When Muslim-minority German youth identify with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, not only because of the current visibility of their persecution but also due to their racialization, they appear to ethnic Germans to be competing with Jews for victim status, and face accusations of being antisemitic, thus losing their opportunity to be legitimately heard in Germany. When Muslim Germans express fear, they are judged to be lacking in the cognitive skills required to understand how different today’s Germany is from that of the 1930s. When they demand empathy for their own racialization, they are judged as too immature for full participation in German democracy and acceptance into the German social contract. Political legitimacy in postwar German national identity politics derives from adopting the repentant perpetrator position. As anthropologist Sultan Doughan (2022) asserts: „Historical perpetratorship is an inclusive concept in Germany and it includes the figure of the Jew as a sacrificial victim.”
—Esra Özyürek, Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory & Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), 25.
Dining room of the villa where the 90 minute meeting took place.
I have walked those cobblestones. My apartment was near here.