We were delighted to welcome Esra Özyürek (LSE) to the Centre to present some of her work on German Muslims. In front of a packed crowd – there were people sitting on the floor! – she gave a fascinating dissection of the German ‘national character’ through the lens of young German Muslims and German-Muslim intellectuals. Anita Klingler reports back on a stimulating and controversial evening.
A young child appears on the stage, sitting, blindfolded, and eagerly awaiting the surprise his father has for him. It is a toy gun. The father takes off the blindfold, the child rejoices at the new plaything. Then the father begins to instil in his son his worldview: that the Jews who surround them are bad people, evil, less than human. All the while, the father is dressed in a black leather trench coat, immediately recognisable to the audience as representing a stereotypical item of Nazi attire. The Palestinian present and the Nazi past have become one on this stage, indoctrinating the young to hate.
It was this scene, acted out as part of a campaign to teach young Muslim men in Germany about the Holocaust, that captured our speaker Esra Özyürek’s imagination early on in the conception of this research project. As would become apparent in her talk, Özyürek is sceptical that ghettoising, in particular, Muslim youth to teach them about antisemitism and democracy is the most effective way of addressing issues of failed integration, violent behaviour, and a lack of identification with the liberal-democratic values of the Federal Republic.
In examining certain strands of the public discourse on how best to ‘reform’ these youths, Özyürek discovered an interesting parallel to another re-education programme which had taken place on German soil some 70 years earlier. Drawing on the 1944 movie Tomorrow the World! as an example, she set out how the image of Germans at the end of the Second World War was that of the ‘unruly boy’; a child, misguided by Nazism, but able to be taught right from wrong and rehabilitated into the civilised world.
Most importantly, according to Özyürek, American re-education efforts, bolstered by anthropological studies of ‘national character’, focused on changing the Nazis’ authoritarian child-rearing methods and strict patriarchal family structures. Germans needed to learn from Americans how to be democratic by imitating their behaviours, and in particular by adopting a softer ideal of masculinity, rooted in trust and emotions, rather than order and authority.
This pathologization of the German ‘national character’ as a patient, who is sick but can be cured, is repeated, in Özyürek’s analysis, in modern-day Germany with regards to young Muslim men. The Germans, having learned from imitating the Americans after the Second World War, are now mature enough to teach the unruly young Muslims the same lessons. Citing, in particular, self-styled experts who come from Muslim backgrounds themselves, but have gone on to publish books which are critical of Islam, Özyürek showed how their discourses draw on similar ideas of the patriarchal family, forced obedience, domestic violence, and sexual repression as the root cause for young Muslim men’s frustrations, violent behaviours, and religious radicalisation.
She fleshed out this parallel by presenting extensive quotations from three such experts, two of Turkish origin, one with Arab roots. All of them focused on the Muslim father figure as a cruel and almighty ruler of the household, who demands obedience, forbids questions, punishes misconduct, and instils shame in his children. At the same time, he is often perceived as dysfunctional by his children, especially if he speaks only broken German or faces challenges such as unemployment, which question his authority. Thus, the argument goes, the adolescents remain forever immature and seek an alternative figure of authority in the shape of Allah, or his representatives on earth, especially radical imams who offer clear structures, answers, and welcome them with open arms.
The solution presented by the Muslim-background experts for how Muslims can learn to be democratic, respect women, Jews, and homosexuals, and adopt the values of liberal mainstream Germany, is to rebel. Again, a parallel with the German past is drawn, this time with the generation of 1968 and its rebellion against their Nazi fathers. Young Muslims today must rebel against their authoritarian fathers just like young Germans did in 1968; only then can they emancipate themselves from the undemocratic principles instilled in them by their upbringing.
Özyürek criticised how, in presenting this solution, the self-appointed experts vastly oversimplify the varied Muslim experiences within Germany and draw a faulty total dichotomy between ‘German’ and ‘Muslim’ families, the former representing an ideal which the latter ought to aspire to, to truly belong. These experts also draw heavily on their personal biographies and present themselves as having successfully completed the process of rebellion, and having embraced the liberated ways of Western democracy, just like the Germans had 70 years prior, bringing the analogy full circle.
The paper was followed by a stimulating discussion, initiated by Mathias Thaler’s thoughtful comments. He raised the question of the role of a less pro-American strand of post-1945 re-education, namely the Frankfurt School’s engagement with authoritarianism, which seems to complicate the notion of Germans having become democratic solely by following the American lead. He also asked how Özyürek’s analysis might fit with the pan-European character of the ‘Muslim troublemaker’, in light of the fact that no other country in Europe experienced denazification and American re-education on the scale Germany did.
After this, audience members questioned the speaker on the difficult definition of ‘Muslim’, which led Özyürek to speak about the ethnicisation of Islam in Germany, according to which all individuals with roots in Muslim countries were counted as Muslims, but not the around 100,000 ethnic Germans who have converted to Islam. Other questions concerned methodology, with some of the audience questioning whether by simply citing the Muslim-background experts who she evidently disagreed with, Özyürek had done enough to demonstrate their arguments’ fallaciousness. Some wondered to what extent the parallel in discourse was cogent or simply coincidental, and whether the trope of educating a ‘child-like’ people towards democracy was not one familiar from imperial contexts.
In the end, the paper presented an interesting case study of two re-education efforts which evidently exhibit uncanny parallels. The complex issue of analysing them in relation to each other and to the challenges of the present raised many difficult questions, and will have left the audience members with much food for thought.
Anita Klingler is a PhD student in History. Her research interests lie broadly in twentieth century European history, political and colonial violence, and coming to terms with a violent past. Her thesis compares attitudes towards political violence in interwar Britain and Germany. She is a member of the CSMCH steering committee.