Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants by Jacob Kushner. Grand Central Publishing, 336 pages. 2024.
On November 8, 2011, in Winzerla, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Jena, a city in the former East Germany, a thirty-six-year-old woman named Beate Zschäpe borrowed a cell phone from a student on a tram and called the police. “Good day,” she said in German, “this is Beate Zschäpe.” When the operator didn’t recognize the name, Zschäpe explained that she was the target of a nationwide manhunt. Still the operator didn’t recognize her. Zschäpe hung up, returned the phone, and walked off.
For eleven years, Zschäpe had carried out a murderous campaign of right-wing terrorism with Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, two friends from Winzerla. They’d killed eight Turkish immigrants and one Greek, as well as a German policewoman. Calling themselves the National Socialist Underground, the trio had subsisted with donations raised by neo-Nazi networks across the former East, with tax money funneled into the group by Tino Brandt, an informant on the government’s payroll, and by robbing banks, like the Red Army Faction had in the 1970s. Since 2000, the murders had gone unconnected. The police seemingly refused to consider the possibility that they were politically motivated. Despite the fact that the NSU had distributed video manifestos bragging about the killings through the right-wing extremist world, where German security services maintained a network of paid informants, the various police departments investigating the crimes worked from the dubious presupposition that the murders had been carried out by the Turkish mafia. Detectives leaked this theory to the press, which dubbed the killings “the döner murders,” using the word for a Turkish kebab.
Four days before Zschäpe called the police, the two Uwes walked into a bank in Eisenach, the city where Martin Luther had translated the New Testament into German. They pistol-whipped the manager, stole €72,000, and pedaled away on their bicycles. A witness spotted them in a nearby parking lot as they loaded their bikes into a white RV. Police found the camper on a road heading toward Chemnitz. As they approached, three shots rang out, and the vehicle went up in flames. Inside, police found both men, their corpses charred, each with a bullet wound in his head—apparently one had shot the other and then himself. They also found more than twenty guns, including a submachine gun and two Heckler & Koch P2000 pistols, a service handgun used by the German police.
The police soon identified Mundlos and Böhnhardt. Both had been arrested numerous times for various offenses in their adult lives, including for right-wing extremism. In 1999, together with Zschäpe, they’d been wanted in Jena for placing a bomb with no detonator at the grave of a communist resister of fascism. After the deaths of the two Uwes, a search was undertaken for Zschäpe. She would give up on calling the police, instead walking into a station to turn herself in, accompanied by an attorney whose office was nearby. Zschäpe expressed neither concern nor remorse, her main worry whether or not her cats had survived the fire she’d set at the trio’s Zwickau apartment to dispose of the hideout’s evidence after hearing a radio bulletin about the murder-suicide at the camper van.
Several days later, newspapers, TV stations, and Muslim community centers across Germany received copies of a DVD that Zschäpe had dropped into the mail before she turned herself in. The DVD contained the NSU’s mission statement, in the form of a short film. Set to a jazzy soundtrack, it follows the Pink Panther—a childhood favorite of Mundlos—as he discovers an advertisement for a group fighting to protect the fatherland. The Panther joins up and goes on to blow up numerous caricatures of shifty-looking foreigners, with each explosion cutting to gruesome photographs taken of the NSU’s murders. In a still widely circulated through German media, the Panther points to a map of Germany marked with nine white X’s. The film ends with the Panther receiving an award for protecting his homeland. In a voice-over, he promises to return.
Sick Men of Europe
The subsequent trial of Zschäpe, together with four male associates charged with supporting the NSU, was among the most expensive and longest-running court cases that Germany had ever seen. The trial went on for five years, 438 days in session, with more than six hundred witnesses heard. From its very start, it managed to touch every live wire in German public life.
The possible complicity of Germany’s police and intelligence agencies in a campaign of racist terrorism touched off the most charged wire of them all.
That the NSU and their networks grew out of the former East was lost on no one. The optimism of the post-reunification years had given way to hard reality. Though the East had slowly overcome the mass unemployment that had hit after the collapse of communism and the “rationalization” of Eastern industry into the global market, work and talent had steadily moved west, leaving behind an aging, stagnating economy. In 2013, the year the trial began, the average rate of unemployment in the East was 10.3 percent. West Germans resented new financial commitments, in the form of a “solidarity tax,” to support lagging Eastern businesses, and they disapproved of what they perceived to be the East’s stubborn refusal to get with the program of liberal democracy. The tabloids played on these gripes, painting Zschäpe as an Ossi washout who spent her years on the run in a déclassé throuple with the two Uwes, swilling beer, sunbathing by the Baltic, and watching German-dubbed reruns of Malcolm in the Middle. The trio were indeed sponging off the government, as some informants paid by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution passed their cash on to the group. Zschäpe herself didn’t help matters by evincing no contrition and by dragging out the proceedings with go-nowhere legal maneuvers.
Then there were the victims. Migration had been a tense political issue in Germany since the early 1960s, when the West German government established a guest worker program with Turkey to deal with the labor shortage caused by mass deaths in World War II. The dynamics changed substantially in the late 1980s, however, when deindustrialization brought Turkish residents out of factories and shipyards and into view as the owners of shops, restaurants, and clothing and grocery stores. Though official German culture celebrated the new multiculturalism as a sign of how far the nation had come since the Third Reich, mob violence against migrants and firebombings of migrant housing had become a regular occurrence in the 1990s. Germany’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), jumped in by proposing drastic limits on migration.
The murders had occurred during a time of economic slowdown, when articles about Germany as the “sick man of Europe” were common in the economic press. The trial coincided with the subsequent period of relative prosperity that followed the Great Recession, when German exports finally reaped the benefits of the European common market, growing to roughly half of its GDP. But the benefits were unevenly distributed, not least because of the hard austerity that followed the financial crisis of 2009. The perception that the German pie was shrinking to the disadvantage of unskilled workers was intensified further still by a huge spike in asylum seekers—with over a million arriving in 2015 to 2016—from the Syrian and Libyan civil wars. That Angela Merkel had allowed in these refugees after being elected to continue the CDU’s hard line against immigration only hardened the sense among those already disenchanted with Germany’s “grand coalition” between the center right and the center left that there was no sense in voting for either party. In 2017, the year before the verdict—life in prison for Zschäpe, leniently brief sentences for her codefendants—was announced, Alternative for Germany, known as AfD, won ninety-four seats in the Bundestag to become the nation’s third-largest party, bringing the far right into national parliament for the first time since the Weimar Republic.
If, at the start of the trial in 2013, the German press could still embrace the comforting narrative that a resurgent far right was a statistical phantom, nothing more than protest votes from bitter Ossis, more disturbing revelations would soon lay that myth to bed. The media reported in 2012 that shortly after Zschäpe’s arrest, and the same day the Pink Panther video went public, a department chief at Germany’s federal intelligence agency gave a clerk orders to begin shredding documents on the agency’s attempts to recruit far-right informants. Three days later, the German intelligence agencies went on to destroy transcripts of phone calls they’d recorded between members of the neo-Nazi scene. At best, the agencies had been negligent in not stopping the murders. At worst, sympathetic agents might have covered them up. Further outrage ensued when it came out at trial that Andreas Temme, an agent from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution whose neighbors called him “Little Adolf” for his right-wing views, had been present at one of the NSU’s murders in 2006. Temme claimed that this was a coincidence and that he hadn’t heard the shots, but a team of forensics experts demonstrated that this was physically impossible. “He either saw the killer,” concluded one British journalist, “or he was the killer.”
The possible complicity of Germany’s police and intelligence agencies in a campaign of racist terrorism touched off the most charged wire of them all. (In addition to the police and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, right-wing extremism runs rampant in the German armed forces. Serving in the German military from 1994 to 1995, Mundlos’s company commander attempted to bring charges against him for his extremist views, but a military court ruled that there had been no criminal offence and released Mundlos from custody.) For decades, the West had looked to Germany as a model of historical reckoning. It had erected memorials, opened museums, paid reparations. Berlin had established itself as a cosmopolitan center where young people could enjoy cheap rent, thriving art scenes, plentiful drugs, and pulsing techno. These privileges were undergirded by a sense, shared by Americans and Germans alike, that Germany’s “coming to terms with the past” made it morally superior to other Western countries—like the United States, where Confederate flags still flapped over southern statehouses. While no one who knew anything about modern German history had any illusions about an easy transition from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic, Germany had been virtually alone among its neighbors in keeping explicitly far-right parties out of parliament. But if, as in a century prior, right-wing terrorists carried out murders while a complicit police force and a legal system full of authoritarians looked on, then what had Germany learned, really?
A Case Study in White Terror
The NSU trial generated an enormous amount of information over its years in session. Accordingly, its interpretations were many. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s newspapers of record, treated the proceedings like a second Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, an edifying public spectacle that, however unsatisfying its result might be, would nonetheless log once and for all into the public record the brutality of democracy’s enemies. The neo-Nazi world that had produced the NSU looked forward to the trial as a second Stammheim, the 1975 trial of the Red Army Faction where a group of young, telegenic terrorists had been able to use the court as a public platform to inspire a new generation to take up their cause. The Bild-Zeitung tabloid, on the other hand, approached the affair as a trial of the century in the American style, like O. J. Simpson or Pamela Smart, yet another snapshot of a society circling the drain. This made a certain kind of sense, since the NSU themselves drew on American influence, a darker version of the German-American exchange going on in Berlin in the 2000s. On the computer seized by the police from Zschäpe’s apartment, the police discovered a German translation of The Turner Diaries, the 1978 white supremacist novel about a fictional race war in America best known for inspiring Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
The NSU trial generated an enormous amount of information over its many years in session. Accordingly, its interpretations were many.
Hence Jacob Kushner’s Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants, the first full account in English of the murders and the trial, is less a piece of foreign journalism than an entry into today’s debate in the American press, in print and especially online, on the nature of the contemporary far right. A foreign correspondent for The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times, and other outlets of the mainstream press, Kushner admirably sifts through years of trial transcripts and news reports, working them together with extensive interviews with the victims’ families, who were largely sidelined by Germany’s national press. The result is a comprehensive synthesis of a decade’s worth of media coverage not only on the defining media event of the decade in Germany, but—as Kushner repeatedly reminds the reader with references to Anders Breivik, Christchurch, and recent massacres in America—one of the most brutal and sustained acts of right-wing terrorism in the wider West.
For Kushner, the NSU murders are an epidemiological case study in “white terror.” His goal is “to understand what white terror is, who is spreading it, and how to stop it.” Do voters support far-right parties because of their racism and conspiratorial thinking, or because of economic anxieties and new waves of migration? Are white supremacist terrorists crazed loners, picking up on frequencies floating in the air to justify their already existing murderous and suicidal impulses? Or are they the storm troopers of a new fascism that “legitimate” politicians like those in the AfD can condemn, even as the party’s rhetoric eggs them on?
To answer these questions, writes Kushner, “we must look to Germany’s East, where three friends from a small town set off to murder immigrants—and the government that was supposed to stop them chose to look away.” Zschäpe, Mundlos, and Böhnhardt were born in the 1970s, a time of relative prosperity and stability in socialist Germany, when the East had the international standing that allowed its government to pivot away from rapid industrialization and toward the production of consumer staples. Zschäpe was raised for most of her life by a single mother, Annerose, who had a job as an accountant at the Zeiss factory in Jena, an optics concern that had flourished producing rifle scopes, binoculars, and bombsights during both World Wars. After reunification, Zeiss was forced to tweak their lenses to adhere to international standards enforced by the European market and to compete with China. A third of Zeiss’s workforce was laid off, including Annerose, who descended into alcoholism and chronic unemployment.
Mundlos and Böhnhardt’s parents, meanwhile, belonged to the solid middle class. By all accounts the brains of the operation and the ideologue who radicalized the other two, Mundlos was the son of a professor of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in Jena. Böhnhardt, the most violence-prone of the trio, was the son of an engineer and a schoolteacher. Though neither family faced the same material pressures as Zschäpe’s, against a background of national collapse and economic precarity these professions lost both the promise of stability and the aura of prestige that had attached especially to the applied sciences under socialism.
The members of the NSU met at the Winzerclub, a space that tried to keep teenagers off the streets by giving them a place to drink beer. A teenage Zschäpe and Böhnhardt had already fallen into shoplifting, truancy, breaking and entering, and street fighting. Older than the other two, Mundlos had channeled his youthful disdain of the GDR and his skepticism of its propaganda into a hatred of the new Federal Republic and its pieties, especially its culture of Holocaust commemoration. Together, they fell into Jena’s neo-Nazi scene, which plagued the city’s suddenly visible migrant community. They spent their days attending white power hardcore shows, burning crosses, attending rallies to commemorate the death dates of prominent Nazis, and roving the streets looking for foreigners or other social undesirables to beat up.
In his account of the NSU’s youth, Kushner evinces at least some sympathy with those in the “racism-or-economic-anxiety” debate who spurn antiracist politics and the liberal creeds of multiculturalism. To some on the “economic anxiety” side of the discussion about Europe’s slide to the right, what the West has perceived as an unraveling of democratic norms is actually the revenge of a disempowered demos against flagrantly undemocratic bodies, like the EU government, that put all decision-making power in the committees and markets, especially decisions about immigration. After all—so runs the argument—the assimilation of the Gastarbeiter population was never taken up in earnest by the state, and so no consensus was ever established about the presence of a permanent immigrant population. Insofar as, in the West, ethno-religious tensions have replaced class conflict, nativism is a form of false consciousness. Nonetheless, to those inclined toward economic explanations, the core of this nativism is rational. It is the response of an embattled working class against the presence of a foreign workforce introduced in order to drive their wages down, and to the refusal of unelected ruling bodies to put the issue on the table for public discussion.
Kushner disagrees, however, that material conditions adequately explain the motives of the NSU. Mundlos, he points out, was both the most radical of the three and the one with the most promising prospects, as a data processor at the same Zeiss factory from which Annerose had been laid off. Zschäpe was gainfully employed as a painter’s assistant, Böhnhardt as a mason. What’s more, in the East, reunification actually hit immigrants the hardest: in addition to losing their jobs, they also lost their residency permits. Workers were forced to return home, many to countries with civil wars. The immigrant underclass that remained was smaller than it had ever been when the anti-immigrant violence of the 1990s flared up, but their visibility made them convenient scapegoats for politicians, especially those like Helmut Kohl and his CDU architects of reunification, who ran on the most restrictive immigration and asylum platform in Germany’s modern history. As young adults, the members of the NSU would have read countless stories in the Bild and Die Welt about “asylum fraud” and “bogus asylum seekers.” Kushner notes that even Der Spiegel, that model of respectable journalism, ran a cover story depicting Germany as an overladen ship on a sea of people: “Onslaught of the Poor: Refugees. Emigrants. Asylum Seekers.”
And then, “rational” explanations for a racist worldview never entirely grasp its fundamentally irrational character, the way that its virulence can become a dark parody of real social knowledge. The trio seemed to believe in earnest that the Holocaust had been invented by the cabal of Jews that controlled today’s events both international and domestic, at a time when the Jewish population in Germany was by most calculations less than 1 percent of the population. Together with Europe’s far-right parties and fellow white supremacist terrorists, they believed that a shadowy world government was letting in hordes of rapidly repopulating non-white immigrants in order to seize power from Europe’s rightful white citizens. From The Turner Diaries, they learned that they were the foot soldiers of an imminent race war that would result in nuclear exchanges between the United States, Russia, Israel, and China; instead of returning what little survived of humanity to medieval conditions, the conflict would usher in a new age of white prosperity. Living underground, they passed the time by playing a self-designed, Nazi-themed version of Monopoly called Pogromly. Clearly, more is at work here than concerns about stagnant wages for unskilled labor.
If the “economic anxiety” left can be accused of overrationalizing nativist racism, then the challenge for a project like Kushner’s is to clarify what white terror really is, and what drives it. But Kushner often treats the moral jolt that accompanies the charge of white supremacy as in and of itself explanatory, as though racism were something perennial, unchanging, self-evident. Kushner does gesture to a historically informed understanding of the NSU with reference to “institutional racism” in the passages on the police forces’ fumbling of the case. But, perhaps wary of inadvertently justifying the NSU’s actions, Look Away never fully analyzes the relationship between the material conditions of Germany’s existence and its fluctuating concepts of racial identity. One might note that Greek guest workers, now considered white (or, at the very least, “Southern European”), were also treated as racial others by Germans in the 1960s, while the Third Reich considered Poles—today, with the other Visegrád countries, considered by the German far right as allies in the struggle for a white Europe—as racial inferiors. Kushner’s analysis of racism has a great deal of moral urgency but less analytical clarity than we need now. Racial hatred is, at times, simply something ubiquitous—“institutional”—as if racism migrated from the heart of the individual to infect the collective soul.
A Swastika Is a Swastika
The former East is not, of course, composed entirely of neo-Nazis and AfD voters. Look Away often cuts away from the NSU to follow a more sympathetic counterprotagonist, Katharina König. The daughter of a Lutheran pastor who helped organize the Monday demonstrations against the GDR that soon became part of the nationwide uprising that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall—and the granddaughter of a member of the SS—König joined an antifa group as a teenager in the early 1990s and squared off with the right-wing thugs in Jena, including the future NSU. When, as the news of the case unfolded, the state of Thuringia appointed a committee to further investigate the NSU, and König, as a prominent antifascist, was able to obtain a seat, she used her authority to expose the failures of the security services in stopping the NSU. König dutifully befriended Jews and learned about Jewish culture, as well as her family’s role in destroying it. She took her gap year in Israel to volunteer at a home for Holocaust survivors in Jerusalem. Some there refused her care at first and admonished her for speaking German.
König’s story unfolds the second portion of Kushner’s inquiry into white terror, the part concerned with how to stop it. This becomes explicit in a passage where Kushner describes König’s education:
She’d studied the Holocaust in school, as all German children do. She’d even learned something about what her own grandparents had done. With Katharina, Germany’s attempts at Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the struggle to overcome to the past, had worked wonderfully. There she was, a German volunteering in Israel, taking interest in Jewish culture, befriending Jews. . . . The real problem, she now realized, was Germany’s future. Though most Germans learn about the fascism of the past, “we don’t learn how to stop it today.”
Here Kushner is staking out his ground in racism-or-economic-anxiety’s historiographic cousin, the fascism debate. Today’s Nazis, the book suggests, are no different from the old Nazis; any strategy for stopping them must begin with this acknowledgment. The original Nazis succeeded by weaponizing a nation’s hatreds and complacency. For decades, it seemed, the terrible lesson had been learned. Germany’s culture of remembrance made it unique among its neighbors in grappling with the atrocities of that time. France, by contrast, did not acknowledge the Vichy government’s role in murder of the Jews until the first year of the Jacques Chirac presidency in 1995. Poland, for its part, passed a law in 2018 making it illegal to accuse Poland of complicity in the Holocaust. But now, once again, the same hatreds, and the same complacency, have returned.
“Rational” explanations for a racist worldview never entirely grasp the fundamentally irrational character.
One might ask: How “wonderfully” did Germany’s struggle to overcome its past work, really? The remembrance of the Holocaust is, as even the critics of Germany’s memory culture acknowledge, the central pillar of its modern national identity. The Third Reich and its crimes are legally mandated topics for secondary school curricula in Germany, and visits to concentration camps like Dachau are common. What’s forgotten, however, is just how recently this culture emerged. As historian Tony Judt writes in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, a “consistent majority” of German respondents said that Nazism was “a good idea badly applied” in a survey carried out from 1945 to 1949. In a 1952 survey, 37 percent of West Germans answered that Germany was better off without the Jews. Only a small sliver of the people responsible for the enormous legal, military, and police apparatuses the Nazis relied on to carry out their orders ever faced justice. Kurt Georg Kiesinger, the West German chancellor from 1966 to 1969, had been a member of the Nazi Party for all twelve years of Hitler’s dictatorship. The East, for its part, held that because fascism was capitalism in its final, imperialist form, Germany’s Nazi past was the West’s responsibility—the Berlin Wall, when it went up, was popularly known as the “antifascist firewall.” East German schools tended to play down the specifically racist character of the Holocaust and focus instead on “victims of fascism” more broadly, especially communist resisters.
Hardly anyone who aided the Third Reich ever “came to terms” with what they had done. What really defeated Nazism in the West was the relentless focus of the Adenauer government on establishing a high standard of living for Germans. This task was made easier by the vastly simplified economic landscape of postwar West Germany, where the murder by the Nazis of the anticapitalist elements in German society, the Prussian Junkers and the communists, cleared the way for a cooperative corporatism between business leaders large and small and a unified labor movement. So long as the economy grew, wages increased, and the Deutsche Mark held steady, West Germans were more than happy with a sedate politics of consensus. But the moment that economic shocks of the 1970s hit West Germany and, for the first time since the 1930s, the country experienced the fear of unemployment and inflation again, nativism and xenophobia quickly returned to public life.
Neo-Nazism, as this nativism’s rightmost manifestation, did not come out of an incomplete “reckoning” with the past. Instead, both emerged simultaneously in the 1980s and 1990s, from a new generation of reunified Germans facing the uneven economic picture of deindustrialization and globalization—König and Zschäpe, both born in the 1970s, are handy cases in point here. “The culture of remembrance,” as it came to be known, represented a real bottom-up demand by children born in the postwar decades for truth and reconciliation from their parents. As a state culture, a top-down initiative to build memorials and open museums, Germany’s public displays of contrition were inextricable from the efforts of Helmut Kohl’s government to bring Germany into a common European market free of trade barriers. “We in the free part of Germany realize what it means, following Auschwitz and Treblinka, to have been taken back into the free Western community,” said Kohl, at a ceremony marking the fortieth anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. “Those nations did so not least with the justified expectation that we will not disown the crimes perpetrated in the name of Germany against the nations of Europe.” For Kohl, and, more important, for Germany’s business lobby, a “European” Germany was the sole path to preserving, even in a diminished form, the country’s export economy, and to avoiding the social unrest that had swept other industrial economies in the previous decade. For Germans excited about a new European future with no limitations on where they could live or work or travel or study, memory culture was their ticket abroad.
For all the rest, whose lack of schooling, professional training, employment opportunity, or money kept them rooted exactly where they were, the performance of contrition for historical events that had happened before their parents were born held little appeal. To be sure, memory culture met with considerable public ambivalence from respectable corners of society, such as nationalist-conservative historians like Ernst Nolte, who argued that the Holocaust needed to be “contextualized” against the crimes of the Soviet Union, and Kohl himself, whose speeches emphasized the need for a positive German patriotism to balance out “images of horror and guilt.” (It’s frequently forgotten that Ronald Reagan’s laying of a wreath in 1985 at a military cemetery in Bitburg where members of the SS were buried was at Kohl’s invitation.) Neo-Nazism represented the most extreme and most violent rejection of this deal and the whole social arrangement that produced it. Seen from this perspective, the new Nazism only superficially resembles the old one. The fascism that took power in 1933 was an unsteady alliance of farmers, public servants, teachers, and small businessmen that received substantial institutional support from extreme nationalist elements in the military, industry, and the Prussian aristocracy. Neo-Nazism, in its shaved head and Doc Martens form, was a street movement that began in England and America, the two countries where the neoliberal turn was carried out most completely. On the American side, it received strong impetus from the prison population, where in the wake of mass incarceration racial separatism became a de facto form of rule. The fascism that Zschäpe, Böhnhardt, and Mundlos took from The Turner Diaries was not a form of governance but a kind of gang violence that took place on the streets of American cities, carried out not by tanks and planes, and not even by the gas chamber, but with that birthright of every American citizen, the handgun and the lynching rope.
This may seem like so much hairsplitting. At the end of the day, a swastika is a swastika. But it points to the limits of the political culture Kushner glosses so approvingly and its ultimately dialectical relationship to its enemies. Like the taboo on Nazism in the postwar years, the culture of remembrance during the era of reunification was tacitly offered to citizens in the former East as part of compact with the New Germany. This deal promised to bring with it a return to the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s after decades of slowdown by overcoming other remnants of national chauvinism, too, like controls on the movement of capital, state aid, and the resistance to global governance. The recent expansion of the AfD’s voter base from the former East into the West suggests that, so long as that compact continues to distribute its spoils unequally, those who refuse to take it, once regarded as a sad minority, may not remain outnumbered for long.
Holding the Far Right Back
So, per Kushner’s question: How to stop this today? As a work of reportage, Look Away doesn’t really find anything more than an offhand answer to this question. A race war like the one predicted in The Turner Diaries has not come to pass—not yet. Nonetheless, reports of right-wing penetration of Germany’s police and military are now an almost yearly occurrence. At the time of this writing, the AfD is the second-largest German party in the EU Parliament and is polling at 17 percent nationally, after a high of about 22 percent earlier this year. The CDU looks poised to return to power under the leadership of Friedrich Merz, proposing a return to the anti-immigrant platform abandoned by their former leader.
The former East is not, of course, composed entirely of neo-Nazis and AfD voters.
One difficulty in answering this question lies in the specifically American perspective that Kushner brings to Germany, where the lens of “white terror” flattens out the broader spectrum of right-wing politics at play. A specific point of difficulty lies in the book’s elision of terrorism qua terrorism. Zschäpe, Mundlos, and Böhnhardt were not, after all, your average AfD voters, content to take part in a virtual politics of national restoration and rhetorical retribution against their perceived enemies. Nor were they your average neo-Nazis, malcontents happy to let out their antisocial urges by immersing themselves in a symbolic universe and pogoing to hardcore records. They were mass murderers who took the lives of innocent people, as well as their own. That they chose to do this at a time when the national mood seemed to be on their side, and legitimate political representation for their views began to coalesce, as Kushner shows so ably, suggests that their real desire was not, or not only, to rid Germany of immigrants, but rather to achieve the awful grandeur that attends the terrorist act in the mass media age, where the intractable asymmetry between the significance of the terrorist act and the insignificance of the people who commit them pushes violence to the absolute limit of explicability, toward the mythic. “By introducing conspiracy and chaos into the world, a terrorist hopes to make himself equal to the overwhelming world around him,” the financial reporter Chris Cumming wrote, the year the NSU trial began, in an essay on Don DeLillo. “What other mythic ambition can a loser instantly achieve, just by deciding to do it?”
Another question: If something is to be done, who is to do it? There is something American, too, in Kushner’s implicit conception of “Germans” as an entity that must “come to terms” with its past, and “immigrants” as the passive object of their “understanding.” If the last twenty-five years of German politics have demonstrated anything, it’s the fractiousness and discontinuity of the German populace. The German Jews who this “coming to terms” is meant to benefit are long gone—today’s German Jews are the result of a Russophone migration with an entirely different past, haunted by other historical crimes. In a monkey’s paw version of Kushner’s wish, the German government has been making up for its failure to bring charges of antisemitism against neo-Nazis by bringing them now against protesters, many of them Jewish, demonstrating against the German government’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza. Germany’s vice chancellor, Robert Habeck of the Green Party, has threatened to deport Muslim immigrants for participating in “Islamist” demonstrations. “Anti-colonialism must not lead to anti-semitism,” Habeck said. “In this respect, this part of the political left should review its arguments and be skeptical of the great resistance narrative.” What is the responsibility of the million asylum seekers of 2016, who fled a different world of violence? Or the near quarter of Germany’s population with an “immigration background,” as one calls it in German?
The haziness of the book’s moral tone blurs its underlying correctness about the fact that the fight against fascism, whether old or new, is a political one, and will be fought by Germany’s elected officials. The AfD’s success in the European elections saw a jump of ten percentage points in the under-thirty demographic (newly expanded, with those as young as sixteen able to vote for the first time)—worrying news about the future of the Bundesrepublik. Next year’s federal elections will clarify where in German society these young voters might take their place. Nonetheless, the AfD’s approval rating is not a barometer of Germany’s moral character, it’s a gauge of the party’s strength. The road from approval to governance remains long—just ask the Greens. Germany’s political scene remains fractured, nowhere more so than in the former East. Hand-wringing only takes you so far; the old-fashioned work of coalition building among Germany’s citizenry—of all creeds, colors, and citizenship statuses—still remains.