"At the turn of the millennium, Middle Eastern and Muslim Germans had rather unexpectedly become central to the country's Holocaust memory culture--not as welcome participants, but as targets for ...re-education and reform. Since then, Turkish- and Arab-Germans have been considered as the prime obstacles to German national reconciliation with its Nazi past, a status shared to a lesser degree by Germans from the formerly socialist East Germany. It is for this reason that the German government, German NGOs, and Muslim minority groups have begun to design Holocaust education and anti-Semitism prevention programs specifically tailored for Muslim immigrants and refugees, so that they, too, can learn the lessons of the Holocaust and embrace Germany's most important postwar democratic political values. Based on ethnographic research conducted over a decade, Subcontractors of Guilt explores when, how, and why Muslim Germans have moved to the cente
A new cohort of Turkish- and Arab-background public intellectuals in Germany locate the root of problems of migrant communities in a resemblance between Islamic culture and Nazi ideology. Islam ...critics promote the idea that if, like the children of Nazis before them, children of Muslims can rebel against their fathers sexually liberate themselves, they will also be able to embrace the democratic values of German society. In their best-seller books, Islam critics aim to include migrants in the German national temporal framework and also enable a new interpretation of German history not as an anomaly, an evolutionary modernization story gone terribly wrong, but as an historical model that other nationalities should also pass through and come out of. By studying how highly popular Islam critics position Muslims in relation to memory of National Socialism in Germany, this article asks what kind of transformation (and reproduction) is German Holocaust memory and public political culture is undergoing in its perception of its relationship with its Nazi past on one hand and its multi-ethnic present and future on the other hand. It also asks what role Muslims and other minorities play in shaping, reacting to, and corresponding with these transformations. By focusing on the unlikely promise of inclusion of the Muslim minority in the German national temporality through path-dependent repetition, it argues that national memory cultures are formed in relation to and with the help of minorities who are being simultaneously incorporated and excluded from the present at once.
In the last decade there has been widely shared discomfort about the way Muslim minority Germans engage with the Holocaust. They are accused of not showing empathy towards its Jewish victims and, as ...a result, of not being able to learn the necessary lessons from this massive crime. By focusing on instances in which the emotional reactions of Muslim minority Germans towards the Holocaust are judged as not empathetic enough and morally wrong, this article explores how Holocaust education and contemporary understandings of empathy, in teaching about the worst manifestation of racism in history, can also at times be a mechanism to exclude minorities from the German/European moral makeup and the fold of national belonging. Expanding from Edmund Husserl’s embodied approach to empathy to a socially situated approach, via the process of paarung, allows us to reinterpret expressions of fear and envy, currently seen as failed empathy, as instances of intersubjective connections at work. In my reinterpretation of Husserl’s ideas, the process of paarung that enables empathy to happen is not abstract, but pairs particular experiences happening at particular times and places under particular circumstances to individuals of certain social standing and cultural influences. An analogy can be made to shoes. Anyone has the capacity to imagine themselves in someone else’s shoes. Nevertheless, the emotional reactions the experience triggers in each person will be shaped by individual past experiences and social positioning. Hence, grandchildren of workers who arrived in Germany after World War II to rebuild the country resist an ethnicized Holocaust memory and engage with it keenly through their own subject positions.
This article analyzes a growing sector of state-funded pedagogies designed to reform Muslim masculinity in Germany. These programs present Muslim men as suffering from a psychopathology rooted in an ...alleged Islamic “honor culture”. They rely on a mix of Christian and non-religious welfare providers to supply Muslim youth with alternative masculine role models. We trace three implications of this arrangement: First, these programs' culturalist approach perpetuates Orientalist hierarchizations of masculinity. Second, the de-Islamized masculinity these programs construct as normatively binding revolves around a heteronormative patriarchy imagined as benevolent, thereby reinforcing the subjection of women. Third, these educational initiatives yoke the reform of Muslim masculinity to male participants' dramatic conversion to a Christian-German culture that blurs the line between the religious and the nonreligious. We suggest that studies of (hegemonic) masculinity in Europe ought to attend to the salience of the nation-state and to the public relevance of Christianity—two dimensions given short shrift in recent theorizing.
The controversy regarding Achille Mbembe's disinvitation from giving a keynote lecture at the Ruhrtiennale art and music festival has prompted a major discussion regarding antisemitism in the German ...media, revealing a deeper question as to who has the right to speak publicly on Holocaust memory, the defense of Jews, and Israel, in a polarized political climate. As commentary on the topic proliferated on the right as well as on the left, some of the leading voices in the discussion who support pluralism of ideas were themselves accused of being antisemitic. Felix Klein, a non-Jewish German and Christian Democratic Union diplomat, holds since 2018 the position of the Federal Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism. Klein, who originally called for Mbembe's retraction from his keynote, spoke with journalists in an introduction of "Competence Center on Antisemitism" in late June 2020 about "left liberal antisemitism, which should not be underestimated, even if right-wing narratives 'currently have a higher potential for violence.'" The debate thus shifted its focus onto the legitimacy of public intellectuals and their utterances and writing on topics of antisemitism, Holocaust memory, and Israel, revealing once more this focus on inner German identity and legitimacy.
Every year more and more Europeans, including Germans, are embracing Islam. It is estimated that there are now up to one hundred thousand German converts-a number similar to that in France and the ...United Kingdom. What stands out about recent conversions is that they take place at a time when Islam is increasingly seen as contrary to European values.Being German, Becoming Muslimexplores how Germans come to Islam within this antagonistic climate, how they manage to balance their love for Islam with their society's fear of it, how they relate to immigrant Muslims, and how they shape debates about race, religion, and belonging in today's Europe.
Esra Özyürek looks at how mainstream society marginalizes converts and questions their national loyalties. In turn, converts try to disassociate themselves from migrants of Muslim-majority countries and promote a denationalized Islam untainted by Turkish or Arab traditions. Some German Muslims believe that once cleansed of these accretions, the Islam that surfaces fits in well with German values and lifestyle. Others even argue that being a German Muslim is wholly compatible with the older values of the German Enlightenment.
Being German, Becoming Muslimprovides a fresh window into the connections and tensions stemming from a growing religious phenomenon in Germany and beyond.
Muslim, ex-Muslim as well as converted Muslim intellectuals are increasingly prominent figures in the West European far-right movement. By analysing their publications and online presence, we observe ...that concepts utilized by Muslim-background intellectuals popular in the German far right build on two seemingly contradictory tropes of German national identity—rationality and spirituality—and a civilizationism that oscillates between notions of rational liberalism and an illiberalism based on spiritualism. As these intellectuals combine the tropes of German nationhood and European civilisation, the far right builds connections with the growing Muslim demographic in Germany. The movement provides space for a variety of Muslim-background intellectuals: those who embrace a secular-liberal self-description emphasize how rationalism is synonymous with Germanness, while those who embrace a religious self-description critique liberal rationalism as lacking spirit. In so doing, Muslim public intellectuals help the far right to simultaneously spiritualize national reason and rationalize national spirit.
Exile and Plurality in Neoliberal Times Özdemir, Seçkin Sertdemir; Mutluer, Nil; Özyürek, Esra
Public culture,
05/2019, Letnik:
31, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Today thousands of academics from Turkey, along with others from Syria, Iran, and Egypt, are deserting their homeland in search of intellectual refuge in Western countries. These exiled academics ...practice diverse forms of teaching and researching, both in Turkey and in exile. The authors argue that the current struggles of oppositional academics inside and outside Turkey offer insight into the nature of the global crisis in neoliberal academia based on precarious working conditions and commodification of education. Some of the answers to this crisis may lie, as they did in the 1930s and 1940s, in the hands of those same persecuted scholars who bring with them academic perspectives forged in oppressive regimes. An approach that goes beyond humanitarian support has the potential to pluralize the academy.
Since the Turkish government's recent turn to authoritarianism, tens of thousands of public dissidents and government critics have been subjected to dismissals and revocation of civic rights via ...emergency decrees. The victims call this process 'civil death'. We aim to understand the logic behind this form of punishment in Turkey by examining the differential genealogy of civil death in the work of Hannah Arendt, Bertrand Ogilvie, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe. We demonstrate that a later form of civil death was used by totalitarian regimes in a process leading to the reduction of targeted individuals as 'superfluous' and as 'living corpses' in concentration camps. In these contexts, death became an instrument of biopolitical and necropolitical powers. We propose that although contemporary punishment of public dissidents in Turkey shares some similarities with these forms of civil death, it may more fittingly be identified as civic death. We argue that while civil death is based on the classical political right of the sovereign to 'make die' after first reducing targeted individuals to little more than living corpses, civic death is linked to the power of the sovereign to 'let die' through the exclusion of public dissidents from economic, social, and political life.
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