A Room of One’s Own Bookstore will be hosting international journalist and Fall 2023 Distinguished Visiting Lecture in International Studies and Journalism, Jacob Kushner. Join A Room of One’s Own, IRIS NRC, and Jacob Kushner as he discusses his new book, Look Away, which explores the harrowing true story of three right-wing Germans who radicalized into anti-immigrant extremists, murdering and bombing immigrants while authorities–blinded by their own prejudice–looked away. The book is a warning about the present-day dangers of white supremacist terror.
About Look Away
Not long after the Berlin Wall fell, three teenagers became friends in the East German town of Jena. It was a time of excitement, but also of economic crisis: some four million East Germans found themselves out of jobs. The friends began attending far-right rallies with people who called themselves National Socialists: Nazis. Like the Hitler-led Nazis before them, they blamed minorities for their ills. From 2000 to 2011, they embarked on the most horrific string of white nationalist killings since the Holocaust. Their target: immigrants.
Look Away follows Beate Zschäpe and her two accomplices—and sometimes lovers—as they radicalized within Germany’s far-right scene, escaped into hiding, and carried out their terrorist spree. Unable to believe that the brutal killings and bombings were being carried out by white Germans, police blamed—and sometimes framed—the immigrants instead. Readers 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 NSU and their accomplices to the world. A masterwork of reporting and storytelling, Look Away reveals how a group of young Germans carried out a shocking spree of white supremacist violence, and how a nation and its government ignored them until it was too late.
About Jacob Kushner
Originally from Milwaukee, Jacob Kushner graduated from UW-Madison with a B.A. in journalism and Latin American studies and received his MA in Political Journalism from Columbia University. While in Madison, he wrote for The Daily Cardinal, La Comunidad News, the Wisconsin State Journal, and Wisconsin Watch. In 2020, he published This is How the Heart Beats: LGBTQ East Africa, a book collaboration with photographer Jake Naughton (UW Journalism & African Studies ’10). Jacob works as a foreign correspondent who writes magazine and other longform articles from Africa, Germany, and the Caribbean. His writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Economist, National Geographic, The Atavist, The Nation, Foreign Policy and The Guardian. In Fall 2023 he returned to Madison to teach courses on International Reporting and Migration.
