the audience. The sound made the musicians appear as Klezmorim who have the communal responsibility to bring sound to the emotional experiences of the collective. The use of Klezmer's music in this way can be seen as a strategic mobilisation of different feelings of crisis and frustration among the audience. With that, Banda Comunale goes beyond capitalist exploitations of musical tradition from elsewhere.

The emotional connections that the musicians build with the audience created a stage for clarinettist Michal Tomaszewski to bring the provisional community into being in sound but also in collective action. He asked the audience to imagine that if they became and acted as an alliance they could stand up to Pegida and the larger far right project. Tomaszewski thereby projected an imagined collective that has the capacity to oppose the erasure of a multiplicity of struggles against different forms of domination by Pegida. Banda’s performance not only symbolised solidarity but instructed the audience to act in community so that physical movement could set into motion ideas for collaborations (Benford and Hunt 1992). The goal was to move solidarity beyond the festival setting through a shared sense of agency. The connections formed became the foundation from where the collective could begin to recover democracy.

The radical act that the concert triggered is that not only the people but the urban architecture in which the protest took place became part of the collective. Banda Comunale’s performance took place in collaboration with the theatre that built the backdrop of the ‘Postplatzkonzerte’. The building was mobilised as a canvas to carry lights and banners that condemned the actions of Pegida. The theatre capitalised on its architectural aesthetics to amplify that it has a symbolic power which it can mobilise for the left and against the far right. In a powerful way, the building acted as an authority. It assisted the people in the streets by deliberately staging the protest in bright and vibrant colours. This form of mobilisation is unique in this protest setting because it was the first time that buildings became agents of protest in No-Pegida’s fight. The theatre alongside other monuments in the Old City are authorised cultural heritage sites that are commonly cited in identity-formation narratives about Dresden. That the theatre joined No-Pegida’s alliance-building amplified that the cultural heritage sites themselves refuse Pegida’s authoritarian heritage populism. This strategy is a transversal mode of subversion. It changes the perception that cultural symbols are without agency and can be instrumentalized for authoritarian projects.

Worker Performance as Anti-Cleanse to Far Right Spatial Cleansing

Pegida not only involved cultural sites of authority in its authoritarian heritage populism but also, as Julian Göpffarth importantly states, activated local political memory of the German Democratic Republic’s civil rights movement. The strategic mobilisation of local East German biographies capitalises on the struggles of state repression. Pegida utilised the still salient collective memory of the Monday protest marches of 1989 by staging East German heritage through the materiality of the street. Pegida chose routes through Dresden that were similar to the 1989 protest marches to revive individual and collective memories of the struggles against a repressive regime. Mobilising affective responses and emotional memories helped Pegida popularise the idea that contemporary resistance against the state bears similarities to the past. This form of revival of the past can be understood as ‘an affective, social, embodied, and embedded investment’ (Rae 2022: 129). The performance of marching the streets was crucial for Pegida’s selective appropriation of history that takes place in the streets. Reinvesting in embodied resistance through marching authorised the marchers as protectors of Dresden’s historical potential to overthrow the establishment (once again). Pegida thereby also capitalised on the struggles of East Germans who suffered from the intra-state integration after the German reunification in 1990. Pegida thus solidified what Göpffrath (2021: 67) observes as a ‘prefigurative nostalgia that draws on past resistance and solidarity to enact in their activism the culture-driven, nativist politics they hope for’.

Pegida’s marches authorised the streets as historical witnesses to the local protest culture and marching became a collectively enacted revival to collectively stage Dresden as the ‘capital of resistance’. Banda Comunale’s 2015 street performance ‘Neujahrsputz’ (2015) is a reaction to this appropriation. Dressed in the vests of street sweepers, the musicians led a march along the same routes of Pegida protests. When I interviewed tubist Alfred Haberkorn (2017), he stated that the aim was to literally brush Pegida and its nativism off the streets. During the march, the band performed popular brass tunes such as the Rebirth Brass Band’s ‘Feel Like Funkin’ It Up’. Banda Comunale drew connections to New Orleans rhythm and blues traditions to use its grooviness for amplifying complex political messages.

Music is strategically used in left-wing music activism (eds. Garofalo et al. 2020) and far right activism alike. Banda Comunale, however, adds another layer. The musicians performed as street sweepers that merged sound and movement. Almost ritualistic, the brooms’ sweeping the street mimicked, for example, the one drum rhythm that backs Yellow Umbrella’s ‘No-Pegida’ hymn. Audience members also lifted their brooms in the air so that the procession appeared as a sea of brooms, vibrating to the beat of the music. The demonstration capitalised on the symbolic power of the broom while also transferring authority over the street to the collective of street sweepers that the audience members became.

The figure of the street sweeper was a significant choice in the performance because it gave the musicians the capacity to make visible working-class heritage that is associated with the streets but not represented in Pegida. Street sweeping is a profession often carried out by migranticised people. Even though street sweepers are important for the maintenance of society, they often remain invisible. How their mobility experiences shape their positionality, recognitions and sense of belonging in a society are rarely thematized. Banda Comunale staged the street sweeper as a key figure in its performance because it considered this member as a powerful actor who could shape society. Even though street sweeping takes place at night or in non-places of social attention (Augé 1995), the street sweeper is the authority over visibility in the public sphere. The interviews did not reveal if the performance was constructed in collaboration with migrants in Dresden. However, the symbolic value of the work indicated that the performance reacted to Pegida’s authoritarian displacement of different working-class histories from the streets of Dresden.⁹

In this performance, the figure of the street sweeper produced a cocoon that the demonstration audience could temporarily occupy to address different struggles that were not necessarily those of the musicians or audience members themselves. The cocoon was able to hold different working-class experiences that erupted onto the street through the ritualistic broom performance. On the one hand, there were people in solidarity with migrants and refugees whose presence Pegida wanted to erase. On the other hand, there were people marching who felt misrepresented by Pegida’s far right East German victimisation narrative (Volk 2020; Kaya 2023). The performance unified these different reasons to resist, thereby also drowning out some voices over others. Very visible were members of the local creative middle-class who perceived their own voice at risk, fearing not only about their place in the city but also about their freedom of creative expression under far right authoritative heritage populism. This fear was given a space to exist visibly in the street.

I argue that the performance used the cocoon to turn sweeping as a method of erasure into a method of resituating the traces of different stories on the pavement in intersectional ways. Banda Comunale’s multidimensional performance therefore worked at different levels of mobilisation. It was an anti-cleanse that radically pointed at local histories of struggle that Pegida deemed undesirable. Reviving different memories associated with the street through the performance can thus be understood as the band’s attempt to construct the popular consensus of struggle against the far right from multiple working and middle-class pasts (Prangnell and Mate 2011) in intersectional ways.

Radical Politics at Community Level

Integrative Practice and Making a New Urban Creative Middle-Class

While Pegida continued to operate on the street level, the left opposed cultural racism on the community level through intercultural artistic collaborations. Paradiesorchester und SingAsylum are among the local initiatives that were interviewed during fieldwork to understand how the local nativist discourse affected establishing transcultural connections via music. Paul Hoorn’s Paradiesorchester responded, among other issues, to the increased number of migrant musicians with many of them originating from Syria. These migrant musicians wanted to take up their career in Germany. Although Hoorn initially started with a drum group in a refugee accommodation facility, the project quickly became an orchestra that incorporated different folk music traditions.

In an interview performer Simon Hänel (2019) explained that the ensemble discovered that the performers’ own understanding of folk music was biased. At first, orchestra musicians anticipated that refugee musicians would connect more easily to specific ethnicised rhythms that mimicked the culture of the country of origin. However, playing together quickly made them realise the artistic potential that they could explore if they abandoned a migranticised understanding of refugee musicians’ culture. For example, the orchestra rewrote pieces like ‘Misirlou’, a Greek rebetiko song typically sung in the Arab, Greek, and Turkish diaspora, and merged different cultural traditions that have historical relations in sound.

The orchestra also began to label its musicking practice as a sounded response to the complex struggles of a multicultural music community in Dresden. This orchestra is multicultural because it brings together different mobility biographies. Different from diaspora musicians ensembles that use music for identity construction and revival of heritage from the homeland (Boura 2006), the Paradiesorchester reflected how the migration experience and different discourses about human mobility influenced the working conditions of the new post-migratory creative middle-class in Dresden. Especially, how performers could come together under the challenging circumstances that Pegida’s anti-immigration propaganda produced. The orchestra became an important resource for the migrant musician community in Dresden. Musicians who had difficulties to establish themselves as professionals could use the orchestra to show that they can teach instruments such as the oud. The orchestra led to collaborative music projects between individual performers. Over time, it became clear that these opportunities were unique and that otherwise refugee musicians were facing precarious working conditions as new immigrant cultural workers (see e.g. Grant and Buckwold 2013). The working environment in the orchestra allowed refugee musicians to grow accustomed to the local creative labour force. I argue that the Paradiesorchester can thus be seen as a reflexive model for imagining new safe and democratic forms of musical exchange that could lead to new ways of conceptualising the creative labour market and participation therein.

The intercultural choir SingAsylum that university students formed in 2015 took a more activist approach to intercultural music-making. SingAsylum’s approach can be understood as a recodification of the territory that the creative middle-class culture could occupy in Dresden’s eastern districts. In an interview, choir organiser Kerstin Martens (2019) stated the choir’s mission was to recode the nativist imaginations of migrant culture in very hostile districts in the city. The choir wanted to provide locals and refugees with a positive opportunity to get to know each other, to understand ‘that it isn’t that bad with foreigners. They are not evil’ (2019). After performing at street protests, SingAsylum capitalised on the assumption that ‘anyone can sing’ (2019) and proposed a meeting on Mondays when Pegida demonstrations would take place. Building on local networks in its districts, the choir mobilised singers and built a repertoire that included traditional and popular songs from Syria and Afghanistan, Eritrea, and Somalia but also German ones. The choir invested in creating its own transcriptions from audio recordings that singers brought. Through the practice of sharing and translating for the musical collective, the choir strengthened the social bond between singers. Singing songs from around the globe in Dresden’s far right hubs indicates that mobilising culture could create small islands of resistance. The choir’s musical interventions sought to weaken the acceptance and support of Pegida’s nativist propaganda. This practice can be understood as a response to the crisis of increasingly influential nativism in Dresden’s eastern districts, which were slowly pushing out multicultural arts. The project recognised the threat that cultural racism posed to the existence of different song traditions. That is where SingAsylum’s approach differs from projects such as the Volksliedertafel, which demonised performing song traditions that are not based on the local ethnic German culture. SingAsylum showed that the meaning of different song traditions can also be transformed into something positive in a setting where nativist thinking prevails. The choir’s strategy can be understood as a form of radical politics. It intervened in the far right’s narrative that posed multiculturalism as a threat to the health and strength of the community. The choir, however, demonstrated that a healthy community can also come together through engaging with differences. This project implemented a transversal mode of subversion that not only changed the meaning of non-ethnic German song traditions to locals. The choir’s vision brought people together and associated song traditions that are otherwise rendered as a threat with a positive social experience.

Reconsidering Democratic Music Learning Through the Subaltern

Besides mixed ensembles led by musicians of the local creative majority, ensembles led by subaltern musicians also began to flourish. One example of this scene is the Vierteltonorchester. The Vierteltonorchester is a string ensemble that is connected to the Syrian Expat Philarmonic Orchestra (SEPO), a global network of professional musicians that plays traditional music from Syria. Both orchestras are part of an emergent post-migration music scene across Germany. Settled musicians have begun to shape local music scenes. Their music rearticulates the relationship between local music cultures, popular music styles, and stereotypical interpretations of ethnicised folk music traditions. Besides being cultural ambassadors of traditional music from the Middle East, the Vierteltonorchester is a testimony to how the local creative middle class is changing.

The musicians mobilised their knowledge of different musical traditions from the Middle East and slowly established a place for these in Dresden. Orchestra member and violinist Yara Aboufakher (2019) explained that the orchestra has a clear mission: introducing Dresden’s audiences to what she described as ‘Oriental music, … to get to know it, to practice it together’. While audiences may not be able to understand what ‘Syrian’ or ‘Iraqi’ music would sound like, the term ‘Oriental’ allowed her to simplify the sound. To her, this simplification was useful for drawing audiences and local collaborators alike. She does not seek to reproduce stereotypical representations of an imagined Other. Instead, the band thinks of the ‘Oriental’ as a cocoon that they can fill with meaning.

While it may be argued that Aboufakher is reproducing an Orientalist discourse (Said 1978, 1985), her use of the term ‘Oriental music’ also resituates the kind of relationship that Middle Eastern musical traditions can have with European classical and folk traditions. Aboufakher explained that most ‘Oriental’ music arrangements she heard in Germany mimicked a European, a German atmosphere. By that she meant that the performance tradition of songs in non-Western scales sometimes fails to interpret pitches and variations of intervals authentically. Musical mistranslation can artificially create sensory familiarities (Bascuñan-Wiley 2021) where differences in sound should be audible. Aboufakher argued that musical translation needed to communicate more and less familiar traditions to performers in a way that musicians could be in dialogue with the pieces and add their own understanding to the musical interpretation.

That means that the ‘how music contact comes into being’ is central for getting conversations between different musical traditions right. It is the multidirectional human mobilities through which different music traditions have come into contact with each other throughout history that matter. Aboufakher explained that musicians have experienced these themselves or can detect when musical works merge musical traditions and styles from different places. Included in these histories are mobilities that came about as violent forms of conquest such as colonialism, but also the imperial project of Western music education in the global East. I argue that her approach to ‘Oriental music’ in this setting is a reconstitution of musical relations through different forms of human mobility over time. This approach locates migration as a human phenomenon at the centre of understanding music’s relationship to place.

The Vierteltonorchester brought these histories and the associated sounds into being on their own terms. Aboufakher considered herself able to teach music in this way because she has been trained in the traditions of classical European and classical Arab music. Therefore, she was familiar with the pitfalls that could occur when musical engagement is not sensitive to the heterogenous ways that music has meaning for different audiences. Her positionality as a woman subaltern music educator can in itself be understood as a radical subversion of the conditions under which the far right would like her to exist. While far right discourse builds on the fear of the Other, which they employ through the binary of the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident’, the work of the Vierteltonorchester resituated and remobilised the musical heritages of the East in the context of music education to correct misinterpretations and misuses. Thereby the musicians made it harder for culturalising racist propaganda in culture to take hold.

Conclusion

The discussion of creative mobilisation in music, theatre, and performance through the case of No-Pegida showed that the left is using heritage as a crucial strategy to oppose authoritarian heritage populism. I conceptualised five examples of strategic heritage mobilisation to delineate the characteristics and functions of this mode of radical politics for the left. Against Pegida’s ritualisation of nativist culture in its annual Christmas Singing, Banda Comunale provided an example of how the left uses global popular music to disrupt the far right from becoming an authority over culture in the city. The band’s 2015 performance ‘Neujahrsputz’ complicated this form of disruption even further. I showed that the performance used the figure of the street sweeper as a cocoon to hold multiple, and at times unrelated, struggles which raised the emotional intensity at the demonstrations so that a sense of solidarity emerged between different groups in Dresden’s left. Many No-Pegida actors began to collaborate across district lines despite varying political ideologies within the left. These examples explained that the left goes beyond class interests to oppose Pegida.

Class itself is reinterpreted by projects such as Paradiesorchester. The orchestra became an important starting point for the emerging migrant creative middle class. The project’s reflexive approach allowed musicians to identify meaningful collaborations that could help migrant performers enter the creative labour force more easily. Related to that, SingAsylum indicated that the left countered the far right’s territorial dominance over the cultural narratives of the city by staging projects in far right strongholds and at times that Pegida’s protest took place. Opposing projects like the Volksliedertafel, SingAsylum subverted the spatial opportunities that multiculturism is given. Its communal approach was further strengthened by the traditional practice of singing. Changing the song repertoire, however, subverted how the nativist musical projects allowed that to be possible.

On the one hand, radical heritage mobilisation opposed Pegida appropriating heritage, on the other hand, these examples of radical interventions were significant for recentring erased heritages in the local imaginary. Building local identity in radical, intersectional ways, the Vierteltonorchester reconfigured cultural philosophy about musical traditions in ways that make it hard for the far right to appropriate the ‘Orient’ concept. These five examples therefore demonstrated that the left strategically used heritage to mobilise multiple heterogeneous demands that reconceptualise class struggles, think them through subaltern perspectives, and incorporate concerns about culture, migration, and human rights violations. Cultural narratives that the left mobilised importantly contain forgotten histories of subaltern and other marginalised groups. How the left is taking back territory in the cultural scene indicates important terrains for social change. Further attention to heritage mobilisation by the left will show that the democratic project has become increasingly intersectional and radical, seemingly the only way in which to imagine a future society.

Ethics Declaration

IRB The Ohio State University: 2017E0360.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks all research participants, as well as the editors of the Special Issue for their comments on previous versions of the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ohio State Presidential Fellowship, the Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability, the Mershon Centre for International Security Studies, and the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University.

Notes

1 I follow Christine Agius et al. in using the term ‘far right’ to describe ‘people, groups, movements, parties, and politics on the far right of the political spectrum’ (Agius et al. 2020: 432).

2 I follow Geoff Eley’s definition of ‘the left’ (2002) to describe individuals, collectives, associations, and parties who are trying to advance the boundaries of democracy.

3 Pegida is an acronym that stands for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident.

4 I use the notion of authorised heritage with reference to Laurajane Smith’s concept ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (2006) to denote the idea of heritage as preservation of selected and traditional cultural elements that have value for social elites or nationalising narratives.

5 I use the term ‘spatial cleansing’ as introduced by Michael Herzfeld (2015) to describe the purposive removal of undesirable cultural/heritage elements as a form of governance.

6 I use the terms migrant artist and refugee artist as descriptive categories to indicate the social position that the construction of a legal Other creates for an individual artist based on their mobility experience and subsequent legal status.

7 I follow Janine Dahinden (2023) in using the term ‘migranticisation’ to describe the performative practices ‘that describe a migratory status to certain people and bodies … and thus (re-) establish their a priori non-belonging, regardless of whether the people designated as ‘migrants’ are citizens of the nation-state they reside in or not, and regardless of whether they have crossed a national border or not’.

8 Global popular music refers to musical styles that scholars often group under the term World Music (Stokes 2004; O’Flynn 2007). This genre builds on the multimedia marketing of different musical traditions in popular music culture that mainly Western popular music artists popularised in the 1980s (Frith 1993).

9 The method of staging working-class heritage performatively is a recurring theme in street art in Germany, which situates Banda Comunale among street artists such as Various&Gould and their 2012 performance ‘Zu Gast Arbeit’ [To Guest Work, author’s translation] (BrooklynStreetArt.com 2012).