I’m not sure they quite understood them, then. Fascist pose, but not at all fascist. If you dig into their work and know the context, it’s evident, I think. But I can also understand how they can easily be misinterpreted as being what they seem to be on the surface. I mean, they wear uniforms, sing in German, their name is German, lots of fascist imagery, etc. But they come out of both the early Yugoslav punk scene as well as the Yugoslav and European performance art scenes of the 70s and 80s, so that helps to contextualize them a bit more. I mean, plenty of punks in London threw around swastikas, and certainly weren’t nazis (Ian Stewart being a real fascist, of course, but who cares about Skrewdriver…).
They’ve been incredibly subversive, though. For example, about a month prior to Milosevic’s speech in Kosova, which essentially kicked off the Yugoslav wars, (he had been giving very nationalist speeches ahead of this around Yugoslavia prior to this), they show up in Beograd and during the performance, one of the members gives a speech which mixed Hitler, Chamberlain, and Milosevic, in a combination of German and Serbian. The implication was a rather clear indictment of the rising tide of nationalism and where it’s appeasement could lead. They also played a show right at the end of the Siege of Sarajevo, where they handed out NSK passports. The tour was called the Occupied Europe NATO tour.
Taken out context, they seem just like a bunch of fascists, I think. But they employ themes of nationalism, fascism, and socialism in order to better explicate what they actually are and how they function in our mass culture. I kind of think they read that famous (infamous) quote by David Bowie from the late 70s, where Bowie said something about how “Hitler staged a country in the same way a rock star stages a show” and decided to make an entire career out of it. Seems to have worked.
