Examining Orientations to Racialized Categories in Pre-Unification West Germany

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Abstract

Scholars in the Anglophone world––like Liz Fekete (2004) and Nicholas de Genova (2018)––and in the German speaking world–– such as Iman Attia (2009), Gabriele Dietze (2009), and Ilke Eickhof (2010)––have increasingly taken up the term “anti-Muslim racism” to describe attitudes, practices, and structures negatively targeting and affecting Muslim. This transition reflects a broader shift in attention paid to Muslim as a racialized category in the 21st century. The overwhelming majority of this attention has focused on the post-9/11 period, with special focus on the period of the so-called “refugee crisis” that began in 2015, regarding the racialization of Muslims as a recent phenomenon. In the German case, scholars have generally argued that this particular orientation to Muslims began at the earliest in the 1990s with reunification and the collapse of the Soviet Union. This paper takes an ethnomethodological and historical approach to studying the racialization of Muslims between 1945 and 1990. In so doing, it examines shifts in the primary categorization of the Turkish population that came as guest workers in the 1960s and remained as non-citizen residents. I demonstrate that primary West German orientations to Turks shifted from categorizing them as reserve labor, to as ethnically and culturally foreign. Although Muslim was not a primary categorization during this era, I argue that it was present as a secondary categorization that was often offered as an account for essentialized difference. In this way, this paper demonstrates that orientations to the category “Muslim” as relevantly and consequentially racialized predate the collapse of the Soviet Union. As such, it also demonstrates the availability and use of discursive resources that (re)produced Muslim as a racialized social category.

Author

• Joseph Sterphone, University of California, Santa Barbara