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Özyeğin Forum on Modern Turkey

Making Germans out of Turks and Arabs? Holocaust Memory and Inclusion/Exclusion of Immigrants


September 24, 2018
4:30pm - 6:00pm
Goldman Room, Adolphus Busch Hall
September 24, 2018
4:30pm - 6:00pm
Goldman Room, Adolphus Busch Hall

This presentation explores the dynamics of the unprecedented focus on young Muslims in Holocaust memory and education in Western Europe, in general, and Germany, in particular. It asks why considerable amounts of resources and energy is spent to organize special Holocaust education programs for youth with a Turkish or Arab background even though all students learn about the Holocaust in school. Based on two years of ethnographic field research on a number of extra-curricular Holocaust education programs targeting Muslims, it suggests that this recent focus extends the burden and responsibility of shouldering Holocaust memory to racialized immigrants and gives them an opportunity to be included into the moral fold of the German community. At the same time, by focusing on Arab and Turkish connections to Nazis, these programs set them apart as a distinct community of perpetrators who have not yet repented.

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