On Tuesday, October 22, we had the great pleasure of engaging in a conversation with Professor Esra Özyürek about her book “Subcontractors of Guilt”, published in 2023 by Stanford University Press. The book explores how at the turn of the millennium, Middle Eastern and Muslim Germans rather unexpectedly became central to the country’s Holocaust memory culture—not as welcome participants, but as targets for re-education and reform. Through a rich ethnographic account based on research conducted over a decade, Professor Özyürek analyzes how 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, could learn the lessons of the Holocaust and embrace Germany’s most important postwar democratic political values. The book argues that in this way, German society “subcontracts” the guilt of the Holocaust to new minority immigrant arrivals, considered as the prime obstacles to German national reconciliation with its Nazi past, with the (false) promise of inclusion into German society.

In the discussion, we touched on various topics, exploring the role of emotions and affect in German Holocaust memorial culture, especially regarding current debates about the war in Gaza, as well as the dynamics of the export-import theory of antisemitism that is outlined in the book. Professor Özyürek described in detail the motivation for participating in Muslim-only anti-semitism educational programs on the side of the young Turkish and Arab-Germans she worked with, highlighting how they became “good anthropologists,” understanding how the social contract of post-war Germany is based on a linear chronology of redemption. However, she points out that her young interlocutors remained racialized “outsiders” despite their willingness to enter such social contract by shouldering the externalization of guilt projected on them by German society, 

The conversation also revolved around more methodological questions concerning our positionality as researchers as well as the intricacies of the writing process and its timing or the importance of thinking through the lens of storytelling. Finally, we touched on the role, constraints, and significance of public anthropology in the current repressive scenario in Germany, Europe, and the world at large. 

Thank you so much for your time, Professor Özyürek!