Doughan, Sultan. 2022. A Secular Conversion of Protestant Morals? Contending Modernities, [Article]

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Abstract or Description

How do Germans, Palestinians, and Israelis living in Germany navigate their shared and contested histories of violence and oppression? Sa’ed Atshan and Katarina Galor’s The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians provides a blueprint for understanding the current dynamics between these communities in modern-day Berlin through an analysis of interviews they conducted among members of each of these groups. The result of their study is a nuanced account of how the past and present intermingle in shaping our moral and political horizons. Among their most significant findings is the inability of non-Palestinian and non-Jewish Germans to acknowledge the oppression of Palestinians in Israel/Palestine.

In this essay, Sultan Doughan further unpacks the complex assignations of perpetrator and victim status examined in The Moral Triangle, with a particular attention to how religion has shaped the German sense of national moral responsibility for the Holocaust. As Doughan shows, secularized accounts of the German Protestant Church’s embrace of perpetratorship becomes central to German national historical memory. However, the consolidation of this frame produces challenges when secularized German religio-nationalist narratives of guilt become entangled with identifications of Jewishness with the state of Israel, and Palestinians with an (often racialized) conception of Islam.

Item Type:	Article
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Anthropology > GARP - Goldsmiths Anthropology Research Papers Anthropology
Dates:	Date Event 17 February 2022 Published
Item ID:	39084
Date Deposited:	26 Jun 2025 16:13
Last Modified:	26 Jun 2025 16:13
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39084

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