The arrival of Syrian refugees in Germany during the early 2010s continues to be mainly discussed as an unprecedented and exceptional event that must not be repeated. While Syrian newcomers were initially greeted with an extraordinary welcome, this climate gradually shifted into an existential angst, whereby these refugees were perceived to be throwing Germany into an overwhelming socioeconomic crisis. As countless political talk shows tirelessly debated the ostensibly deficient and incompatible traits of a group that, conspicuously, quickly grew to include Muslim-identified people in general, Fatima El-Tayeb intervened with her monograph Undeutsch in 2016, debunking the myth of an unprecedented migration crisis and dissecting a phenomenon that appeared strangely familiar to her. Un/German, published in 2025, is not a belated translation or quasi-anniversary edition. It has not lost any of its urgency in an era where Chancellor Merz states that the problem of German cityscapes can be solved through increased deportations. Moreover, this edition comes with an update in the form of a new preface powerful enough to stand alone as a reading assignment for students and scholars alike. However, one would hope that this translation, which is impressively accessible to readers, would be read in its entirety, since the insights and stakes of this monograph are wide-ranging and relevant to various fields from political science to migration studies. El-Tayeb probes Germany as a paradigmatic case of how race is negotiated in contexts of migration “crises” in post-Cold War Europe, and the counterintuitive representativeness of her case is spelled out with clarity and astounding scope. Yet, it is the book’s national orientation that might fascinate readers even more, and which will be focused on in the following, as El-Tayeb’s study, in a way, explores a baffling question that I often asked myself: How does post-Holocaust Germany in the twenty-first century manage to understand the existence of non-white communities and racism in its midst as a new and foreign phenomenon?
El-Tayeb diagnoses Germany with selective amnesia in conjunction with repetition compulsion as an unacknowledged but longstanding pathological pattern where internal instability, time and again, is compensated by drawing the public’s attention to those deemed “Ungerman”: the figure of the seemingly recently arrived racial outsider who becomes a scapegoat for a complex of preexisting socioeconomic challenges and against whom a formally reunited but otherwise divided country in the post-Cold War era can reconcile as tacitly white. Un/German seeks to put an end to this near-collective amnesia. Each case study takes readers back to yet another cycle of racialized crisis—often by using the magazine Der Spiegel as a seismograph—and unpacks the respective “crisis” in two key ways. On the one hand, the condition of crisis is deconstructed in a quasi-psychoanalytic way to reveal how Germany once more externalizes inner conflicts through a racialized outsider. On the other hand, the racialized outsider of each cycle “talks back.” Every section introduces the voices of outsiders into debates from which they were conventionally excluded and which produced as well as anchored them as Ungerman in the national (un)conscious. What dominantly passes for political common sense in each “crisis” is thus richly complicated through Jewish, Roma, Sinti, Black, Brown, migrant and post-migrant, feminist, and queer perspectives. As El-Tayeb is keeping track of cyclical dynamics on numerous analytical planes, the argumentative path is not always straightforward. But whatever might first appear as an excursus inevitably and profoundly enhances our understanding of a specifically German racism.
As a point of departure, El-Tayeb powerfully dismantles the pernicious notion of a once ethnically homogenous German society by turning to the ur-scene of the cyclical pattern, wherein a war-torn region transforms into the Weimar Republic. At this juncture, El-Tayeb argues, national cohesion is generated by demonizing the predominantly male Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe as racialized strangers who are perceived to be fleeing poverty rather than persecution and are scandalized as an overwhelming financial burden, as a political endangerment of the Republic, and a threat to German women. As one of the most prominent instances where the dominant discourse is countered with a minoritized voice, El-Tayeb here includes the full open letter penned by Albert Einstein’s in 1919, wherein he speaks out against the criminalization of recent refugees as a smokescreen for general antisemitism that diverts attention away from preceding social, economic, and political post-war challenges. El-Tayeb thus effectively delineates a formative blueprint for the post-Cold War era, where a recently unified country deflects a range of anxieties onto vulnerable and racialized Others.
One of the monograph’s (many) crucial interventions targets the way Germany reconciles with its Nazi past in explicit and implicit, conscious and unconscious ways. It constitutes a fascinating throughline of the book and begins by critically engaging with the often-celebrated culture of remembrance. For El-Tayeb, the state’s politics of remembrance not only historically tend to consign Jewish life to Germany’s past and thereby indirectly project an ethnically homogenous present but are also shaped by the marginalization of Roma and Sinti communities. The state’s commitment to excluding the historical violence against these communities from memorialization in the early 1990s is reconstructed to have been propelled by a crisis discourse around recent Roma refugees from Eastern Europe that made these minorities overall appear as a new, foreign, and corrosive element in German society.
El-Tayeb then moves on to pinpoint the moral panic around multiculturalism in the 2000s as a crisis mode that prefigures Germany’s encounter with Syrian refugees a decade later. From a holistic perspective, the author identifies a range of legal, political, and cultural maneuvers that fixate the descendants of 1960s Turkish guest workers in twenty-first-century Germany as incompatibly Ungerman—amid a renewed hysterical assertion of German homogeneity, i.e. “Leitkultur.” Across astonishing micro and macro scales of political discourse, El-Tayeb identifies how religion in this controversy is used as an alibi for racialized German belonging, so that Islam is officially and repeatedly declared to be dangerously Ungerman and, by implication, so too are the people believed to practice said faith in a post-9/11 world.
The frequently attested failure of multiculturalism is revealed as the discursive ground for the 2010s “crisis” around Syrian refugees in the final and most impressive case study. For El-Tayeb, the pattern of crisis comes full circle to its original scene as racialization of religion once more produces a non-white outsider who is putatively eroding German culture but also externalizing antisemitism in the same breath. El-Tayeb traces how, contrary to hate crime statistics, Muslim-identified migrants are increasingly imagined as the only relevant and greatest threat to Jewish life in Germany, so that even educational programs originally designed to combat antisemitism in (white) East German adolescents shifted to focus primarily on Muslim youth. As El-Tayeb drives home at the end of her monograph, antisemitism itself is thus ultimately cathartically cast (out) as Ungerman: “Fascists are always the Others” (212).
This is not only a brilliant study that innovatively charts how the latest non-white newcomer, time and again, is held up to intense scrutiny and ascribed with characteristics that seem to threaten German society in an often-unconscious smoke and mirror game. What this study achieves exceptionally well is to show how Germanness as an implicitly white identity throughout all these crises not only goes unchallenged but is ultimately reaffirmed. “Crisis,” as the conclusion makes clear, constitutes a discursive category available to white citizens (besorgte Bürger), whereas the regular white violence against non-white bodies never amounts to a national threat, since those are, after all, Un/German.
