UC Berkeley

This dissertation deals with the question of citizenship in contemporary Germany. By taking the field of civic education as a site of inquiry it probes into the educational methods of civic practices geared to train youth and professionals of migrant backgrounds to cultivate a sense of German citizenship. The dissertation demonstrates that the key question of citizenship, as one of tolerant conduct, is framed by the post-Holocaust condition. Thus, the dissertation focuses on civic educational programs funded to combat Islamic extremism and to foster secular tolerance by way of relating to the Holocaust and the murdered Jews. By doing so, the research focuses on programs dealing with the Holocaust as an exceptional event, yet constitutive of liberal democracy and tolerant subjects in the political present. The unit of analysis of the study is the group of civic educators hired to target and work with members from immigrant communities as Muslims. Here the dissertation focuses on how the Muslim subject is produced and bifurcated into tolerant German Muslim vs. Islamic extremist.

The thesis argues that the wider policies aimed at incorporating immigrants as Muslims into the German nation, becomes traceable as racializing effects in civic education. The position of the Muslim is an unstable category at risk to fail to be a recognizably secular citizen. Part of this failure, as it is accounted for throughout the dissertation, is a secularization paradigm applied to Muslims as religious subjects, who are asked to shed their religiosity from public. Secularization in the sense of historicism intersects with the notion of racial historicism, a civilizational betterment of Muslim subjects. Yet the same form of secularization cannot be applied to relating to the Holocaust. Rather, here Muslims have to submit to the Holocaust as “the constitutive exception” for the post-Holocaust episteme and the contemporary political order. The failure to do so, is read by public institutions as signs of Islamic extremism or religious intolerance.

The dissertation accounts for the strategies and moments in which formal German citizens are at risk to be further racialized as Muslims only, without ever fully being perceived as German citizens. Conversely a wider effect of these educational strategies and the discourse around them contributes to a moral superiority of the ethnic German Christian-secularized majority leading up to a sense of rightful owning of the nation and entitled to discriminate against Muslims, because of their assumed religious intolerance. The thesis defines this national superiority as moral nationalism in a reciprocal and co-constitutive relation with the racialized Muslim subject.