Forgetting Hitler

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'I was doing a workshop once,' says Elif Kayi, who works with Berlin's Arab, Turkish, and Muslim youth at the grassroots organization Kreuzberg Initiative Against Anti-Semitism, 'and I heard a student say that Jews should be gassed. ' Kayi watched as the teacher stood by in silence. When she asked the instructor later why he didn't respond, 'he said that he'd heard such things before, but that he didn't react in order to avoid a conflict,' she recalls. That's a shocking observation in a country that has made the Holocaust and confrontation of its Nazi past something of a national assignment. It's a shift that reveals a tangle of social issues.

Born in Berlin to Turkish parents, Tulay Bilgen works as a program coordinator at the nonprofit Institute for Cultural Diplomacy. When I described to her anti-Semitic incidents and attitudes attributed to young Muslims, she was astonished. 'That was not my experience,' she told me.

When Bilgen went to high school some 10 years ago in Kreuzberg, students of German descent still made up the majority, and talking negatively about Jews in public was relatively taboo. Bilgen's class watched films and learned about the Nazi era. 'The pictures were unbelievable,' she told me. 'It didn't matter if you were Turkish or German. My opinion hasn't changed today,' she added, 'and it won't. It is impossible to find the right expression for this brutality, this genocide.'

But Bilgen later acknowledged that she sees a certain schadenfreude in the Muslim community about the Holocaust. 'The topic of Israel and Palestine is sensitive,' she told me. 'The reality is that there is an anger that grows against the Jews because of the politics in Israel.' Now the anger is transmogrifying, with frequently asserted comparisons of the Gaza Strip to the Warsaw Ghetto, of Israeli army checkpoints to Nazi roundup points, of Ariel Sharon to Adolf Hitler.

But the shift is about more than solidarity with Palestine. If you pull a thread from the sleeve of the situation, a complicated reality unravels. Caught in the middle of two cultures, neither of which they feel they belong to, young Muslim immigrants are increasingly taking on the umbrella identity of radicalized Arab or Muslim, conflating Israel, Jews, and the Holocaust with their own sense of isolation.

Most of the immigrants live in big cities such as Hamburg and Cologne. The largest number are settled around Berlin, in communities that are made up mostly of Turks who came to Germany as cheap manual labor beginning in the 1950s and their children and grandchildren. In recent years, ethnic Kurds, Muslims from Iran and Bosnia, and Arabs from North Africa, Palestine, and Syria have joined them, mostly as political and economic refugees, some illegally. They exist for the most part in cultural and social isolation in what is described as a Parallelgesellschaft, a parallel society. Unemployment in these neighborhoods is as high as 50 percent, and high school dropout rates run at about 30 percent-consequences of Germany's longtime reluctance to integrate its immigrant population.

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