Esra Özyürek's book Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany explores significant and timely questions around migration, anti-Semitism, and the role of Holocaust memory in the making of postwar German national identity. Focusing on the recently formed Muslim-only anti-Semitism and Holocaust education programs, Özyürek offers fresh insights on the complex and multifaceted ways in which Turkish and Arab-background Muslims negotiate German Holocaust memory and shoulder its weight as a proof of belonging to German society “while bearing the brunt of racism in the country” (p. xiii). Her analysis reveals how “the ideological labor” of remembering the Holocaust and performing this memory becomes of a way of deciding who belongs to the majority German society and who is to be excluded or is granted conditional entry to the postwar German social contract. Investigating the political implications of the roles assigned to Middle Eastern/Muslim-background Germans in Holocaust memory discussions, Özyürek discusses the trends of externalizing anti-Semitism from Germany and subcontracting the guilt of the Holocaust to Muslim-background Germans who do not adhere to the exceptionalist rules of Holocaust memory and point out that different forms, modalities, and historical experiences of racism can be read together to expand anti-racist imaginaries.

Özyürek's book relies on an extensive ethnographic study in Germany where she attended various Holocaust education programs, training sessions, and study visits to Auschwitz designed for Muslims in Berlin, Duisburg, and Dortmund. Moreover, she observed tenth-grade history classes in a mixed-track high school catering mostly to non-German-background students in Berlin. She also conducted semi-structured interviews with Holocaust educators regularly teaching Muslim minorities and Turkish- and Arab-background German Muslims on their relationship to German history. Based on this meticulous ethnographic fieldwork, Özyürek exposes how the foundational narrative of postwar German society based on Holocaust memory culture regards ethnic Germans as “having reached their destination of redemption and re-democratization” and non-ethnic Germans, especially German Muslims, as less able to learn the ethical lessons of empathy, tolerance, and democracy in relation to Holocaust memory (p. 2). Throughout the book, Özyürek convincingly demonstrates that racializing processes and discourses are at work in Holocaust memory culture, revealing that they project anti-Semitism upon Muslim migrants by accusing them of being “unable to relate to Holocaust history, incapable of establishing empathy with its Jewish victims, and of importing new forms of antisemitism” to Germany (p. 2).

The introductory chapter portrays the emotional basis of German Holocaust memory and the postwar German social contract that “moved from admittance of collective guilt to collective pride at having come to terms with the past better than any other nation” (p. 9). As Özyürek aptly shows, this emotional framework serves to assume that ethnic Germans have already shouldered responsibility for Germany's Nazi past, but that non-ethnic Germans and non-Germans are less matured personally and politically in relation to Holocaust memory. Here, Özyürek underscores that in the 2000s, Middle Eastern and Muslim-background Germans, who have long been considered as irrelevant to Holocaust debates, have come to the forefront of this narrative. She cites various significant developments as key to German Muslims’ shifting positions: the start of the Second Intifada, terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States by Muslim terrorists, and the rise of Islamophobia and right-wing politics. This contextualization helps the reader better grasp the multiple racializing processes that inform the proliferation of discourses on Muslims, migration, and anti-Semitism in the exclusionary Holocaust memory narratives.

In Chapter 1, providing a gendered account of the German postwar social contract, Özyürek suggests that the gendered nature of re-democratization in postwar Germany relies on a psycho-social imaginary of democracy where the guilt arising from the Holocaust is associated with authoritarian fathers who are seen as guilty of having led their sons toward authoritarianism. Interestingly, she notes that like the postwar German sons who claim to be liberated from their authoritarian fathers, German Muslims emphasize the significance of the rebellion of Muslim sons against their traditional, strict fathers who adapt conservative gender norms. We see that this tendency to reimagine Muslim masculinity in the footsteps of postwar Germans is quite common in the Muslim German intellectual circles who are also fierce critics of Islam. These critics often align with the ethnonationalist narrative that the Muslim minority potentially undermines the German democratization narrative, especially in terms of women's rights and gender roles. Their narratives tend to reproduce the age-old Orientalist assumptions that frame Muslim men as oppressors and Muslim women as victims, and regard the Muslim minority in Germany as categorically antithetical to the ideals of gender equality in the German democratization narrative. Özyürek highlights that in idealizing the gendered dynamics of how Germans came to confront and learn from the Holocaust, this view leads to the trend of reimagining Muslim masculinity at the “zero hour” (Stunde Null), a term used to refer to “the place where defeated Germans began in 1945” (p. 68). Stressing the need to reimagine Muslim masculinity in the footsteps of postwar Germans, it exposes the centrality of the gendered dynamics to the place that Muslim-background Germans hold in Holocaust memory culture.

Chapter 2 introduces what Özyürek calls the export-import theory of Muslim anti-Semitism. The export-import theory suggests that Europeans developed anti-Semitism into Nazism in the 1930s and later exported it to the Middle East where it was preserved intact and later imported back into a supposedly “antisemitism-free Europe” by post–World War II Muslim immigrants. Özyürek argues that this theory reduces the positionality of Muslims in Germany to a perpetrator position, while completely ignoring their marginalized, racialized, and disadvantaged status in European societies. She states: “Depicting Muslims as past and present offenders against Jews … serves to conceal the subtle and not so subtle ways in which Muslims are indeed victims of racism in today's Europe. It also depicts antisemitism as a problem that no longer belongs to Germany but now only exists there due to immigration” (p. 102).

In Chapter 3, Özyürek discusses the complexities of Muslim-minority Germans’ feelings of empathy toward Jewish victims of the Holocaust as nuanced, socially situated experiences of intersubjective connection and discusses the strong negative reactions that these complex and multifaceted feelings might generate in ethnic Germans’ inner worlds. Building on Husserl's concept of the intersubjective nature of empathy, Özyürek claims that the previous experiences and positionality of the empathizer shape the empathetic process. Looking through this lens, she criticizes the fact that German Holocaust education offers a strictly defined empathetic process based on the feelings of the responsibility of the perpetrator as a moral standard in engaging with the Holocaust memory. According to Özyürek, German Muslims’ narratives informed by a simultaneous reading of various trajectories, modalities, and histories of racialization are blamed for not seeing the exceptionality of the position of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Her analysis clearly portrays that when German Muslims express critique of racialization of Muslims in Europe and/or connect the Holocaust history and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in innovative ways along with declaration of radical empathy with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, their intervention into German Holocaust memory is seen as unfit for full participation in German democracy and social contract. Özyürek demonstrates how anti-Semitism prevention programs target the “self-victimization” of Arab and Palestinian youth, a narrative that stresses agonies experienced due to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and various modes of discrimination that one can encounter while living as a Muslim refugee in Europe. She exposes how these programs frequently mention that the Muslim population wrongly perceives themselves to be victims of Israel and the Western world. She criticizes that this approach “views ethnic groups and their desires and ideologies as unconnected with the social and political context in which they live … In this framework, the fact that Palestinian refugees in Germany have been forced to leave their homes, live in precarious conditions, and are subjected to discrimination is irrelevant to the aspirations and ideas attributed to them” (p. 93).

Along this line, her critique suggests that perspectives which do not acknowledge socially situated character of empathetic processes cannot account for the various and innovative ways in which German Muslims enact empathy in relation to Holocaust memory.

In Chapters 4 and 5, Özyürek focuses on the ways in which young German Muslims successfully mobilize a high level of awareness of contextual clues in German society that “enables them to insert themselves into German Holocaust memory discourse as authorized and acceptable members” (p. 152). She reveals that, on the one hand, new Holocaust education programs designed for Muslims open up space for them to enter into Holocaust memory discourse through affiliation with the German perpetrator. On the other hand, internalizing the perpetrator role as prescribed gives them only conditional entry into the German social contract as they are caught up in the broader processes of racialization that mark their positions as ausländer (foreigner) in German society. Özyürek also describes how these education programs often utilize a visit to Auschwitz as a form of shock therapy, “a tool designed to shake them out of their antisemitism and instill in them the ‘right’ kinds of feelings toward Jewish victims of the Holocaust” (p. 159).

Özyürek's book is innovative and eye-opening, particularly in its focus on how discourses on Muslim anti-Semitism are oblivious to entrenched forms of racism in Europe that have particularly escalated due to the increased political efficacy of right-wing politics and Islamophobia in the last decade. It convincingly underscores how the intertwining of various racializing discourses on Muslim anti-Semitism, Muslim sexism, and Muslim homophobia serves to construct the perpetual ausländer position of Muslims in Germany. This line of analysis also begs the question of how one can criticize actual Muslim anti-Semitism without reproducing racist tropes and perpetuating the forms of racialization that continue to exclude Muslims from contemporary European societies and politics. In a nutshell, Subcontractors of Guilt is essential reading for students, researchers, teachers, as well as the general public interested in the entangled questions of Holocaust memory culture, national belonging, migration, Muslims, and the making of the postwar German social contract.