Look Away

Starred review from February 19, 2024
This staggering account from journalist Kushner (China’s Congo Plan) connects the dots between Germany’s far-right movement and a string of terror attacks from 2001 to 2010. Tracking three white nationalists who comprised the core of the National Socialist Underground (the chillingly racist Beate Zschäpe and her two male lovers turned accomplices) as they committed escalating acts of domestic terrorism—bank robberies, bombings, and brutal daylight murders targeting Germany’s immigrant population—Kushner documents how law enforcement, “blinded by their own prejudice,” ignored evidence that the perpetrators were white. Worse still, the police “ evidence to feed officers’ fantasies that immigrant crime syndicates were to blame” and framed immigrants for the crimes. As police dithered, “men of Turkish and Greek background continued to be murdered one by one,” among them Enver Simsek—shot while selling flowers—and Halit Yozgat, murdered at his family’s cybercafé. Kushner also profiles Katharina König, an antifascist punk and “walking antifa Wikipedia” whose documentation of Germany’s neo-Nazis helped unravel the NSU after it was finally exposed following a botched bank robbery. Most shockingly of all, Kushner reveals that the far-right support network that aided the NSU was likely funded by Germany’s intelligence networks via paid informants. Readers will be astounded and dismayed.

April 1, 2024
In November 2011, a heinous crime spree fueled by racist rage came to a fiery climax in Germany, with two perpetrators dead and another on the run. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 came the reunification of Germany, long divided by philosophies of capitalism and Communism. As the former East Germany adopted capitalism post-unification, jobs became scarce. The new country's economic opportunities evolved, and floods of new immigrants began to pour into the German Republic. Then came the backlash from hate groups. Far right, neo-Nazi extremists Beate Zsch�pe, Uwe Mundlos, and Uwe Bonhardt espoused hateful viewpoints toward people of different races and ideologies and, in the late 1990s, embarked on a wave of terrorism, including robberies, bombings, and murder. Look Away is a terrifying trip into the dark heart of a post-Cold War Germany in which hope dissolved into unresolved anger. Kushner's penetrating insights into the terrorist fringe of the German right wing provide background to understanding the motives underlying the terrorists' horrific crimes. A gripping true crime story with deep historic undertones.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 15, 2024
A disturbing, eye-opening look at the neo-Nazi murder spree that took place in Germany in the early 2000s. Kushner, a foreign correspondent and professor of international reporting and migration, turns his attention to a disturbing series of racially motivated murders in Germany's post-World War II history. He begins by tracing the rise of neo-Nazism in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when three teenagers in the small town of Jena became increasingly involved in the far-right movement. In the early 1990s, Beate Zsch�pe met Uwe Mundlos, a bright youth who was enamored with Germany's dark 20th-century history. "To many Germans," writes the author, "pride in the past wasn't just taboo--it was unthinkable." Zsch�pe and Mundlos became a couple, and in 1994, they met the third member of their trio, Uwe B�hnhardt. If Mundlos was the brains of the National Socialist Underground, the neo-Nazi terror group they formed, B�hnhardt brought an element of reckless violence. A beloved youngest son, B�hnhardt was in and out of juvenile detention as a teen, and he became a "sadistic...fighting machine." Kushner moves nimbly among the personal relationships of the three young extremists, who would go on to commit a series of ethnically motivated murders from 2000 to 2011, and he effectively shows how and why German officials often ignored signs of white supremacist terrorism, even mistakenly blaming immigrants for acts of violence. "Germany's failure to recognize its first white terrorist spree of the twenty-​first century--much less stop it--is a chilling warning for other nations that are failing to fight extremists at home," writes the author. "Having briefly earned a reputation as a haven for the world's refugees, Germany is now struggling to protect them from violence by native-​born whites." A perceptive and engrossing examination of a horrifying chapter in Germany's recent history.

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