The DDGC collective is hosting an ongoing reading group featuring texts that help us think with artists and academics about Palestine and related topics. The next installment of the group will feature Esra Özyürek's The Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany (Stanford UP, 2023). 

The official description for the book reads: “At the turn of the millennium, Middle Eastern and Muslim Germans had rather unexpectedly become central to the country's Holocaust memory culture—not as welcome participants, but as targets for re-education and reform. Since then, Turkish- and Arab-Germans have been considered as the prime obstacles to German national reconciliation with its Nazi past, a status shared to a lesser degree by Germans from the formerly socialist East Germany. It is for this reason that the German government, 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, can learn the lessons of the Holocaust and embrace Germany's most important postwar democratic political values. Based on ethnographic research conducted over a decade, Subcontractors of Guilt explores when, how, and why Muslim Germans have moved to the center of Holocaust memory discussions. Esra Özyürek argues that German society "subcontracts" guilt of the Holocaust to new minority immigrant arrivals, with the false promise of this process leading to inclusion into the German social contract and equality with other members of postwar German society. By focusing on the recently formed but already sizable sector of Muslim-only anti-Semitism and Holocaust education programs, this book explores the paradoxes of postwar German national identity.”

The reading group will meet online. Each participant will find their own way to a copy of the book. It is available through your institutional libraries, available for purchase through your independent bookstore, and in other venues. If you have a hard time finding a copy of the book, reach out to one of the organizers. 

The sign up period for the group is over. But you can always join us at a later point. To do so, email any one of the co-conveners for the group.

Meeting Schedule

• Meeting 1: preface + intro, August 15, 12-2pm Pacific Time

• Meeting 2: Chapter 1 + 2, September 5, 12-2pm Pacific Time

• Meeting 3: Chapter 3 + 4, September 26 Pacific Time

• Meeting 4: Chapter 5 + conclusion, October 17 Pacific Time

Organizer Contact

Jason Groves (jagroves[at]uw.edu)

Ervin Malakaj (ervin.malakaj[at]ubc.ca)

Adrienne Merritt (adrienne.merritt[at]colorado.edu)