Where Do These People Work?
In the summer of 2018, neo-Nazis hunted foreigners through the streets of Chemnitz. There were videos: men in packs, following people of color, making sure everyone understood who the city belonged to now. The police stood around. Germany’s far-right AfD party called it a spontaneous expression of civic concern. Nothing particularly changed.
The Zentrum für Politische Schönheit—the Centre for Political Beauty, a German art collective known for staging spectacular provocations—decided that was insufficient. They built a database. Three million photographs scraped from the Chemnitz demonstrations and other far-right marches, run through facial recognition, producing around 7,000 suspects. Then they launched Soko Chemnitz, offering cash payments—€30 to €100 per confirmed identification—to anyone willing to name the faces and report them to their employers.
Their statement had the collective’s characteristic bluntness: While normal people are working, thousands of employees and public servants are chasing foreigners through Chemnitz, attacking journalists and police officers, and giving the Hitler salute. What would your boss say about that?
The site encouraged visitors to denounce their coworkers, neighbors, and acquaintances, and offered—in their words—the opportunity to help remove these "problem Germans" from the economy and the public sector.
What happened next was predictable. A masked mob assembled outside their research office. When the police showed up, they prioritized removing the posters displaying identified Nazis over dispersing the mob itself. That’s one way to keep the peace.
The project cuts cleanly against liberal instincts about surveillance and public naming. It uses the tools of the far right—the database, the mob, the social humiliation—against the far right itself. Whether that’s political art or just symmetrical ugliness is genuinely unclear to me. But the question the Zentrum für Politische Schönheit kept asking—where do these people work?—was never rhetorical. It’s the only question that actually costs something to answer.