Sultan Doughan

Preliminary abstract: During the last decade the German state has invested in various educational programs on the Holocaust that target Muslim Germans of migrant background in order to facilitate their integration as citizens. This project studies state-funded NGOs in Germany that provide Holocaust education including anti-Semitism prevention to align Muslims closer with the political culture of the state and liberal citizenship. It assesses the extent to which Muslims’ stances towards German history coincide with and differ from those prescribed by the educational programs, and how this causes a problem for becoming a fully integrated cultural German citizen. By focusing on how Muslim participants claim German history through the frame of the Holocaust this project gauges how Muslims in Germany today relate to their new nation’s past and what modes of relating these programs make possible or foreclose. The research will demonstrate to what extend discourses on Muslim integration in Germany intersect with the notion of Bildung and how this plays out in Holocaust education. Germany’s self-perception as liberal and secular is entangled with Holocaust education. Further, contemporary forms of citizenship and national belonging in Germany intersect with Germany’s genocidal history, which has not been fully accounted for in the anthropological literature. My project will provide new insights on how the memory of the Holocaust and the dis course on integration frames the subject-positions particularly of young Muslim citizens of migrant background.