Rethinking empathy: Emotions triggered by the Holocaust among the Muslim-minority in Germany

Abstract

In the last decade there has been widely shared discomfort about the way Muslim minority Germans engage with the Holocaust. They are accused of not showing empathy towards its Jewish victims and, as a result, of not being able to learn the necessary lessons from this massive crime. By focusing on instances in which the emotional reactions of Muslim minority Germans towards the Holocaust are judged as not empathetic enough and morally wrong, this article explores how Holocaust education and contemporary understandings of empathy, in teaching about the worst manifestation of racism in history, can also at times be a mechanism to exclude minorities from the German/European moral makeup and the fold of national belonging. Expanding from Edmund Husserl's embodied approach to empathy to a socially situated approach, via the process of paarung, allows us to reinterpret expressions of fear and envy, currently seen as failed empathy, as instances of intersubjective connections at work. In my reinterpretation of Husserl's ideas, the process of paarung that enables empathy to happen is not abstract, but pairs particular experiences happening at particular times and places under particular circumstances to individuals of certain social standing and cultural influences. An analogy can be made to shoes. Anyone has the capacity to imagine themselves in someone else's shoes. Nevertheless, the emotional reactions the experience triggers in each person will be shaped by individual past experiences and social positioning. Hence grandchildren of workers who arrived Germany after the World War II to rebuild the country resist an ethnicized Holocaust memory and engage with it keenly through their own subject positions.

“This Is Just Where We Are in History”

“…In trying to elucidate the complexity of my interlocutors' engagement with the topic of the relational positionalities of Jews and Muslim in the UK I hope to both build upon and contribute to the following bodies of literature. I suggest my fieldsite offers an important ethnographic and analytical prism for the growing research on Jewish and Muslim experiences in Europe that has emphasized the overlapping histories of antisemitism and Islamophobia, and sought to complicate and unsettle accounts that polarise European Jews and Muslims (for instance, Anidjar 2008, Atshan and Galor 2020, Everett 2018, Everett and Gidley 2018, Katz 2015, Klug 2014, Mandel 2016, Meer 2013, Özyürek 2018, Renton and Gidley 2017, Romeyn 2017, Sheldon 2016, Silverstein 2010.1 It also offers a fruitful site for the scholarship at the intersection of Jewish Studies and postcolonial theory that has examined the differing dimensions of what I describe as a comparative theorization of the minority condition (Cheyette 2013, Goetschel and Quayson 2016, Guttman 2013, Mufti 2009, Rothberg 2009, 2011.…”

Muslim minorities as Germany’s past future: Islam critics, Holocaust memory, and immigrant integration

“…The crystallization of German Holocaust memory as victim-centered and the accompanying sense of “moral superiority” (Frochtner, 2014) for having found the correct method of coming to terms with the past coincided historically as well as ideologically with the entry of Turkish and Arab immigrants into the national discussion of Holocaust memory. The contemporary sense of responsibility hence is directed not only toward the past crimes but also simultaneously toward evaluating and educating immigrants (Özyürek, 2018). “Rethinking Empathy: Emotions Triggered by the Holocaust among Muslim-minority in Germany” Anthropological Theory 18(4): 456-477, 2018.…”

“…While Turkish-background Germans in particular have long engaged with the memory of the Holocaust, these engagements have by and large been ignored by the general public (Konuk, 2007). When in the early 2000s, German and west European newspapers began to run stories about the refusal of Muslim students to attend concentration camp tours and engage with class material devoted to the history of National Socialism (Ozyurek, 2018), a twin public discourse began to dominate concerning the Muslim importation of anti-Semitism into a country that had already come to terms with its own anti-Semitism (Ozyurek, 2016). In response, some Muslim-background public intellectuals popular in mainstream society for their critical position toward Muslims and Islam promoted the idea that Muslims are exactly at the point now where Germans were at 1944.…”

Being Minority in Papua: Religious and Political Identity Struggle of the Dani Muslims

“…Discussions about Muslim minority groups have been widely reviewed by experts from various parts of the world. Muslim minorities in Western countries are certainly a common topic (Aydin, 2019;Hirsch et al, 2018;Özyürek, 2018;Roach, 2006;Salnikova & D' Arcus, 2019;Smart-Morstad et al, 2009;Trittler, 2018;Vanparys et al, 2013) with a focus on issues surrounding Islamophobia, immigrant identity, as well as several events regarding terrorism. In addition to Western countries, there is also works that includes the marginalization of Muslims minority in Congo (Leinweber, 2012), Muslim minority groups in Singapore (Roach, 2006), in Nepal (Dastider, 2000), and even Greece (Tsitselikis, 2004) where Muslims as a group have unequal access and treatment in various aspects.…”