Julia Werhahn

Since 2005, quotes from past decades (mostly from the 1980s) headlined the annual One Night Group Shows at the end of November at Spor Klübü. Other projects and especially the pandemic had led to a 4-year break of this show format. This year the thread is picked up again.

"ZERO TOLERANCE" stands as a term for many dubious strategies. Especially as a strategy of crime fighting and crime prevention. This allows the police - preventively, so to speak - to intervene or crack down hard on regulatory violations below the crime threshold, so-called petty offenses. It became known in the 1990s with the "New York Model", championed by Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his police chief Bill Bratton, who based it on the "Broken Windows Theory" that had already emerged in the 1980s.

As a result, the zero-tolerance strategy became a worldwide export hit and also partly ended up in German criminology and politics. The success and efficiency of the strategy remained doubtful and were apparently never clearly proven. The negative sides, however, were obvious: exaggerated restrictions on freedom, the emergence of excessive police arbitrariness and violence, the establishment of a control and police state, and so on. In the 1990s, running a red light on a bicycle in Manhattan or openly consuming alcohol on the street meant fearing that one could end up in jail.

Another zero-tolerance strategy was pursued by the U.S. government under President Trump many years later with regard to immigration to the United States. If legal or illegal immigrants as well as asylum seekers had, among other things, an entry in their national or foreign criminal records, they were immediately detained and deported or turned away. Families, e.g. children from their parents, were also separated from each other without consideration.

What if you turn zero tolerance around and look at it from a different angle? For example, precisely against these political intentions and actors and in the political demarcation against the right. It cannot be that, for example, a party like the AfD in Germany is given tolerance just because it reaches people and wins votes, but builds on an extreme right-wing, national socialist, racist and anti-Semitic mindset. Anyone who abandons his zero tolerance limit at this point, who enters his firewall, succumbs to complicity and makes right-wing extremism more acceptable.