Introduction: Affective Witnessing as Theory and Practice

Abstract

On 21 May 2016, an asylum seeker named Shabaz Saleh Al-Aziz had been in and out of a Netto supermarket in Arnsdorf, a village in Saxony in the East of Germany. Al-Aziz entered and left three times, attempting to communicate a problem with his phone card. Eyewitness reports variously described his demeanour as frustrated, violent or simply confused. On the third occasion, he was holding two bottles of wine and made the cashier nervous. Four men entered the store and removed him against his will, dragging him across the street before cable-tying him to a tree. He had no chance to testify in court about what took place that afternoon. A year later, just a week before the trial of his attackers, the body of Al-Aziz was found frozen to death in the woods outside Dresden. It was ruled an accident, with no direct connection to what happened in the Arnsdorf supermarket. Without the victim to testify, charges against his attackers were dropped.