“Look Away” – Reading and Conversation with Jacob Kushner

English language reading and discussion

Jacob Kushner’s highly praised book Look Away follows Beate Zschäpe and her two accomplices—and occasional lovers—as they became radicalized within Germany’s far-right scene, escaped into hiding, and carried out their terrorist spree. From 2000 to 2011, they embarked on the most horrific string of white nationalist killings since the Holocaust. Their target: immigrants. Unable to believe that the brutal killings and bombings were the work of white Germans, police blamed—and sometimes framed—immigrants instead. Readers of Kushner’s book meet Gamze Kubaşık, whose family emigrated from Turkey to seek safety, only to find themselves in the terrorists’ sights. It also tracks Katharina König, an Antifa punk who would help expose the National Socialist Underground (NSU) and their accomplices to the world. A masterwork of reporting and storytelling, Look Away reveals how a group of young Germans executed a shocking series of white-supremacist violent acts and how a nation and its government ignored them until it was too late.

Jacob Kushner is a foreign correspondent who writes magazine and other longform articles from Africa, Germany, and the Caribbean. His work has appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Economist, National Geographic, The Atavist, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and The Guardian. He is the author of China’s Congo Plan, which was favorably received by the New York Review of Books. A former American Council on Germany Fellow and Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Fellow, he began investigating the NSU as a Fulbright Fellow in Berlin and completed his research as a Max Planck Journalist in Residence in Freiburg and Heidelberg.

Moderated by: Denise Lee is an artist and civic educator from Hong Kong, USA and Taiwan. In both disciplines, she deals with the topics of colonial legacy, migration, alienation and participation. Having lived in Thüringia for four years before moving to Leipzig, the topic of the NSU Complex has been very present for her.

In cooperation with the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, the Max Planck Law Network, and Bard College Berlin.