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Analysis of a ‘Hybrid’ Situation in Modern Bavaria

Der Fall „Drachenlord“ ist in Deutschland berühmt-berüchtigt und gilt nach einschlägigen Meinungen als Paradebeispiel für toxische Sozialität im Internet. Nationale Bekanntheit erlangte der heute ehemalige YouTuber im August 2018, als seine online-Followerschaft eine kollektive Pilgerfahrt zu dessen Wohnort in Mittelfranken, Bayern organisierte und die ländliche Gegend in Aufruhr versetzte. Der vorliegende Beitrag wirft eine kritisch-anthropologische Perspektive auf dieses Event, das sogenannte „Schanzenfest“, und analysiert dessen Hintergründe und Implikationen für die Gegenwartsgesellschaft.

The case of the “Drachenlord” is widely known in Germany and is regarded by many as a prime example of toxic sociality on the internet. The former YouTuber gained national attention in August 2018, when his online followers organised a collective pilgrimage to his residence in Middle Franconia, Bavaria, causing the countryside to be thrown into turmoil. The present contribution offers a critical-anthropological perspective on this event, known as the “Schanzenfest,” analysing its origins and implications for contemporary society.


Analysis of a ‘Hybrid’ Situation in Modern Bavaria

Jonas Kießling

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Abstract

Echoing Gluckman’s (1940) influential article on the opening of a bridge in modern Zululand, this work presents what I term the analysis of a ‘hybrid’ situation in modern Bavaria. The focus of this analysis is the ‘Schanzenfest’, an event that happened on 20 August 2018, best described as the collective pilgrimage of a digital community to the home of a notorious German content creator on YouTube, named ‘Drachenlord’.

News coverage propelled the event to nationwide attention, framing it as an example of the adverse effects of digital sociality, driven solely by the hatred of a regressive community of troublemakers. Pursuing the question of what motivated people to participate in the event, this work offers an alternative interpretation.

I argue that the Schanzenfest is an instance of ‘gamification’, characterised by the introduction of game-like elements into a setting previously unrelated to games (Malaby 2012: 288). Characteristic of participatory online culture, the Drachenlord’s community emerges as the ‘prosumer’ (Rennie 2007: 3) of what can only be described as a postmodern version of a classic German fairy tale. The online fandom, which had been engaging with the Drachenlord’s publicly exposed life for many years, provided the community with an ‘indexical framework’ (Boellstorff 2012: 52) that revolved around the interpretation of his persona and property.

Therefore, I will argue that at the core of the Schanzenfest lay not the community’s hatred but rather the motivation to impose this digitally curated framework onto non-digital reality, resulting in the creation of a ‘hybrid’ situation in the process. This work adds to the anthropological discourse on digital gaming, specifically focusing on the relatively new phenomenon of gamification, which scholars have begun exploring only recently.

Furthermore, highlighting ‘alterity’ as a key anthropological theme (Hage 2012), this case study exposes some elements of the structural condition of our present, whereby contemporary social spaces are losing their homogeneity and internal coherence due to the widespread proliferation of digital media.

Table of contents

Abstract
1 Introduction
2 From the sociality of games to the ‘gamification’ of the social
3 Gluckman meets digital anthropology
4 Analysis of a ‘hybrid’ situation in modern Bavaria
5 Conclusion
6 Bibliography
7 Online sources

Introduction

1.1 A pilgrimage to the ‘Drachenschanze’
During the summer break of my second year as an undergraduate student, I found myself stressed and immersed in the literature research for an upcoming paper. Yet, some rumours that I picked up online brought a welcome change to my routine and left me with anticipation. Monday 20 August 2018 was the day. That morning, I sit down in front of my computer and navigate to the YouTube-livestream of a user named ‘Drachenlord’ (‘Dragon Lord’). On my screen, the content creator, also known as Rainer Winkler, lounges on his couch in front of a poster-covered wall and reports to his chat about the events of last night (Fig. 1). It had been relatively calm, the then 28-year-old announces. His scratchy voice, however, indicates that he must have been engaged in some intense verbal dispute with visitors – the kind of which contributed to his fame in recent years. Everything that day seemed far too absurd to me at the time, but perhaps that was precisely what kept me engaged in front of my computer, watching the unfolding spectacle via various livestreams.

With the intention of besieging Winkler’s house, an infamous property known as the ‘Drachenschanze’ (‘Dragon’s Bunker’), approximately 600 to 800 people began swarming the Drachenlord’s small home village Altschauerberg during the early afternoon (Fig. 2). Although the police had imposed an assembly ban on this rural municipality in the Bavarian region of Middle Franconia, Germany, this could not deter the collective pilgrimage that ‘Haiders’ (an altered version of the English word ‘haters’) had announced online months earlier. What was termed the ‘Schanzenfest’ (‘Festivity at the Bunker’) ended with hundreds of expulsions, two fire brigade operations, and several arrests. Reports by major German news outlets transformed the event into a national media spectacle, catapulting the Drachenlord to mainstream attention. Winkler and his property survived the day unharmed. Yet, in response, he announced he was quitting all social media – a promise made numerous times before – only to return shortly afterward, as usual.

At the time of writing this paper, Winkler has indeed recently ceased all online activities. Should he abstain from the internet, as many of his critics hope, he would likely bring an end to what has become known as the ‘Drachengame’ (‘Dragon’s Game’) – a now more than decade-long battle between him and his online community of trolls that took shape with an outburst of anger by Winkler in February 2014. In a fateful YouTube video, he had revealed his home address and urged his Haiders to visit him to resolve issues in person.

Among Haiders, the Schanzenfest is widely regarded as the ‘highlight’ of the Drachengame. In German discourse, it is widely interpreted as a prime example of the pitfalls of digital sociality, bullying, and the disruptive online behaviour aimed at provoking or upsetting others, commonly referred to as ‘trolling’ (Fichman & Sanfilippo 2016: 6). Despite the event’s impact, however, much of the media coverage provides little substantial insights into the phenomenon and buzzwords tend to fill in the gaps where commentators fail to move beyond superficial explanations.

Conclusion

5.1 Summary of the argument
Adapting Gluckman’s (1940) situational analysis for a case study in digital anthropology, I have presented the analysis of a ‘hybrid’ situation in modern Bavaria. The focal point was the Schanzenfest: the 2018 pilgrimage of a digital community, calling themselves ‘Haiders’, to the house of an infamous German YouTuber named ‘Drachenlord’. This study pursued the question of what motivated people to participate in this unlikely and absurd event. Contrary to the dominant narrative in the German news, which claims that the event’s main driver was the community’s hatred for the Drachenlord, I have argued that the collective pilgrimage was rooted in the community’s motivation to impose their own indexical framework, curated digitally, onto non-digital reality.

Some dimensions of the phenomenon, like the importance of space-making and fan art as an expressive practice, align with well-established arguments from the anthropology of digital gaming about how ‘the digital’ can foster authentic sociality. However, the Schanzenfest also speaks to ‘gamification’ as a more recent development in societies that are increasingly penetrated by digital technologies. As a gamified phenomenon, the event was not about ‘play’ but rather the institutionalisation of a contingent experience that games possess as a cultural form. With digital media expanding, openness and uncertainty of this sort proliferate via the collision of digital and non-digital frameworks, resulting in what I have termed ‘hybrid’ social reality.

As an example of this development, the Schanzenfest revolved around a community imposing its very own framework onto a small Bavarian village. Fandom turned the Drachenlord into the protagonist of a postmodern fairy tale. His house and the village became incorporated into digital representations of space, and people tried to immerse themselves into the story they themselves had produced. The event’s absurdity and incomprehensibility for outsiders only enhanced the ‘aesthetic thrill’ of testing how far one can shape social reality according to one’s own terms, trying to reach closure of the situation’s contingency.

5.2 Implications
Certainly, neither the Schanzenfest nor the Drachengame are expressions of ethical virtue. However, the analysis reveals how people were not simply motivated by hatred either. Suggesting otherwise seriously undermines the ability to see the bigger picture that the phenomenon represents. As an event, the Schanzenfest reflects our turbulent and complex present, characterised by the proliferation of indexical frameworks. Its inner workings are an example of Hage’s (2012) thesis on how social spaces, because of digital media, are losing their former homogeneity via the proliferation of context-specific structures of meaning-making.

Although alterity is an integral part of societies, there are instances in which the stakes are much higher than in the Drachengame. Amplified by digital technology, emerging alter- spaces and politics can become problematic. The truly disruptive power of this structural condition has already become evident to the degree that particular interpretative frameworks emerge, not as trivial microcosms of trolling that are spatiotemporally limited, but as lasting and comprehensive sociocultural and political realities that are mutually exclusive to other perspectives. If there is no closure of contingency, the results are the kind of seemingly unbridgeable political divides, over issues like the recent pandemic or contemporary international conflicts, which have plagued the recent past. The public sphere, which should serve as a common ground for debate, instead becomes increasingly compartmentalised.

Anthropology demonstrates convincingly that digital technology does not make us less human. The changes we experience due to digital technology are nevertheless profound. Studying phenomena like the Schanzenfest can help gaining insights into the sociocultural dynamics these changes entail.


About Jonas Kießling

Jonas Kießling hat Politikwissenschaften und Ethnologie an der Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main und Sozialanthropologie an der London School of Economics and Political Science studiert. Zu seinen Interessen- und Kompetenzfeldern zählen Ansätze und Methoden der kritischen Theorie und der Kulturtheorie sowie aktuelle Fragestellungen der Digital Humanities.

“Als Wissenschaftler befürworte ich unbequeme Kritik; als Demokrat fühle ich mich dem konsensorientierten Austausch verpflichtet. In diesem Spannungsfeld bewege ich mich beruflich und in meinem gesellschaftlichen Engagement.“

Jonas Kießling ist Mitinitiator bei Paranova, eine Initiative, die sich dem freien Austausch von Ideen zur Verbesserung der Gesellschaft verschrieben hat. Mit ihrem Kernprojekt “Common Ground” möchte Paranova ein neues soziales Medium erschaffen, das Zivilgesellschaft und demokratische Diskussionskultur im Internet durch Deliberation fördert. Deliberation bezeichnet den kommunikativen Prozess, in dem verschiedene Akteure durch Austausch und kritisches Abwägen unterschiedlicher Meinungen und Perspektiven zu informierten Entscheidungen gelangen.

Kontakt: jonkies@web.de

Paranova-Website: https://paranova.org


Titelbild: #14623549_Blogger with loudspeaker influencing on audience in social media.jpg | freepik.com


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Jonas Kießling (12. Februar 2025). Analysis of a ‘Hybrid’ Situation in Modern Bavaria. Bildung - Mensch - Medien. Abgerufen am 25. März 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/13ayi


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