 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, fellow scholars. And obviously I wish I could have a guest, and most of all to Professor Esther Ozurek, who is here for her inaugural lecture. You will, of course, remember that lectures in Cambridge begin at five minutes past the hour. And that is the tradition we have endeavoured to respect this evening. Esra is delivering her inaugural lecture as Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths and Share Values. It's another Cambridge tradition, of course, that we tend to give our inaugural lectures fashionably named. Esra has in fact been with us since October 2020. As I'm sure many of you are aware, she came here from the London School of Economics, where she had been a Professor of Contemporary Turkish Studies before that. She taught anthropology at the University of California in San Diego. Still further back after her undergraduate studies in Istanbul, she conducted her doctoral research under the auspices of the University of Michigan. Now, the nature of our inaugural lecture today is slightly different from what is customary. Esra is going to give us a lecture first, introducing her latest book, about which more in a moment, Subcontractors of Guilt, Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany. Copies, as you know, are available. Esra has, of course, published other books. I've noticed something in looking at her career. Her specialty appears to be, I think, turning the tables. I call it turning the tables. Her first book, Nostalgia for the Modern State. Nostalgia for the Modern. I love that. Nostalgia for the modern state. State secularism and everyday politics in Turkey already, I think, back in 2006, turning the tables on a shifting tide in contemporary Turkey. Since then, of course, taking her work in a new direction, she issued a few years, six or seven years ago, being German, becoming Muslim. Not being Muslim, becoming German, of course, which is the story we might well have expected, being German, becoming Muslim, race, religion and conversion in the new Europe, an examination of the new impact of the Muslim face in modern Germany and based, of course, on considerable fieldwork there. But finally, with subcontractors of Guilt, again, wonderfully thought-provoking title. I was kind of wrestling with that. Germans of Muslim background are her study. It's a study, a detailed study of Germans of Muslim background wrestling with the memory and legacy of the Holocaust in Germany. Now, of course, even a historian, even a mere historian of the English Reformation, knows the significance of Holocaust memory in contemporary Germany, but this book, again, once more turns the tables in an admirable and interesting way. It's concerned, as it were, in the context of that rising concern about antisemitism, which, of course, we are all of us concerned at the present day, examines the way in which Holocaust education has been, as it were, designed, redesigned for and delivered to specifically Muslim audiences. We have this curious, this ironic tale about the need to educate Germans of Muslim origin in Germany about the responsibility for genocide against the Jews within the context of a society which is, of course, still in seminary respects, fundamentally or structurally, a Christian one. And this wonderful monograph documents, therefore, a delicate and a sensitive investigation of, of course, a topic of the most challenging kind in the area of relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims. But as such, of course, it represents exactly what, exactly the kind of academic enterprise that the Sultan Kabir's chair was designed to foster and encourage, namely an enterprise, an academic enterprise which blends intellectual rigor and sophistication with real world and contemporary impact and relevance. Now, my primary role here is to introduce Esra, but I'm forgetting my duties very slightly. I should also, before I finally invite Esra to come here and deliver the talk you want to hear, I should introduce our distinguished guests. First of all, our colleague Professor Sarah Colvin, Professor Schroeder, Professor of Journal, I beg for pardon, in the modern medieval languages and linguistics faculty. Doctor Michael Banner, the Dean of Trinity, and of course a leading expert in ethics and the application of practicality of ethics. And finally, from Birkbeck in London, Professor David Feldman, the director of the Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck. All that said, the moment has come for me to introduce formally our new Sultan, Abus, Professor of Abrahamic faiths and shared values, Esra Ozil. Thank you so much for this wonderful introduction, and thank you everyone for being here instead of enjoying the sunshine sitting by the river. So I hope, you know, I'll prove that it is a good experience for you. Yes, as Rex was saying, the gist of my research is working on people who do unexpected things, establish unexpected alliances, and also people who choose to become something else. So in this one, you know, it is more about unexpected alliances, and also how do we become who we are, how do we hold the beliefs that, sorry, how do we hold the beliefs that we believe in, how do they come to us, and when do they become legitimate, or in what conditions people challenge us saying that they are not legitimate, that it doesn't fall on our shoulders to fight for them, to defend them. Today, I will talk about my book, Subcontractors of Guilts. It just, I don't know, a month ago exactly came out from Stanford University Press. I decided to give a short talk about the book and then ask my colleagues about what they thought about it and how it reflects looking from different perspectives. So, and again, as Rex was saying, this is both an easy topic to write about because people relate to it, but it's also very difficult to write about because everyone has a strong opinion about it, as Daniel was telling me, that everyone has opinions about it much before I start my talk. So try to stay with me, listen to it. It may be a bit different from what you have taught until now. At the end, of course, you can decide that how you have been thinking was the way and mine is wrong, but anyway. So post-war German national identity is based on atoning for the high crimes of the Holocaust and learning the ethical lessons of empathy, tolerance, and democracy. Both German civil society and the state heavily invested in establishing a shared cultural memory that would unify the values that define German society. We, of course, know that not all Germans live by it, but it is a norm, it's an ideal many people strive for it. Despite its commitment to anti-nationalism and anti-racism, German memory culture failed to include members of society who are not ethnically German. Or one can argue even the exclusion of racialized groups from the foundational narrative of post-war German society was not a failure, but rather a calculated effort. That is, founders and defenders of German memory culture believing that only an ethnically homogeneous German identity could ensure German responsibility for the Holocaust. It is also more they thought it falls on our shoulders and no one else's. It is rightly a resistance to say it is a mistake that belongs to everyone. It belongs only to us. But then the paradox of it is that people who are not ethnically German fell outside of that memory culture which defines what modern Germany is. So they regard the racialized groups such as the Muslim background Germans who helped to build post-war Germany as both external and irrelevant to the post-war public German narrative of democratization. As a result, Muslim background Germans could not be included in the post-war German social contract. Right? Because it's only for the Holocaust what makes you German then how are you going to be German if you cannot do that? So through which a new and free West German society was allowed by the Allies to emerge on condition of having learned the correct lessons from the Holocaust. This long-lasting perceived irrelevance of non-ethnic Germans to Holocaust memory underwent a radical and unexpected change beginning in the 2000s. Since then, Turkish and Arab background Germans have been central to the public narrative but only as the prime obstacles to German national reconciliation with its Nazi past and its embrace of democracy now and into the future. Today Middle Eastern Muslim background Germans are routinely accused of being unable to relate to Holocaust history incapable of establishing empathy with its Jewish victims and of importing new forms of antisemitism to a country that is assumed to have more or less dealt with its own antisemitism. In a country where 90% of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing white Germans we know it because police keeps a careful record of antisemitic crimes fingers continue to be pointed at the Muslim minority for being the major carriers of antisemitism. So how do we explain that? The federal and local governments as well as NGOs began to organize an assortment of Holocaust education and antisemitism prevention programmes designed specifically for Muslim background immigrants and refugees. In my book I explore when, how and why Middle Eastern Muslim background Germans moved from the periphery to the centre of Holocaust memory discussions in Germany as potential perpetrators of antisemitic crimes. I also make suggestions about what this development means for Holocaust commemoration on the one hand and for the place of immigrants in Germany and in an enlarged Europe on the other. By focusing on the recently formed but already the sizeable sector of Muslim only antisemitism and Holocaust education programmes I investigate paradoxes of post-war German national identity through the prism of Middle Eastern Muslim background Germans. Ostensibly these programmes aim to ensure that Muslim Germans also finally learn these lessons from the Holocaust and thereby embrace Germany's most important post-war political values. You can say oh great now they found you know found how it should be now they're including them into the story. However providing remedial programmes for a population who passes through the national curriculum like all others however posits them as less able to learn the lessons of the Holocaust. That is why they need extra education. In effect by doing so these programmes erase more than 60 year long history of millions of post-war migrants who reconstructed Germany after the war it is not that they were not there they were there all along. The logic behind the programmes also depicts white Christian German background Germans as having reached their destination of redemption and re-democratisation or at least having come far enough in terms of dealing with the Holocaust to qualify themselves as judges and educators of others. A unique focus on Muslim in antisemitism prevention thus offloads the general German social problem of antisemitism onto the Middle Eastern background minority and further stigmatises them as the most unrepentant antisemites who need additional education and disciplining. In the last few years these points have been made with some other scholars and public intellectuals who observed developments in Germany. I used to feel very alone but now it is like a number of people who make similar arguments. What is most unique about my study is that I focus on Middle Eastern Muslim background responses to this unprecedented call to shoulder the responsibility of the German past from which they have thus far been excluded despite their full participation in building the society. So over a decade I followed minority groups and individuals who eagerly took this weight onto their shoulders with a variety of motivations and expectations. In the German language the word guilt should also means debt. A personal or national liability that can be handed down from generation to generation but also can be widely distributed or even cancelled. What are the consequences of distributing the foundational German guilt and the inherited debt of the Holocaust to people who mostly arrived after the crime was committed? What is the nature of this contractual relationship between the parties who exchange guilt and debt? What can non-German background minorities who arrived after the war gain or lose if there is a new German social contract and that of white Christian background German majority in whose name the crime was committed but before they were born? So in a sense what is the difference between an immigrant who came after the war and a German who is born after the war? Is there a difference? Can just anyone, irrespective of their relationship to Germany or the German nation, take this guilt or pay of this debt? What happens to the guilt or debt itself once it is spread around or subcontracted? As you can imagine I don't have perfect answers for all of them but I'm trying to understand how these questions shape the lives of minorities and in the way they position themselves to this major question. So in the book I seek answers to these questions in the context of Germany. It is important to note that even my focus is Germany, my intellectual quest is universal. By looking at a case where the subsequent governments and citizens took the crimes to a religious ethnic minority done in the name of a nation seriously, I'm trying to understand what can possibly go wrong even when so much effort is put into doing memory work right. What happens when work to undo consequences of racism further marginalizes some groups in society? And can the lessons learned from the history be still nevertheless powerful to include them back again? In short, do the experience of learning from the Holocaust have the potential to create a new and more inclusive Germany? I have already told how Middle Eastern Muslim background Germans who were left outside the Holocaust narrative found themselves at the center of it in 2000s. So how did this happen? This development was facilitated by a number of internal and external developments. That by the beginning of the 21st century transformed both Germany and also the world as we know it. So these include the unifications of two Germanies and the enlargement of Europe, the start of the second in the Fada, which brought mass protests against the Israeli government to the streets of Europe and Germany, the 9.11.77 attacks in New York and London by Muslim terrorists, the rise of Islamophobia and the rapid shift across the western world and beyond toward the right end of the political spectrum and the consolidation of right-wing politics in Israel which heavily shaped the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You yourselves may think about additional factors and I would be curious to hear them. So these internal and external developments that came together facilitated the initial entry of Muslim background immigrants into public discussions about German Holocaust memory practices through what I call an export-import theory of anti-Semitism. That is, I'm arguing how the German political actors in this field think. The theory suggests that German-originated anti-Semitism was initially exported to the Middle East. So the idea is that it is a German invention, but it was exported to the Middle East via German missionaries in the 19th century and then by Nazis during the early 20th century. So there is a long discussion anyway, you know, is it so where there are other local anti-Semitism, what not, you know, that I leave it to historians. But this idea goes, this ideology during the post-war period was then carried back Muslim background immigrants into a Germany that had already overcome its anti-Semitism problem. So never mind the fact that these immigrants have been in Germany since 1960s. So in a way they were like keeping it dormant, but then they bring it in 2000s. Having worked hard to confront and overcome their anti-Semitism, this theory posits, the defeated Germans were now confronted with the anti-Semitism they had once exported, now brought it back into their midst by Middle Eastern immigrants. The theory in a sense depicts Muslims as carriers of Germany's past problems into the present, you know, so it kind of equates different kinds of anti-Semitism. It essentializes a Middle Eastern or Muslim anti-Semitism versus German anti-Semitism. Anyway, so many and then combines them. Yeah, it is a very complicated and to me fascinating, you know, things coming together, separating. So a second rendering of Muslim background, my immigrants in Holocaust memory discourse suggests that because their anti-Semitism was important, immigrants were incapable of empathizing with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and of learning the necessary lessons from German history. Until they atoned for their anti-Semitism, the theory went, they would remain locked in Germany's shameful past. Despite public unease around their engagement with the Holocaust, research has revealed the keen participation of Turkish and other Muslim background Germans in Holocaust memory discourse, but in a way that deviates from national expectations. Instead of performances that symbolically transform German guilt and shame into responsibility and engagement, Turkish German artists and activists until recently routinely identified with the Jewish victims. Turkish German authors, you know, such as Emine Sefgi Özdemar and Feridun Zaeimolu, immigrant association leaders and ordinary Turkish background Germans have drawn parallels between themselves and Jews under national socialism. And this has been accepted until 2000s. This was kind of a discourse that it would be done. You know, oh, they are treated like Jews used to be, you know, like, of course it wasn't right, but I'm just saying in public discourse, it was okay to say such things. But now it is not. So in the 1990s, Turkish German author, Zafer Sönucak provocatively asked, doesn't immigrating to Germany also mean immigrating to entering into the arena of Germany's recent past? He wrote novels that brought together victims and perpetrators of the Jewish Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. The main character of his novel, Pyrilius Kinship, is the son of a Turkish general who perpetrated the Armenian genocide and has a German Jewish mother who found refuge in Turkey. It took another decade for these ideas to move from the field of art and literature to political educational projects. However, this migrant travel to the German past did not bring migrant Jewish and German backgrounds together, as Sönucak imagined in his novels. Few historians even showed that Turks and Arabs were already the part of the Holocaust narrative. Some as Jewish victims, some as enablers of the Nazi regime, and that overall there were varied reactions towards the Nazis in the Muslim world. Despite the complicated nature of the Holocaust history, Middle Eastern background immigrants entered Holocaust history narrative without mixing with German nationals and found themselves the recipients of parallel stories of implication in relation to the Holocaust. That is actually what surprised me to most, that is how I entered the field when I saw advertisements for Holocaust education for Muslims. I thought, how would that work? Isn't it like one narrative? How can we make different Holocaust education programmes? Do we have one for Poles? Do we have one for Vietnamese? That was the puzzle that I entered. 15 years later, I don't know, I'm out of it still trying to understand. So Muslim on the Holocaust education and prevention and antisemitism prevention projects that I have observed teach Turkish and Arab youth about Arabs and Turks who collaborated with or inspired Nazis in their heinous crimes, or who in rare cases saved Jews in the same way other righteous Germans or white Europeans did. This model incorporates Muslim background Germans into Holocaust memory discourse as a parallel society of perpetrators. Those of you who follow discussions in Germany know this like parallel society is a big discourse or used to be. So as a parallel society of perpetrators, bystanders and rescuers. Paradoxically, this narrative serves to first include non-German background nationals in the German community of faith, Schicksalge mineshaft, by emphasising they too have a share in Holocaust history, but then immediately excludes them. Given that their share is one tainted by its own particular guilt and its own particular community of faith outside of Germany. So they cannot really be Germans, but then they need to follow a path that is drawn for them. And because Arabs and Turks have yet to atone for their contribution to the Holocaust, this narrative paints Arab background and to some extent Turkish background nationals as morally inferior to repentant white Germans. A number of Muslim background Germans are nevertheless willing to enter into this subcontractual relationship by taking over the guilt, which they regard as a better option than not entering into it and which leaves open the possibility of changing the terms of the contract. They talk about Mohammed Amin al Husayni, the notorious mufti of Jerusalem, who collaborated with the Nazis and then worked in the pay of the Third Reich. They discuss the rampant antisemitism in Turkey and Iran, or the antisemitic propaganda distributed by Hamas. Locating antisemitic forbears in their own genealogy gives them an unexpected opportunity to include themselves in the German narrative and moral order. As they publicly, and I argue sincerely, perform guilt and responsibility, the Muslim minority demand to be properly accepted members of German society. They also use the rare public attention according to them when they talk about antisemitism to also shed light on other forms of racism rampant in German society. By displaying their empathy for Jewish victims of the Holocaust, Middle Eastern Muslim background Germans aim to cultivate empathy for their own racialisation, because there is no other context in which they can bring up their own racialisation. I suggest, however, they do yet another more important emotional work. They also show empathy for contemporary white Germans who live with the shame of a crime they did not commit, and by doing so hope to be considered as a true German. Throughout this book I demonstrate that the empathy which these Holocaust education programmes for Middle Eastern Muslim background Germans attempt to inculcate assumes a certain subject position as a given, namely that of a past now repentant perpetrator who embraces the qualities of a rescuer. Holocaust education was first developed to be delivered to defeated Germans whom the victorious allies suspected were not taking responsibility for their atrocities. Maybe you have heard, they had posters in places in Germany saying you are guilty. Today, Holocaust education throughout Europe is designed first and foremost for people who are descendants of perpetrators, collaborators or bystanders, not rescuers, outsiders or victims. Also I have just read a book that human rights education is also like that. It assumes a certain subject position and tries to change you emotionally. So the programmes help people who stand in ethnic German perpetrator or bystanders shoes to step into a different pair, the shoes of their forefathers Jewish victims, by shifting their subject position from a potential perpetrator bystander to a potential rescuer. Feel like how it would be like to be this victim, through that you will be transformed. In this sense in today's Germany the concept of empathy has come to denote the highly valued and sociopolitically desirable characteristic of ethnic Germans who are momentarily able to imagine what it might have been like to have been victimised by their grandparents at this point. When they step back into their own contemporary shoes it is hoped they will have developed a new perspective, new characteristics. But what about other subject positions and shoes Germans might step out of and back into? What happens when the hoped for empathiser are not ethnically German grandchildren of ethnically German perpetrators bystanders or rescuers? What happens during Holocaust education when non-German empathisers are not thinking from within past German positionalities but from within present non-German ones? What if going to a camp reminds them their own difference? So how can we develop a nuanced understanding of empathy and relating to Jewish victims that can account for the many and varied experiences and structurally fixed positions and positions empathisers undergo as they confront Holocaust memory? Holocaust education programmes designed especially for and often by Muslims, I suggest, open up space for immigrants to enter into the Holocaust memory discourse. Participants, sorry, I talked a bit about these. So because they bring in different experiences, different empathetic engagements, I argue these immigrant or non-ethnic German engagements with the Holocaust actually open up new possibilities for us. Holocaust at a period when all the perpetrators have died, this is still a crime for all of us to remember and the ways of remembering and engaging with it will change. Immigrant engagements with it open new spaces for it. So rather than routinely accusing these new participants into the Holocaust memory discourse as doing it in a wrong way, we need to think about how they open up new places. So the big question I ask following the observations I made for an inclusive Holocaust education and memory is the following. Is there a way to appreciate different kinds yet still empathic emotional connections learners of the Holocaust establish with these Jewish victims even when they look different from the traditional national script? What does a Holocaust education or memory gain from marking such connections as morally wrong out of principle? It is inevitable that the emotional connections Muslim minority in Germany established with the Jewish victims will be different from those established by ethnic Germans. So I propose that public Holocaust memory discourse in Germany as well as the emotional basis of German Holocaust memory and the redemptive path toward democracy needs to expand to allow for the many and different identifications of its citizens and permanent residents. Hansai suggests racialized groups in Germany hold the key for a more inclusive public Holocaust memory discourse that can be organically carried to new Germans who are new because they are young or new because they recently arrived. Thank you Ezra, that's just sort of added to my admiration for the work. I was really struck by a question you asked which was does the experience of learning from the Holocaust have the potential to create a new and more inclusive Germany? And I was particularly struck because my spontaneous answer after 20 years as a professor of German was no, of course not. Which is, you know, how curious, how paradoxical is that? And what you've done I think which is what some of you know the best scholarship does particularly in the humanities is to put your finger, you can't put your finger on an elephant in the room, that's an absorbance. You have named the elephant in the room. That's such an important question, you know, why is it that my response to that is to think well no learning from the Holocaust doesn't give us a new and more inclusive Germany? So I think this is a very quietly written book and I think it's a very explosive book and I hope it will be read by lots of people and cause lots of trouble. My partner is an artist and he always congratulates me when my academic work as he puts it, this is something that's going to piss everyone off. Because in his mind you know pissing everyone off is one of the most valuable things you can do because you're not telling a line. You're actually negotiating things that are really difficult and I was kind of excited and a bit stunned as I was reading because of the difficulty that you're negotiating in the book. I first actually came across it when Ezra gave a very fascinating paper to our departmental research seminar which explored Muslim background Germans responses to sites like Auschwitz and then white Christian background Germans response to that response. And the Muslim visitors felt actually an empathic connection, a strong empathic connection with the Holocaust victims because it made them fear for their own future in Germany. Was this something like this going to happen to them? And the white German group leaders and the facilitators of the visits read that as a wrong response because Muslim Germans were supposed to identify as perpetrators or co-perpetrators of religious and racialized hatred and not as its victims. So that was a fascinating introduction to the work. And reading the book now as a professor of German and as a white Christian background woman, my immediate response was how very important it is to complicate the view on contemporary Germany in this way. I'm always very cautious about dissing the Germans. The bad German where bad means Nazi is a tedious popular trope in Western culture. It's not a very interesting thing to do. But actually, particularly since 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's become fashionable to admire the Germans and there is some kind of almost equally facile works of admiration out there. Citizens of the Federal Republic are generally imagined and generally imagined themselves as white and as coming from families that lived in Germany during the Hitler regime. Those two things together seem to make us, as I was saying, a citizen of Germany or a belonger, although there are lots of other people, of course, who are citizens formally. They accepted their post-war guilt and they accepted a particular duty to address the Nazi past. But actually, more latterly, many Germans have embraced a newer identity as residents of a model nation. There's a strong cultural feel of that and as you've put it Ezra, they've moved from collective guilt to collective pride having come to terms with the past better than any other nation. That's a citation. In fact, I think Germany probably has done a better job of addressing a violently racist past than, for example, the UK. But the black British German writer Sharon Dodd or Otto has pointed to the problem of circumscribing racism as something that belongs to a bad past because that affects people's openness to accepting responsibility for racism in the present. So the perception, as my US colleague Professor Leroy Hopkins says, is that there's now no racism in Germany. All of that unpleasantness disappeared with denazification. Now standing in a country that recently produced a government report obscuring the existence of racism in the UK, I've no wish to point the finger at Germany for ignoring contemporary racism. For Ezra, your book traces things that are historically and culturally specific to Germany, namely, well, and at the same time, I think that it does something that goes beyond Germany. And we have to hold on to, you say it has a broader European context, I think it might even have a broader global context. It explores in detail something that German historians, very distinguished German historians like Mary Fullbrook have recognised. And then you'd that the construction of German national identity via Holocaust guilt excludes some of Germany's citizens from being recognised as German. You can be a citizen without being seen as fully German. But you also go beyond that and I think quite brilliantly you expose another obvious but often ignored problem about stigma, which is politically very important. Now children's games, anyone who watches kids play, they show us how stigma has to be passed on. You know, I run, I tag you, now you've got the stink and you're not going to get rid of the stink until you've passed it on to someone else, it will stay with you. And your book shows in evidences how stigma has to be passed on and how that is inevitably now happening again. Now Muslim men in Germany are being, as you put it, set in opposition to the historically distinct German democracy that was achieved by negating Nazism. And in a country where 90% of anti-Semitic crimes, and this is a statistic I'm stealing from you, 90% of anti-Semitic crimes are committed by white Germans, anti-Semitism education programmes are being aimed at Muslim background immigrants. And your book shows and you spoke about in your lecture how some Muslim background Germans are willing to accept the stigma and take the guilt and responsibility of the Holocaust on their shoulders. And how they're socially rewarded in the form of project funding, awards and expanded social networks. And actually I find this the saddest part of the book, I felt genuinely sad as I read this, I'm going to quote, none of this makes them full and equal members of German society. After bigger applause and an award ceremony, they'll be stopped in traffic by the police. They'll not be let into clubs, they will have a harder time getting jobs and renting apartments. They'll also still be routinely accused of being anti-Semitic and sexist. So they'll still be asked where they're really from. For me to wind up, this book is actually a perfect example of humanities scholarship. I'm very committed to humanities scholarship. One of the great strengths of humanities scholarship is that it addresses the messiness and the complexity of human affairs. It's almost always the case about any human matter that more than one thing is true at the same time. Contemporary German democracy is both good and problematic. The will of some Muslim background Germans to accept education programmes in order to be perceived as more German is both good and problematic. And acknowledging complexity in these matters is more important than I have time to say just now. I also think that this is a work of global humanities scholarship and Ezra Co Directs, our institute. It brings new perspectives in the way that global humanities scholarship can to the table of old knowledge. And thereby, as you said, it opens up new possibilities. What does the perspective of Muslim background and immigrant background Germans reveal that would otherwise have been invisible? That would otherwise not be part of collective knowledge? That's really important. Global and complex knowledge is out there. And it needs to be accessed so that more of us have a better understanding of what's really going on in the world. And it couldn't be more important. Thank you so much. I'm hugely pleased to take part in this inaugural event today. Over a number of years Ezra has been a generous colleague and interlocutor. Subcontractors of guilt is at once a deeply researched and reflective book and incisive and persuasive in ways that we've heard. It excavates and elucidates the politics, performance and reverberations of Holocaust memory in a German present, which is ethnically diverse and in which Germans with Arab and Turkish backgrounds are enjoined to take up the burden of Holocaust memorialisation. This is a German story and one of Muslim minorities in Germany, but at the same time Ezra's work raises large questions about the history, content and function of Holocaust memory elsewhere. One curious development of the last 25 years has been the efflorescence of Holocaust memorial practices across Europe. In the early 1980s when the Board of Deputies of British Jews went to Margaret Thatcher's government and said, we'd like to have a Holocaust memorial, a Lord Carrington said, no, not really. It'll annoy our allies in the Federal Republic of Germany. So we've come a long way, something that we take for granted almost or not be taken for granted. And in this regard, the United Kingdom is not an exception in this country as in Germany, but also differently from Germany. Holocaust memorialisation has developed in a context marked by the legacy of immigration and by the contested practices of multicultural. In the 21st century, the Holocaust has become central to the ways in which British people are encouraged to think about the past. Holocaust Memorial Day is observed all over the country in communities, in schools and universities. The Holocaust is the only compulsory subject in the national curriculum for history teaching in schools. The British government funds visits to Poland to enable children to learn lessons from Auschwitz. The Conservative Labour and Liberal Democrat political parties are all committed to building a Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre next to the House of Parliament. When Holocaust Memorial Day was introduced in the United Kingdom in 2001 by the Labour government, an information pack was sent to all schools in the country. The aim of the day, the pack explained, was not only to, quote, raise awareness and understanding of the Holocaust, but also to, I quote, highlight the values of a tolerant and diverse society and the responsibility of all citizens. Similarly, announcing the day Tony Blair stated, it would be a defence against those who would destroy a just, tolerant and multiracial Britain. Esra has explicated one conjunction between Holocaust memory and the legacy of migration and cultural diversity. Here in the UK, there has been another. At the heart of this memorial project was an absence which has continued to shape Holocaust memorialisation in this country ever since. This absence concerns acknowledgement and understanding of the role of the state in the Holocaust. The message of Holocaust Memorial Day in schools did not dwell on the dangers and responsibilities of political power. Instead, there was a focus on the need for tolerance and good citizenship. Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, explained, the lessons to be learned are for all of us. And no doubt this is correct. But in view of the character of the final solution as a state project carried out in circumstances of total war, the focus on the citizenry and not on the state is remarkable. And this depoliticised reading of the Holocaust has consequences. One of these is to produce consensus, but at the same time to sever ways of connecting the history of the Holocaust to state practices in the present. It does not promote reflexivity among political actors. The Holocaust and its memory has become a point of consensus in the United Kingdom, notwithstanding the culture wars which repeatedly erupt in public debates. The issues at stake in public debates over the legacies of enslavement, for example, deal with history and memory, racism and identity. These are the very same issues which Holocaust remembrance brings into focus. Yet unlike the case of Holocaust remembrance in which the government is funding a memorial and education centre to the tune of £75 million, in the case of enslavement and the slave trade, there is no consensus and the government has dragged its feet, refusing to give even a small amount of money to support a memorial in Hyde Park to the victims of the slave trade. The Holocaust is, in a way, an easier subject in this country, of course, because Britain was not directly implicated in it. A series of atrocities perpetrated by the nations enemies in wartime are an easier set of atrocities to remember. But it's also important that the Holocaust and anti-Semitism more broadly has been depoliticised. They are imagined as stemming only from popular prejudices. Colonialism and enslavement, by contrast, necessarily implicate the British state, as does the systematic disadvantage suffered by people of colour in the United Kingdom today. And this is perhaps why the Holocaust and anti-Semitism are the forms of racism which British governments have consistently preferred to address from new labour down to the present. A different way of making this point is to say that resources were earmarked for the government's Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre at the very same time as the Home Office presided over the Windrush scandal, which saw thousands of law-abiding black Britons from the Caribbean classified as illegal immigrants. An unknown number were denied access to paid work and housing and scores were deported. The Windrush scandal underlines the continuing significance of the state as an agent of racism, something which Holocaust memorialisation has the potential to highlight but which its current practice serves to obscure in this country. Ezra's latest book, Subcontractors of Guilt, demonstrates how Holocaust memory in Germany becomes a vector for the racialisation of Muslim Germans and for renewed injustice. Even at the same moment as it commemorates the racialisation and injustice that took place under Nazi rule. The United Kingdom played a memorable part in the struggle against the Third Reich, but here too Holocaust memory has become entangled in the politics of racial injustice. I'm conscious of standing in a very perilous position, which is namely between you and a drink at the end. I don't know whether Ezra is going to reply, but both of us may do that. In her book from 2019, Learning from the Germans, Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil, Susan Naaman compares the work of Germany, remembering the Nazi past, with by comparison the amount of work in Germany and remembering the Nazi past, with by comparison the lack of work which Americans have done in remembering their racial crimes. Naaman's, I think, is an important book, drawing on her lived experience, both in the USA and in living in Germany. But Naaman is, first of all, a political philosopher and commentator, and she writes as an observer, albeit an acute observer, but as an observer, a general observer of the general scene. So we might well expect that a first rate and enterprising anthropologist, Professor Ezra Ozurek, would trouble and render far more subtle that simple contrast between good Germans, bad Americans when it comes to memory war. And trouble it, she certainly does as we've been hearing, at least looking at the good German side of the contrast. Thus, and I could, of course, multiply examples and I'm picking up themes that others have looked at in this splendid book. In Chapter 2, Ezra shows how, what she's already introduced as the export-import theory of antisemitism, manages to burnish Germany's images of post-antisemitic, tolerant and non-racist society by casting antisemitism quite falsely as a problem most dangerously arriving amongst Muslim communities. In the second place in that same chapter, she shows how this invention of an especially dangerous Muslim antisemitism allows Germany to commit again and falsely to anti-antisemitic programmes thereby renewing and reinforcing its self-professed and self-congratulatory modern identity as radically tolerant and pluralistic. Even while, in the third place, she also shows how the invention of German Muslim antisemitism in fact plays off the very racist tropes which Germany has supposedly repudiated. This is in a theatre of the absurd in this book, which renders it in spite of the sadness at moments funny, but that's not quite the right word, but tragicomic, I perhaps should say. Later chapters show how, in a bid to address this confected problem of Muslim antisemitism, young Germans are required to relate to the Holocaust according to the script Ezra has outlined, which is standard and current for good Germans post-war. That is, they are required to identify with the perpetrators and to take on the guilt or shame of the nation with the twist however that however well they perform this script they never really qualify as good Germans but will remain outsiders. So, in place of Naaman's good German memory work, bad American memory work, Ezra teaches us with the sharpest of eyes that the co-opting of Muslims to Germany's memory work gives to Germany's current reckoning with its past a frankly sinister flavour. So, I think I was asked, at least I think I was asked to relate Ezra's research to man and I've just finished writing a little book for Oxford University Press, the proposed title of which, it's not quite one of those long 18th century titles that runs down the whole page but it's near enough to give you a flavour and it picks up what our previous speakers have been talking about. The title of the book is Reparations Now, Slavery, Colonialism and Britain's Debt to the Caribbean. Now, I'm not an anthropologist and I don't possess the observational and interpretive skills which make Ezra's study so compelling. But from my own perspective and angle I am interested in the moral worlds we construct and I simply want to contrast the particular moral world which Ezra depicts with an aspect of the moral world we meaning Britain. Moral world Britain has constructed around the practice of enslavement, picking up very much what has just been said. Ezra depicts the imposition on German Muslims of the very least strained or simply false guilt. So they're required to accept this strained or even false guilt. The achievement of British memory work around transatlantic slavery and the subsequent colonial period has been the construction not of a strained or false guilt but of a false innocence or even more absurdly a false sense of national pride. Eric Williams, who many of you will know, wrote an early and iconoclastic challenge to Britain's standard self-congratulatory version of its history. He said that British historians wrote, almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it. This rai comment however, in the manner of rai comments, rather pulls its punches. What needs to be said is something harsher. I will say it in an outline form since no one would thank me for reprising a longer argument. So here's the outline statement. The British celebration of abolition not only overlooks 200 years of British preeminence in the crime of transatlantic slavery but more fundamentally still overlooks the fact that for the enslaved the legal act of emancipation was a moment of profound continuity and not of discontinuity. That is to say that not by accident but by design, not by accident, I've said again, not by accident but by design slavery's racially constructed system of exploitation continued for more than 100 years across the Caribbean even after slavery's supposed abolition. What we celebrate was not only preceded by grace and flagrant injustice and unfreedom but it was followed by grace and flagrant injustice and unfreedom and not by chance. In the moral world, Ezra depicts, there is too much guilt and it is wrongly located. In the moral world of contemporary Britain there is not enough. For all that racism is an incoherent creed, it propagates or insinuates itself and its creed cunningly. Ezra's new book powerfully reveals how racism works its way even in the shadow of ashtwits and her study is all the more powerful and compelling for being so softly spoken. This is engaged anthropology, I don't know if anyone talks about engaged anthropology anymore, they used to, but this is engaged anthropology if anyone uses that term at its best and I think we should count ourselves very fortunate indeed in having Ezra's critical and constructive voice in our midst in this university and in this country challenging us in this latest work to appraise with fresh and open eyes the distinct challenges of doing good memory work. Can I feel completely spoiled, I really appreciate, I don't think it's common that in inaugural lectures the speaker is shredded into pieces, I think it is to celebrate them, but I really really appreciate I think nothing in the world matches the pleasure of feeling understood after spending like a decade on a book and then people have read it and understood it and then they relate it to other things so I really really appreciate that. And our fantastic program manager Dr Ayonah Hines wanted me to, in the conclusion or my response to connect to the work of Cambridge Interfaith program so if I can just say how personally the program moves me and intellectually is that the violence that groups have committed against each other the memory of it or the existing hatred can be religiously and culturally framed and can have religious and cultural elements but usually there is a very strong political element in pitting people against each other, stroking all the existing differences and then the way in which these hatreds and violence is remembered is also political and what moves me is of course the solidarities that are able to be established, that the people that in my work is the impossibility of Jews and Muslims coming together of course not at all, there are amazing solidarities that bring them together despite all the discourses that pit them against each other so that is my motivation and then in however way you bring them so that they talk about things that are important to them and that is in itself of course valuable but in another day when there is hatred, there is violence, some people are trying to create these atmospheres and these individual connections that they have established become really really important since again our focus here is the Holocaust when people looked at which members of German Jewish society for example or other Europeans have managed to survive are the ones who had most connections with other people so saying as the director of the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, meet other people, get close to them, get to know them as well as you can, befriend them so these political problems cannot be turned into personal qualities which is often done and this happened because these people didn't have tolerance or they didn't have the right intentions it is not so but personal connections and organized solidarities can help us, yeah, political projects that pit us against each other Thank you Ysgrifennidog has very kindly agreed to respond to questions from the audience despite Dr Banner's offer of imminent refreshments I have to warn you that there may just be a little delay until we doog upstairs of course at that point you are all invited to join us in the lobby upstairs for those refreshments so if my eyes will permit me I'll cast them over the audience and see where the first questions might be coming from so I'm straining a bit to see the back and we have a first question here, thank you Ysra, so I really enjoyed your talk, I know some of your work and I think you're also going to play your way into those responses I was just wondering about contemporary Jewish voices in the context that you're describing you talk about Christian Germans and Muslim background Germans I'm just wondering where the kind of contemporary Jewish voices sits, resonates in relation to the kind of complexities that you're talking about Okay, thank you, that really is an important question, I really appreciate that you asked it When I first went to Germany in 2006 and kind of started this research and now are quite different in terms of Jewish presence since then, when I started doing my research maybe there was 100,000 Jews and mostly from Russia and socialist countries and now there is a sizable number of Israeli Jews which are there because they're not happy with the right-wing government so they have brought in really different voice and they have been establishing lots of alliances with Muslims, doing art projects, things like that so there is a very different exciting thing happening mostly in big cities but aside from that, if I can rely on my colleagues who have done research on this topic let's say Irit Dekal's work and there is others they show us that the Jewish voice or the Jewish presence is ghostly in Germany that it is always relating to that dead Jew in a way so that that Jew cannot speak for himself or for herself so Germans are speaking to that and then these left-wing Israeli Jews who now live in Germany get really frustrated because they get banned from participating events they are called anti-Semitic because they are criticizing the Israeli government so it is like an image of a Jew that is not 100% fitting to living Jews the right is also a fantasy of a German so it is also so much about the past to shape the present but then it doesn't fit the present realities of Germany so it is also an effort to show the present realities are different but do you really need my help? No, no, no Thank you so much for the book, thank you so much for the lecture I have two sort of semi-related things When I read guilt or subcontractors of guilt that made me think that guilt had a persona and was like a living organism at work in this system and I wondered whether that was just me thinking way off field but the other thing where you said that guilt and debt were closely interrelated I wondered if it has gone or needs to go further than that to repentance which is like a resolution of non-repetition I would throw that in really Yes, yes, definitely so this connection between guilt and debt is how they are connected in the German language itself it is not a connection that I make and then from there I speculate about how it might be being taught about and definitely repentance is and that repentance then leads to democracy so that is the German imagination or redemption, redemptive path towards democracy and then if you don't have anything to redempt, is that the verb then how do you become a democratic good German citizen so that is the question if your grandfather didn't commit a crime how are you going to go through that path is the question Thank you Please I think I'm struck by how the sort of memory work that is being done in Germany doesn't really address the sort of singular polarity of the state as the producer of a certain kind of ontology even in saying that Germany was the one to sort of export this anti-Semitism which comes back to Roost there's a denial that perhaps the world in which it was exported to was not structured in the same sort of sociological way as Germany for instance it assumes that the way that the Jew fit into society very much a European society one's religion was the foremost and primary indicator of how he belonged in a political system that Jews were ghettoized not only physically but societally as well and it doesn't sort of contend with the history that led up to the Holocaust to the way that the German state oversaw other sort of regimes of death particularly in its colonies and it strikes me that this isn't really multi-directional memory work at all it's very much singular direction memory work so I'm curious whether in the context of the German state today true memory work that takes the framework or the understanding of the Holocaust and allows for a non-competitive memory work to happen is seen as a threat to the state and how the state responds to these sort of multi-directional projects whether they are artistic, political or academic Yes, definitely exactly so you're quite familiar with what is happening in Germany I get the sense so obviously I'm not the only person in the world who is thinking about these things clearly I'm observing what is happening in Germany and there are lots of political actors who argue that we need to think about different forms of violence together for example can we think about the Holocaust and colonialism together so that created a lot of sentiments in Germany things are discussed in newspapers much more than we do it here it was like much ink spilled over it and also lots of people have lost their positions also but at the same time there are lots of people who are strongly making these arguments that say different kinds of racialization different kinds of violence are connected to each other and we cannot understand them and that they are not competing with each other definitely that is the aim I would say Daniel Thank you again for your talk I'm wondering in terms of some of the forms of religious identity so you've talked about Muslim background and ethnic German to what degree do you see the dynamics you describe as do they inscribe people whose grandparents were perpetrators in Christian terms or does Christianity come into it at all or is it just Germans and Germans and Muslims one party has an ethnic title the other party has a religious sounding title or does Christianity come into it? Thank you, that's an excellent question and I think someone else needs to make that research and I do have someone who worked with me at the London School of Economics is doing this research and has been eye-opening for me so how things actually are quite Christian in Germany marked as just nothing culture or not even culture it just gets erased for example through this Jacob Lippes' name it came to my realization that almost all major organizations who do social work are either Catholic and Protestant and they actually look for people who are either Catholic or Protestant to do that work but somehow it becomes like oh it is just social work oh it is very Christian or lots of other things even like having Christmas celebrations singing Christmas carols during Christmas time oh it is just being a way of German but then when you are a Muslim you cannot say oh I am putting on a headscarf because isn't it beautiful in the way that the Christmas tree is beautiful so that is also interesting how Christianity gets erased and Islam becomes like everything becomes Muslim even just the ordinary things so I think that also is something political too Yes Can I ask you another question? From the Axis and from the Allies coming back to Germany including Greeks were there a different approach to Bulgarians to Italians who went back to the Germans to Greeks but then one applied to Turks This is I mean maybe you will know better than me but from my readings I understand that for example in 1960s or so there was also a concern with other killing, sexism, things like that but then they were guest workers and then they came from the Mediterranean world and they do have same sexism related problems like Spain, Greece, Turkey then it was approached as such and then they became taught about as countries Turkey and then after that they became Muslims so somehow the Greeks, the Spanish the Croatians, what not they kind of dropped out of this suspect group thing but I really don't know maybe you will know better than what happened to Greeks are they just like cute people now or is there Right, right, that is true I am also curious what happened to for example there has been lots of Vietnamese immigrants into East Germany and now they are combined so I would always hear things like wow they are great, they are the good ones they know how to educate their children but these Muslims, they are bad so they are pitted up against each other but I never even hear anything about Greeks so I would have to ask someone I am just wondering whether perhaps the moment has come for us to join proceedings but we do have to type one or two more questions if there are any but I detect a certain anticipation on any occasion like this as it were besides the speaker herself and besides the distinguished guests I would like to thank Professor Corbyn Professor Feldman and Dr Banner for their contributions to this to thank them with some slight reservations because I realise my reading list has just got rather dawnsingly longer but thank you for that but it is also important to thank those who have organised the event I would like to draw to your attention Dr Ayanna Hine Dr Anastasia Bader and Dr Giles Walla of the Cambridge Interface Program and also the invaluable assistance of Dr Danny Redhead from the Faculty Office who have all pulled their weight in making the organisation of this day as smooth as it could possibly be but the chief thanks must go to our inaugural lecturer herself and I would like to invite you before you come upstairs with me and the rest of us to enjoy some refreshments in the lobby to show your appreciation for a wonderful event. Thank you.