Volksbühne: Play “Ultralenz”: The Specter of the Police

Anyone who goes to the Berliner Volksbühne on Rosa Luxemburg Platz these days can see the play “Ultralenz – 70,000 Cops want to know your location,” performed in the video library on the second floor of the theater. The remarkable production by Lorenz Nolten and Sofie Boiten, in which only Anna K. Seidel is on stage with a strong, room-filling stage presence, connects the plot of Georg Büchner’s story “Lenz” with current cases of police violence against mentally ill people and people in psychological emergency situations.

Three police murders

Three cases of police violence occur again and again, which are shown in the piece via a satirical version of the “Tagesschau”. There is, for example, the case of the man who was shot by a police officer in the Neptune Fountain on Alexanderplatz in June 2013 after he injured himself in the fountain and then approached the police with a knife. An incident that seems to repeat Büchner’s story because Lenz also repeatedly jumps into the well in the village of Waldbach. The piece also deals with the shooting of a woman in her apartment in Friedrichshain at the beginning of 2020. The 33-year-old is said to have threatened her roommate with a knife, whereupon he called the police. The officers stormed the apartment and shot the woman in her room, where only police officers were present. The piece also takes up the murder of the Senegalese asylum seeker Mouhamed Dramé, who was killed by a police officer with five shots in Dortmund in 2022.

“Ultralenz” only deals with a few of many cases of – often fatal – police violence. The production poses the depressing question of what such recurring events mean for mentally ill people in Germany. What remains completely unclear, however, is why this violence continues to be on the agenda. “Ultralenz” addresses the accumulation of these events, which cannot be explained by the subjective evil of police officers. Because police violence against people in psychological emergency situations has occurred, according to statistics from the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, not just in three cases in Germany, but over 133 times since 2010 alone, the question arises as to how this regular form of violence occurs.

A play can only approach the answer to this question artistically if it does not want to be a course. On the other hand, there are plenty of left-wing theorizations of police violence, and one commonplace here is that, in the service of the state, the police are responsible for protecting the property system. Capitalism uses the executive power of the police to ensure the smooth running of everyday capitalist life. Such an explanation, although it may have some merit, does not apply here. The mentally ill people shot by the police may have endangered public peace and thus, in the broadest sense, normal capitalist operations, but their shooting was by no means necessary to maintain it. The idea often put forward by others that the state is responsible for protecting citizens does not apply here for the same reason. It is all too clear in the three cases mentioned that the alleged threat situation could have been solved differently.

Benjamin’s critique of violence

So how does this violence, which is by no means directly functional, but nevertheless systematic, arise? Walter Benjamin provides useful information for answering this question in his characterization of the police in the essay “On the Critique of Violence” from 1921. It says: “The assertion that the purposes of police power are always connected or even identical to those of the rest of the law is entirely untrue. Rather, the ‘right’ of the police basically refers to the point at which the state (…) can no longer guarantee its empirical purposes (…) through the legal system. Therefore, “for the sake of security,” the police intervene in numerous cases where there is no clear legal situation, unless they accompany the citizen through life regulated by regulations as a brutal nuisance without any reference to legal purposes or simply monitor him.

Benjamin tells us that the police are by no means just pursuing the ends of the law. Benjamin rather states that this institution is empowered, which is never just an executive branch, but rather frees itself from legal purposes. The empowered police accompanied the citizens as a “brutal harassment”. But why does the police, which apparently only have an executive power, have to rise from being a law-preserving force to a law-enforcing force? Couldn’t the officers simply do “duty as directed”?

The answer lies in what Benjamin calls the “rotten (…) in law”: Law would become rotten if it had to suppress and deny the violence on which it itself is based and which it creates against itself. This is what Benjamin means when he describes law as mythical violence and repeatedly brings it closer to fate. Just as the mythical order provokes resistance against fate and then always overtakes this resistance, law also hovers threateningly over the counter-violence that it – even violence – always provokes. It tries to get rid of the spirits it called with the help of the police, a vain effort because it is the legal system itself that creates the deviation from the law. Necessarily denying the law-making power, the “rotten” law is dependent on the police, in whom, however, the repressed power of the law to be preserved accumulates and is released again and again.

Because the police’s supposedly law-preserving power must continue law-making, the police are never just executive, but oscillate between law-preserving and law-making. That is why Benjamin characterizes the police as a ghost: “In contrast to the law (…), the examination of the police institution does not reveal anything essential. Its violence is amorphous, like its incomprehensible, widespread ghostly appearance in the life of civilized states.” They probably don’t even know what is “essential” to the police, because anyone who tries to catch a ghost ends up just flailing around air around.

Left-wing criticism of the police should not make this mistake. If you look back from here at “Ultralenz”, the Neptune Fountain, the shooting woman in Friedrichshain and the murder of Mouhamed Dramé, you can see what interesting things Benjamin has to contribute to the criticism of this very violence: Because, according to him, the law-preserving violence (of which the police are very important belongs) has to defend itself against all hostile counter-forces (such as crimes or revolts), it indirectly weakens the law-making power for which it should actually stand and to which it owes its existence. A symptom of this process is the necessary self-empowerment of the police. However, the fact that their violence represents arbitrary, “brutal harassment” is in no way contrary to what is actually a good law of the state. Rather, this authorization of the executive is a necessary consequence of the law-making power and its purposes.

Does the police have the right?

While the legal power appears to the citizens as fateful and threatening, it is itself exposed to a sad fate: in order to preserve itself, it must betray itself. The inappropriate and yet systematic police power is therefore a necessary excess. This does not simply derive from the task of the police, but must be understood as a kind of side effect of maintaining the law, which is nevertheless necessary.

The power accumulated in the executive branch can be found in the numerous cases. It can be seen, for example, where the police impose their own provisional “law” through regulations (Benjamin deliberately puts this term in quotation marks). Or it is involved in constant violence against people in psychological emergency situations, which means that the police generously abandon the freedom of action granted to them and are subsequently only rarely prosecuted for it.

Benjamin recognizes that the violence of the police cannot only be understood in terms of their task and is nevertheless necessarily tied to state power. His considerations help left-wing police criticism neither to derive police violence from a functionalist perspective nor to fall into state affirmation that seeks to separate bad police violence from good law.

Benjamin’s text thus sets standards for appropriately complex police criticism, despite all the puzzles it poses. A criticism that could be helpful, not least in the current debate about abolitionism. What a society can look like beyond violent law is not just a question of reading and theory, but above all a question of shared social practice. Because even if the law behaves like a fate, its existence is certainly not one.

The piece »Ultralenz. 70,000 Cops Want to Know Your Location” runs until January 19, 2024 at the Volksbühne at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin.