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Narrating the Holocaust with the Nakba? On the Limits of Liberal Democracy in Germany
Abstract
Scholars have increasingly attended to the ambivalent effects of citizen-incorporation of minoritized subjects in liberal-democracies (Scott 2007, Fernando 2014; Partridge 2010, 2012). With the shift to wage war on terrorism and by exporting liberal forms of governance (Mahmood and Hirschkind 2002), citizen-incorporation within Western democracies has gradually come under purview of security concerns (Puar 2007). This paper takes Germany as a case to discuss the dark side of democracy as it governs Middle Easterners as Muslims in and through tolerance education. Since the early 2000s pedagogies of citizenship have flourished across Germany targeting a newly defined population: Muslims. Muslims, a racial term for migrants from the Middle East regardless of legal and political status are considered coming from undemocratic countries where hatred of minorities reigns. According to political discourse a particular problem among Muslims is their relationship to Jews stemming from ‘unsecularized’ sentiments, dangerously feeding the violent capacity to radicalize. De-Radicalization projects combatting Islamic extremism in particular have deployed the memory of the Holocaust. Beyond the task of training tolerant speech and practices, these sites enable forms of scrutiny, surveillance and the exposition of migrant youth as potential radicals. In centering the case of a German-Palestinian civic educator in Berlin, who was ousted for comparing the Holocaust to the Nakba this paper seeks to complicate the notion of democratic incorporation in several ways. First, by discussing what forms of public speech count as tolerant and how Holocaust education is key for a liberal-democratic subjectivity in Germany, I will point out how Holocaust education is enabling and limiting in thinking about human and minority rights violations. Second, by showing how the civic educator became a transnational case of “Muslim Antisemitism” for her comparison, I will point out how her public right to political speech was curbed by a circuit of power prioritizing other states and state interests rather than one’s own citizens. This circuit of power is further based on historical and racial hierarchies, depoliticizing the political present by enabling Muslims to emerge as docile subjects, yet disabling them to point out a range of concerns in the political present. Taken these points together, the paper will argue that Middle Easterners exist in a twilight zone of social death in which their emergence as Muslims, good or bad, enables the state to craft itself and the Christian ethnic majority as a liberal-democracy.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Europe
Sub Area
Diaspora/Refugee Studies