Germany's silence: Testimonial injustice in the NSU investigation and willful ignorance in the NSU trial

Abstract

We can currently see the formation of new nationalist and racist parties or tendencies within established parties to lean towards right-wing politics within many European countries; from the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) in the Netherlands, Lega Nord or Lega in Italia, Vox in Spain, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, Front National in France, the Sverigedemokraterna in Sweden, Fidesz in Hungary, and Golden Dawn in Greece, to name only a few. At the same time, there has been a surge in racist, fascist, and antisemitic attacks within Europe. Since 1991, Neo-Nazi gangs have attacked migrants and members of antifascist groups, burned down housing facilities for asylum seekers (including facilities for Ukrainian refugees in 2022), disrupted social initiatives, and spread fear (BfV, 2022; cf. Speit, 2021). However, most of these activities were described as the criminal action of socially marginalized individuals, downplaying the organized structure behind these far-right activities and, thus, paving the way for more attacks.¹ Part of this paper is to show how the epistemic tools developed by the epistemology of ignorance literature can help to understand (a) why the organized structures of far-right movements are unintelligible within the dominant frame of intelligibility in Europe and (b) how the silence about far-right movements shifts the boundaries for what can be said or done, thus, having deeply problematic repercussions for who can feel safe in Europe. This paper has a modest aim: By bringing into focus contexts of social injustice that have not received much attention in the current literature and by understanding them with the help of existing research from the debate on problematic epistemic practices and philosophy of language, the paper aims to highlight some problematic practices.²

In this paper, I want to concentrate on a series of attacks carried out in Germany. From 2000 to 2007, the National Socialist Underground (NSU) succeeded in murdering 10 people, one police officer, and nine migrants in Germany. The victims are Enver Şimşek, Abdurrahim Özüdoğru, Süleyman Taşköprü, Habil Kılıç, Mehmet Turgut, İsmail Yaşar, Theodoros Boulgarides, Mehmet Kubaşık, Halit Yozgat, and Michèle Kiesewetter. NSU also attempted to murder another 43 times, committed three bomb attacks in Nuremberg and Cologne, as well as 15 robberies. In addition to the three known members of the organization—Beate Zschäpe, Uwe Mundlos, and Uwe Böhnhardt—it remains an open question how many others were involved. However, it can be assumed that they had good connections with at least another 100–200 persons; including confidential informants, members of the German intelligence service and police force, and officials of extreme right-wing parties.³ Yet, instead of investigating even the possibility of a Neo-Nazi terrorist organization as relatives of the victims and migrant communities demanded,⁴ the German police tried to pin all of the murders and attacks on individuals from migrant communities; more often than not on the relatives of the deceased without any substantial evidence. Only in 2011, when two of the three members of NSU were found dead and the third surrendered to the police, investigations turned their focus onto the NSU. Yet, even then, the investigation of NSU and the trial of its members are overshadowed by a hesitation to thoroughly understand the complexities of Neo-Nazi organization and crimes; in its most extreme form, witnesses were found dead, others lied, documents disappeared, and officials of the intelligence service withheld important information without facing any repercussions (Förster, 2017; cf. Kohl, 2011; NSU Watch, n.d.).⁵

On July 11, 2018, the trial of the NSU concluded in Munich, Germany. The trial took place between May 2013 and July 2018 at the Higher Regional Court in Munich. It was one of the longest and largest trials in German history and gained public interest because of claims of institutionalized racism within the German police force and German intelligence service. In fact, it took another 2 years for the court to provide a written verdict that is not open to the public despite the fact that this trial is of major public importance.⁶ Five individuals were at trial: Beate Zschäpe, André Eminger, Holger Gerlach, Carsten Schultze, and NPD-member Ralf Wohlleben. Zschäpe was found guilty of murder in 2018 and sentenced to life imprisonment, Wohlleben was sentenced to 10 years in prison, Gerlach and Schulze to 3 years in prison, and Eminger to two and a half years. They were charged inter alia on account of 10 murders, serious arson, being members of a terrorist organization, aiding and abetting a terrorist organization, and being accessories for the NSU. Yet, 13 not 10 persons lost their lives in right-wing terrorist attacks that can reasonably be attributed to the NSU. Furthermore, the court focused on merely those five individuals, failing to establish links to other individuals and extreme-right groups and to the German police and intelligence service; partly because of destroyed evidence and partly because the police investigation simply ignored available evidence, including the testimonies of several individuals. It is thus not surprising that the trial faced some major criticism.

In this paper, I aim to shed light on these claims and Elif Kubaşık's questions. To do so, I use epistemic tools such as the epistemology of ignorance and Fricker's theory of testimonial injustice. In fact, Elif Kubaşık's words sound familiar to anyone who has read Fricker's analysis of the Tom Robinson case in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Here, Fricker shows the way in which a desperate Atticus Finch asks the jurors to do their duty and not be determined in their verdict by the deeply problematic prejudice that it is in Tom Robinson's nature qua being a Black man to lie. Finch says: “…In the name of God, do your duty.” (1960, p. 210) in the same way that Elif Kubaşık says “We wanted that you did your duty.”

In the following, I focus on the police investigation as a case of testimonial injustice; arguing that the investigating officers did not adequately listen and use the testimony of relatives of the deceased due to pernicious stereotypes and that they failed to adequately acknowledge the danger of existent Neo-Nazi terror due to the persistent framework according to which Germany does not have an organized far-right structure. However, in comparison to the case of Tom Robinson, the identity stereotypes at work are best described as intersectional; they pertain to (at least) racist, religious, and class stereotypes.⁸ I then focus on the frame of intelligibility that masks the systemic problem of Neo-Nazis within German institutions, parties, and everyday life. I do so by showing that the trial and its judges failed to address the aforementioned investigative shortcomings and the questions of the relatives in their concluding statement and that no incentives were given to further investigate the relations between NSU and officials both in the German police force and intelligence service due to a problematic frame of intelligibility, that is closely related to the notion of white ignorance as introduced by Charles Mills. Finally, I argue that the shortcomings in the investigation and the trial contribute to a racist climate in so far as they change the framework of what can be said and done; with deeply problematic repercussions in so far as the relatives of the deceased as well as many other migrants were robbed of feeling safe in the country they made their home and other Neo-Nazis were confirmed in their hate, which provoked further killings such as the murder of Walter Lübcke as well as the murders in Halle and Hanau (cf. Speit, 2021). My aim is to show how testimonial injustice itself creates a dominant but harmful narrative and, thus, to suggest a middle ground between Fricker's theory of testimonial injustice and the literature on the epistemology of ignorance. In this way, structural testimonial injustice contributes to what can be said and done in a society and what cannot. I conclude with some thoughts on the role of political philosophers and theorists when faced with such troubling cases. Here, I want to draw attention to a gap within political and social philosophy: The NSU and other Neo-Nazi networks and tendencies remain mostly ignored; in fact, very few philosophical papers can be found on the NSU or similar racist and antisemitic groups or structures.⁹

Atticus Finch is not asking the jury members to focus “on their moral and legal duty to convict only if they truly judge the defendant guilty” (Fricker, 2007, p. 25), because he knows that their prejudices would override this. Instead, he asks them to simply believe Tom Robinson, to give him credibility. Yet, despite the given evidence, “their immovably prejudiced social perception of Robinson as a speaker leads at once to a gross epistemic failure and an appalling ethical failure of grave practical consequence” (Fricker, 2007, p. 26).

The trial of Tom Robinson is a case of structural testimonial injustice that is produced not by a single instance of prejudicial credibility deficit but by the kind where the prejudice tracks “the subject through different dimensions of social activity—economic, educational, professional, sexual, legal, political, religious, and so on” (Fricker, 2007, p. 27). Hence, it is not a one-time occurrence from which the subject can recover in another context but part of a whole set of social injustices. Structural testimonial injustice is grounded in a pernicious prejudice related to a person's (assumed) social identity. Tom Robinson suffers from racist identity prejudice in more than just one context: “[Tom Robinson] lives in a society in which the prejudice that devalues his word also blocks his everyday pursuits repeatedly and in every social direction” (Fricker, 2007, p. 29). Hence, Fricker follows, structural testimonial injustice is identity-prejudicial credibility deficit.

This kind of testimonial injustice is, I will argue, also at play in the police investigation and the NSU trial that is the topic of this paper; the relatives of the deceased were subject to identity-prejudicial credibility deficit in the police investigation. To make my argument, I will proceed as follows: First, focusing on Elif Kubaşık and her daughter Gamze Kubaşık, I give some background information about their testimony and how it failed to gain access to the police investigation. Second, I show how this is a case of credibility deficit and, third, that this deficit is due to racial identity prejudice and, thus, ethically and epistemically problematic. Third, I relate the case to Gaile Pohlhaus's theory of willful hermeneutical ignorance to shift the focus away from the suffering of Elif Kubaşık and Gamze Kubaşık and towards problematic yet dominant frames of intelligibility and, thus, to the responsibility that the police investigators and the judges of the trial had in this case. Not “doing their duty resulted in a failure to set these injustices right and helped in creating a climate in which racist sentiments and acts are thriving.”

On November 5, 2013, Elif Kubaşık and Gamze Kubaşık, wife and daughter of the murdered Mehmet Kubaşık, testified in the NSU trial.¹⁰ While this testimony is different to the testimony of Tom Robinson because neither Elif nor Gamze Kubaşık are accused of anything, it shows some troubling parallels in the ways in which neither one is given adequate credibility. Part of my argument that Elif and Gamze Kubaşık are suffering from testimonial injustice is to show—through their testimony—that the investigating police officers failed to give them credibility, another part is to show the dismissal both of Mehmet Kubaşık's description of character as well as Elif and Gamze Kubaşık's suffering due to the murder of their husband and father. We will see that the lack of credibility, in this case, points to a straightforward case of testimonial injustice; yet, the dismissal of Elif and Gamze Kubaşık's well-being as well as the ignorance towards Neo-Nazis organization results from a problematic frame of intelligibility at play in Germany.

Consider the following as an illustration of how the investigating police officers failed to treat Elif or Gamze Kubaşık as credible knowers and reliable sources of information that might help with the investigation and with the respect they deserve as family members of a deceased person: Both Elif and Gamze Kubaşık were called to testify the day after Mehmet Kubaşık was shot. Both she and her mother had not been able to sleep in the night after the murder, in the morning they were picked up by the police—visibly for all neighbors—and immediately separated at the station. Gamze Kubaşık was being brought into a room, in which two police officers were waiting; at no point was she asked if she was ok and capable of following the police questioning; otherwise, she would have told them to postpone the questioning feeling both too emotionally strained and scared. She was also not informed that she could have legal support when being questioned. Instead, she was asked whether her father had any enemies or an affair; a question she thought was highly inappropriate the day after he was shot. She was then shown photos of nine to ten foreign-looking men, but she did not know any one of them. One of the officers asked her to look at the photos again, and she explained again that she had not seen these men before. Then the officer turned to his partner and remarked that she failed to even realize that two of the photos showed the same men. Both of them laughed and made fun of her. Let me repeat this: The day after her father was shot, Gamze Kubaşık was brought in for questioning—without any evidence that she herself is under investigation—and the police officers not only fail to show a little bit of sympathy with her plight but instead made fun of her.

Furthermore, both Elif and Gamze Kubaşık are asked to testify to the character of Mehmet Kubaşık during the trial. Elif Kubaşık describes him as a caring husband and father, a likable character both within and outside the family, and she testifies about the good life they had as a family before Mehmet Kubaşık was murdered. Gamze Kubaşık testifies that her father was a good man, who was liked by everyone; when they went for walks together outside, people would stop and enjoy talking to him and teenagers were drawn to his jokes and likable character. Furthermore, both—Elif and Gamze Kubaşık—testify about the problems the family had to cope with after the attack. Elif Kubaşık explains how her son was beaten up on the street due to the rumors spread about the father selling drugs after the police raided their apartment and shop with dogs and questioned the neighbors about the families’ drug business and/or use. She continues to explain that the older son refused to go outside because everyone would point fingers at him after the attack. The older son as well as the younger one lost a year in school due to the insensitive police investigation in the aftermath of their father's murder. Finally, Gamze Kubaşık speaks about her own and her mother's state of anxiety; for example, she was unable to start her vocational training because she was scared to take the train to work thinking the murderers of her father came back. For a year, she was unable to leave the house. Her mother also had panic attacks. Both the suffering of the family during the investigation as well as in the aftermath are direct results from (a) a one-sided and insensitive police investigation, in which all of the family members are treated not as victims but as criminals and (b) a failure of the police and the legal institutions within Germany to convincingly show that racist and fascist attacks against citizens are taken seriously. Gamze Kubaşık is still scared when she is alone nowadays. In fact, Elif or Gamze Kubaşık received no apologies from the investigating police officers nor the judge for the problematic ways in which the investigation was handled and for putting a target on the whole family; and none of these shortcomings are addressed in the written verdict.

Finally, both Elif and Gamze Kubaşık testify further that they mentioned the suspicion that Mehmet Kubaşık was murdered by Nazis early on during the investigation. Elif Kubaşık explains that she was asked by a reporter in March 2007 about who might have killed her husband, to which she answered that she is convinced that her husband was killed by Neo-Nazis due to the fact that all murdered persons—eight of them Turkish and one Greek by that time—had immigrant backgrounds. She testifies that this was not the only time that she voiced this suspicion but no one believed her. Gamze Kubaşık explains that she mentioned the suspicion that her father was murdered by Neo-Nazis to Ms. K. [police officer] and Ms. K.’s boss [chief of the police running the investigation], but he said that they had eliminated this line of investigation.¹¹ In fact, the police investigation at no point made a connection between Neo-Nazis and the murders; the NSU became part of the investigation only after two of their members were found dead on November 4, 2011, together with their brutal videos of confession to these and further attacks. This is despite the fact that the police paid informants from the Neo-Nazi milieu in which the NSU was active. It should also be mentioned that even after the connection between NSU and the murders became known, officers of Germany's federal office for the protection of the constitution (“Verfassungsschutz”) destroyed relevant material on this case; which is why the testimony of family members are of particular importance for this trial. Yet, Elif and Gamze Kubaşık's suspicion and further testimony received no uptake; they were not given the credibility they deserved. Thus, my first claim is that many of the relatives of the deceased suffered from testimonial injustice during the police investigation. However, while it is obvious that they suffered a credibility deficit from the statements recounted above, for this to be a case of testimonial injustice, it has to be shown that the credibility deficit is due to prejudicial stereotypes about their social group; in this case Turkish migrants.

The way in which the police investigation turned against Mehmet Kubaşık and the family seems indicative of some prejudicial stereotypes. Not only did the police fail to take Elif and Gamze Kubaşık seriously, they actively pursued an investigation into the family—despite testimony from the family and others that the Kubaşıks had nothing to do with criminal activities. The investigation into the family—without any evidence underlying this investigation—started early on: Elif Kubaşık testifies that she was asked why her husband was carrying three debit cards or why he had an extra key to a storage room with him, details that were easily explained for someone owning a shop, but Elif Kubaşık was told that these details are highly suspicious. When these details proved unfruitful and the police raid of the apartment for drugs showed no evidence that Mehmet Kubaşık had indeed been a drug dealer, the police investigation turned towards the assumption that the attack must have been due to clan activities in which Mehmet Kubaşık was involved or a family feud. Elif Kubaşık testifies that she was asked what would happen if there is a family feud “between the tribes.” Gamze Kubaşık further testifies that she was asked on several occasions by the police whether her father was an organized member of the PKK or mafia. The explicit connection that the police investigation drew between Mehmet Kubaşık and drugs, the PKK, or mafia is in line with common prejudice against Turkish and Muslim migrants; the underlying belief being that all Turkish and Muslim migrants operate in clans and have connections to criminal organizations.

In comparison to Fricker's analysis of Black racist identity prejudices in the case of Tom Robinson, we can here see an intersectional racism that draws both on racist and religious prejudices. Anti-Muslim racism describes a form of racism that targets Muslims and people who are assumed to be Muslims; it is irrelevant whether those targeted actually practice the Muslim religion. Several studies show that anti-Muslim racism is widely accepted in Germany. In 2018 44% and in 2020 still 27% of the German population agreed with the statement that Muslims should not be allowed to migrate to Germany. Furthermore, in the same years, 52% say that they are scared of Muslims. A recent study of racism within the German police force found that police officers have a slightly higher acceptance of the stereotype that Muslims are prone to become criminals than the average population (MEGAVO, 2022).¹² Furthermore, these prejudices are intertwined with class prejudices according to which social welfare recipients are believed to be lazy, drug-addicted, less educated, or generally “antisocial.”¹³ While anti-Muslim stereotypes in Germany are significantly different to anti-Black stereotypes in the United States, there are interesting parallels; for example, the problematic belief that both social groups are more criminal than other groups (cf. Bierria, 2014) or that both groups are social welfare recipients “by choice” and are, thus, directly responsible for economic problems of the state (cf. Hill Collins, 2000, Ch. 4).

Taking these studies into account, it is a likely explanation that the police attacked (at least partly) on prejudicial stereotypes in their investigation of the NSU murders. This can be illustrated by the investigation into criminal clan activity or drug-related crimes and, further, by sentences such as the one about the family feud “between the tribes”; here the police officer invokes the racist generalization of migrant communities being organized in tribes in comparison to the “civilized” white society. Thus, we can conclude that part of the explanation of why the police failed to recognize Elif and Gamze Kubaşık as knowers and acted in ways detrimental to their well-being, is that they suffered from a credibility deficit due to anti-Muslim, racist prejudicial stereotypes. In other words, they suffered from testimonial injustice as characterized by Fricker with regard to the injustice of Tom Robinson's trial; and this is despite the fact that the racism plays out differently.

It is important to note that not all cases of credibility deficit are caused by prejudice; in fact, according to Fricker, sometimes the deficit results from “innocent error” (Fricker, 2007, p. 21). Innocent error is excusable if it “is both ethically and epistemically non-culpable” (2007, p. 21) and lies in the simple fact that human judgment is far from perfect. Hence, even well-meaning and reasonable (or skilled) hearers will sometimes make a mistaken judgment about the credibility they award a speaker. Someone might want to argue that the investigative failures and behavior towards Elif and Gamze Kubaşık during the investigation were innocent errors—although considering the many more people who suffered and died during the investigation, “innocent” is clearly not the first word that comes to mind. However, we have seen that when a credibility deficit is caused by negative identity prejudice, then it is both ethically and epistemically culpable. From the neglect of the testimony as well as the racist statements made by the police during the investigation as well as the one-dimensional line of investigation into the family (or “tribe”), it is reasonable to conclude that Elif and Gamze Kubaşık suffered from an ethically and epistemically culpable identity-prejudicial credibility deficit and not merely from an innocent error on part of the investigating officers and the presiding judge.

Still, one might want to respond to my argument by questioning that Elif and Gamze Kubaşık—and Tom Robinson—suffer (only) from testimonial injustice as specified by Fricker. In fact, Pohlhaus (2012) has brought forward a strong argument for why Fricker misinterprets the Robinson trial. According to Pohlhaus, acknowledging that knowers are both situated and interdependent gives rise to a different interpretation of the moral wrongdoing in the case of Tom Robinson (2012, pp. 716–718). To say that speakers are situated is in contrast to classical epistemology's generic and interchangeable knower; the idea being that it is not the case that any knower is alike, rather, depending on our social situation and our lived experiences we can come to see the world in different lights. Importantly, this does not mean that each one of us has different knowledge nor that some positions necessarily lead to more or better knowledge than others. As, for example, Linda Alcoff and Patricia Hill Collins have argued, our social positions provide a context from which we approach and interpret the world (Alcoff, 2000, 2006; Hill Collins, 2000). In other words, it is due to the experiences that are specific to our social positions that we create “habits of expectation, attention, and concern” (Pohlhaus, 2012, p. 717) which shape what we are interested in, what we look at, and where we turn our attention. According to this analysis, power can work as an obstacle to gaining epistemically significant insights; exemplified by Charles Mills' famous sentence “whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made” (1997, p. 18). Yet, the opposite can also be true such that if we are powerless and, thus, vulnerable to others we are not merely concerned with our own interests and experiences, but we must also know what those in power expect from us and what concerns them; that is, we have to look at the world from our own eyes as well as theirs. This idea is well known from W.E.B. du Bois' notion of “double consciousness.” Furthermore, being in a vulnerable and marginalized position often implies that “the epistemic resources used by most knowers in one's society for knowing the world will be less suited to those situations in which marginally situated knowers find themselves” (Pohlhaus, 2012, p. 717). This amounts to a dilemma: Those with power can shape the epistemic resources in such a way that they fit their social experiences, but have a less complex understanding of the world owing to the fact that they have to understand merely their own experiences. Those with less power or without power can have a fuller understanding of the world as described above but lack the power to shape the epistemic resources accordingly. Hence, being in a marginalized position means that we experience constant clashes between our social experiences and the existing dominant epistemic resources that can help us understand these experiences; something Fricker drew attention to when she coined the notion of “hermeneutical injustice.”

Being an interdependent knower means that the epistemic tools and resources with which we come to know what we know operate collectively; it is not entirely up to us as individuals what kind of tools exist and can be used by us. All epistemic resources, Pohlhaus argues, are dependent on experiences; they “must answer to our experiences” (Pohlhaus, 2012, p. 718, emphasis in original) while, at the same time, what we experience is mediated through the available epistemic resources. Good epistemic resources are those that can make intelligible our experiences in adequate and useful ways. If resources fail to do that, we must change our existing resources or develop new ones. However, in an unequal society in which some have power while others are marginalized, not all experiences count equally. In fact, we can see that interdependence and situatedness come together: “The right standards for knowing the world well will be determined by what is salient in the experienced world itself, and what is salient in the experienced world itself will depend upon situatedness: what do I/we need to know (or care to know) and why?” (Pohlhaus, 2012, p. 718, emphasis in original). This implies that the marginalized knower is more likely to find the existing and dominant epistemic resources to be an ill-fit in explaining their world than more powerful knowers. This puts them in a position in which they notice the ways in which power relates to knowledge and it is to their advantage to develop more useful and adequate resources that make intelligible their experiences; while this is not the case for more powerful knowers. Hence, being marginalized, Pohlhaus concludes, is both epistemically disadvantageous as it makes it harder to make sense and articulate one's experiences and epistemically advantageous as it can transcend the limited existing resources and can finally lead to more objective knowledge (cf. 2012, p. 719; see also Harding, 1991, pp. 138–163). Seeing the ways in which situatedness and interdependence relate can teach us an important lesson: While the “dominantly situated knower cannot step outside of her situatedness in order to experience the world as other do,” they can nevertheless “learn to use epistemic resources developed from the experiences of marginalized knowers” (Pohlhaus, 2012, p. 721). Hence, dominantly situated knowers are responsible for not directing their gaze elsewhere and listening and learning from others.

One way to interpret the Robinson trial is through the lens of what Pohlhaus terms “willful hermeneutical ignorance.” Because marginal epistemic resources can call attention to parts of the world that a dominantly situated knower had not noticed before, they are often preemptively dismissed as attending to nothing or as making something out of nothing; as is the case with concepts such as white privilege or date rape. However, this is not an innocent dismissal but rather an active ignorance, where the dominant knower refuses to learn about resources from marginal knowers. Willful hermeneutical ignorance is a cognitive dysfunction as Mills (1997) describes it and functions to uphold the privilege and power of those in control of dominant epistemic resources. According to Pohlhaus, Tom Robinson's trial is about more than “not believing someone when one ought due to identity prejudice” (Pohlhaus, 2012, p. 725) as Fricker interprets it. In fact, the central insight is that the jury misinterprets Tom Robinson's words. In other words, while Tom Robinson knows what is going on—a white woman made a sexual advance at him and he is set up—he cannot convey his knowledge, and he knows that he cannot; not just because the jury does not believe him, but because the jury uses “epistemic resources that do not allow for the intelligibility of what Robinson has to say” (Pohlhaus, 2012, p. 725). Hence, this is a case of willful hermeneutical ignorance: The jury refuses to stand in a relation of epistemic interdependence with Tom Robinson. Instead, the jury uses epistemic resources apt to the world of white supremacy and patriarchy, and according to these resources Robinson's testimony (as well as his lawyer's testimony) is unintelligible. This way of interpreting Tom Robinson's trial allows a shift in perspective, away from the manyfold injustice that Tom Robinson suffers and towards the accountability of the jury.

Using Pohlhaus' theory of willful hermeneutical ignorance means to focus on the way in which the testimony by Elif and Gamze Kubaşık (and many others) not only failed to receive credibility but was simply not intelligible within the police officers frame of intelligibility. Such a shift of focus points towards the culpable ignorance of the police officers. In fact, Pohlhaus provides a powerful argument for the epistemic and ethical failings that are in place here: The anti-Muslim and persistent assumption of migrant families as necessarily criminal, organized in “primitive” structures of tribes in comparison to the decent and “civilized” white citizens made it impossible for the police officers to direct their gaze elsewhere and contemplate a different narrative of what happened to Mehmet Kubaşık. Thus, ironically, they fail to see the very reasonable explanation of these attacks being caused by racism due to their own racist frameworks. Furthermore, Pohlhaus is correct in saying that such ignorance is willful as it upholds the privilege of the ignorant—especially in cases, in which it is someone's duty to do justice and literally “follow” the evidence. Hence, we can conclude that Elif and Gamze Kubaşık suffered from testimonial injustice during the police investigation and from willful hermeneutical ignorance on the part of the police officers involved in the investigation. In the following, I show that testimonial injustice and willful hermeneutical ignorance create a so-called feedback loop.

Pohlhaus’ arguments point to the fact that the investigating police officers use epistemic resources apt to the world of white supremacy or, to be precise, apt to the persistent framework according to which there is no organized Neo-Nazi or far-right movement in Germany. According to this framework, Elif and Gamze Kubaşık's testimony of Mehmet Kubaşık being a loving father and neighbor and their suspicion that his murder was an act of anti-Muslim racism is unintelligible. Interestingly, Fricker's and Pohlhaus’ interpretations are related in ways that the current literature does not acknowledge. The current literature on problematic epistemic practices is divided into roughly two camps; one side focuses—in line with Fricker's analyses—on interpersonal cases of epistemic injustice and strategies that individuals can employ to act epistemically just, the other side focuses on systemic epistemic oppression that results from a colonial design “constructed to preclude certain forms of knowledge” (Berenstain & Ruíz, 2021, p. 284; cf. Dotson, 2021; Sertler, 2022). While both sides of the debate are grounded in structural injustice, they direct their attention to very distinct forms of epistemically problematic practices. In the first case, structural identity prejudice paves the way for testimonial injustice, and, in the second case, structural injustices ground the dominant framework which in turn leads to ignorance. Furthermore, in the first case, we can speak of a prejudicial loop, where structural injustice grounds negative identity prejudices, which in turn justify or legitimize the given structural injustice. In the second case, we can speak of an ignorance loop, where structural injustice grounds the dominant frameworks and the ignorance that goes along with it, which in turn contributes and reproduces the structural injustice already in place. However, often unacknowledged in the literature, there is a further feedback loop in so far as testimonial injustice is a symptom of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which in turn justifies the perpetuation of further ignorance, therefore, creating further cases of testimonial injustice. Thus, even though testimonial injustice and willful hermeneutical ignorance are part of two distinct sides within the debate of epistemically problematic practices can be said to reproduce each other.

In this section, I argue that understanding the feedback loop between testimonial injustice and willful hermeneutical ignorance helps to see how both contribute to existing and problematic frameworks that shape the landscape of what can be said and done in a society. Let us unpack the feedback loop: Testimonial injustice is related to both hermeneutical injustice and ignorance in so far as our epistemic resources are dependent on what is said and what captures our attention. Most of what we know is due to some form of testimonial exchange; for example, I know algebra because I was taught algebra by someone in school, I know how to work the coffee machine because I read the manual written by someone, I know things about the epistemology of ignorance because someone gave me the tools to understand philosophy at university and someone else wrote about epistemology of ignorance for others to read. What I can know is determined by what or who is available to convey that knowledge and by my willingness to listen. Yet, some things are more readily available than others and some people are given more space to convey knowledge than others. Hence, what enters into our dominant hermeneutical resources¹⁴ is also a question of who is in a good position to testify, who is speaking within the dominant frameworks and, thus, being intelligible, and who is awarded credibility. The very fact that some individuals receive credibility and others do not is at least partly due to what is already part of our dominant hermeneutical resources and our frames of intelligibility.

Willful hermeneutical ignorance speaks to this problematic phenomenon. Because marginal epistemic resources can call attention to parts of the world that a dominantly situated knower had not noticed before, they are often preemptively dismissed as attending to nothing; they are not part of the dominant hermeneutical resources and, thus, remain unintelligible to the dominantly situated knower. This is why testimony by marginalized individuals receives no or only inadequate uptake and the individuals suffer from testimonial injustice. Yet, the fact that such testimony receives no uptake helps to reproduce the very phenomenon of hermeneutical ignorance, where some experiences remain unintelligible to dominantly situated knowers. Thus, testimonial injustice shapes the landscape of what can be said and what can be made intelligible in our social world. Importantly, Pohlhaus directs our attention to the fact that structural injustices such as testimonial injustice are not a purely structural phenomenon, rather they are structural phenomena that are enacted by individuals. While, as Mills (2007) argues, epistemic ignorance is a cognitive defect in our way of interpreting the world, not all of its elements are beyond our control. Instead, hermeneutical ignorance is willful in so far as it is a kind of dismissal where dominant knowers refuse to learn about resources from marginal knowers (cf. Pohlhaus, 2012). Hence, dominant knowers actively contribute to shape what can be said in testimonial exchanges and what remains unheard or unacknowledged.

This is a particularly important point when considering dominant knowers in social positions in which they stand in relations of (institutional) authority to marginalized individuals as well as positions in which they can shape who remains hermeneutically marginalized. And it is here that our attention should also shift towards the presiding judges in the NSU trial and not focus exclusively on the investigating police officers. While the shortcomings of the police investigation are not the fault of the presiding judges, their failings to address these as well as to express apologies for the behavior of the investigating officers add insult to injury. But by failing to acknowledge these shortcomings adequately expressed in the testimony of Elif and Gamze Kubaşık, the presiding judges do more than treating the Kubaşık family unfairly and unjustly, they shape the landscape of what can be said and done and therewith send a message both to victims of anti-Muslim racism, fascism, and antisemitism as well as to its perpetrators. As Matthew Congdon argues, when

This phenomenon is by now well documented in the philosophy of language. For example, Saul (2017) analyzed the problematic phenomenon of figleaves. Figleaves are a linguistic device to change the landscape of what is acceptable when it comes to racist speech acts by changing the norms of conversational acceptability and their resulting standards of acceptable behavior. This problem becomes particularly obvious when considering racist speech in the United States (cf. Saul, 2019). However, few have focused explicitly on the way in which epistemic injustice and ignorance can not only reproduce existing injustices (this is well documented) but shift the norms of acceptable behavior. With speech the idea is relatively straightforward: whenever a speaker says something that carries a presupposition and no one objects to that presupposition, it is taken for granted for the rest of the conversation—and, in some cases, beyond the conversational context (cf. Langton, 2012; McGowan, 2012; see also Lewis, 1979). For example, when a colleague asks whether my son is still sick—and therefore introduces the presupposition that I have a son—and instead of correcting them by saying that I have a daughter, I merely answer that my child is still sick, the presupposition can now be taken for granted for the rest of the conversation and for future conversations. McGowan (2012) argues that every utterance changes what is acceptable for that conversation; these can be small changes as well as big changes when a racist presupposition is not objected to. The important insight is this: Problematic presuppositions (and statements in general) that are not objected to can shift the standard of what is acceptable to say in a conversation.

But problematic presupposition and general statements that are not objected to can do much more than shifting the norms of a conversation. Langton (2012) argues that they can bring about psychological changes that result in racist attitudes or emotions; hence, they can “convince” others to accept racist beliefs. Furthermore, problematic presuppositions and general statements that are not objected to can result in changes in behavior; that is, unchallenged presuppositions can make racist behavior permissible as Lynne Tirrell (2012) has shown in her analysis of the Rwandan genocide, in which the legitimation of hate speech has played a crucial role. While Langton and Tirrell focus on openly racist utterances, Saul (2017) shows that figleaves—that is, covered or masked racist utterances—can have similar effects. In fact, Saul argues that while openly racist presuppositions can be challenged in many contexts, figleaves are much harder to be challenged due to their reassurance to the listener that no openly racist utterance was made. However, figleaves have the same result in that they shift the standards for what is acceptable in the given conversation—as well as in future conversations. Let us call these (conversational) moves “diachronic harms”: they are designed to carrying-over a certain message that shifts the boundaries of what is acceptable in social contexts.¹⁵

I contend that we can learn a useful lesson from the philosophy of language for the example at hand. In the same way, in which conversational moves with a certain conversational context contain a particular message—both to (potential) victims and to (potential) perpetrators—and with that message shifts the standards of conversation, other communicative moves can contain similar messages and, thus, similarly shift the standards of that context.¹⁶ Let us have a look at some details of this claim: For one, silence plays a significant role in the diachronic harms. In fact, part of the problem with racist presuppositions is the silence with which they are met; it is because of silence that the standards of conversation shift. The problematic role that silences play can be generalized: When certain statements are not met with objection, resistance, or counternarratives, they carry the potential of shifting what is acceptable to say and do. In other words, when the presiding judges decide not to turn their attention to the investigative failures and the structure of far-right organizations, they support an unspoken presupposition that Germany does not have a Neo-Nazi problem but rather that these murders were the acts from random individuals. More than that, the silence shifts the standard of what demands our legal attention and, most problematically, encourages others to join far-right organizations or enact racist violence. The same holds for the fact that the presiding judges did not meet the testimony of the relatives of the deceased with adequate sympathy (or any acknowledgment at all); meeting someone else's speech with silence carries similar messages both to the speakers as well as to others, making it possible for others to justifiable belief that ignoring certain speakers is acceptable. Especially in this case, where testimony is ignored that (a) points to racist violence and far-right networks and (b) is uttered by migrants and vulnerable and marginalized communities. Here, silence shifts the standard of who and what demands our (legal) attention and who is respected as a full (epistemic) member in a democratic society. By shaping the landscape of what can be said and done in such a problematic way, the presiding judges reproduce a frame of intelligibility of white ignorance and a pervasive narrative framework according to which Germany does not have a Neo-Nazi problem. And, by doing so, they pave the way for further attacks such as the antisemitic attacks with two murders in Halle in 2019 and the racist attacks with 10 murders in Hanau in 2020. In fact, research shows that the number of people capable and willing to resort to extreme measures to fight migrants and other marginalized social groups is rising.¹⁷

Lastly, I want to draw attention to the fact that political and social philosophy in Germany has so far ignored the NSU and related questions of anti-Muslim racism as topics for philosophical analysis.¹⁸ While there is a growing literature from European philosophers on (anti-Muslim) racism and colonial structures within Europe (Ammaturo, 2019; Balibar, 2003; De Genova, 2010; cf. Ehrmann, 2021; Haritaworn, 2012; Vergès, 2010), especially with regard to problematic epistemic practices (cf. Altanian, 2021; Bessone, 2020; Lagewaard, 2021; Lentin, 2008; and, although located in Canada, Catala, 2019), hardly any philosophical papers can be found on the NSU or similar racist and antisemitic groups or structures. First and foremost, this is surprising, since especially political philosophers are often concerned with pressing political matters and rightly so.¹⁹ It is also problematic as it highlights the ways in which even political and social philosophy is shaped by the dominant frame of intelligibility and narrative frameworks and often fails to take into account marginalized voices and experiences and—if what I have argued above—by omission helps to reproduce the dominant narrative that Germany (and many other European countries) have no problem with organized far-right movements.

One might want to argue that this omission is at least partly due to timing; academic research and publishing takes time and the phenomena I draw attention to here happened relatively recently. Yet, while this might be the case, the vast research and interest by political and social philosophers of Covid and social life during a pandemic proves that—if willing—philosophers can act quickly. As many climate activists have argued in light of Covid-related research, omission of some topics is not a problem of time but a problem of interest. Hence, a better explanation—although no excuse—can be given by drawing attention to the fact that what we are concerned with philosophically often stems from our general interests, from what our gaze catches, and from our existing frame of intelligibility; for most of us within political and social philosophy, being situated in nonmarginalized social positions and within a frame of intelligibility that is shaped by nonmarginalized perspectives means that we can miss important contexts of research and/or that we fail to understand these in terms of epistemic tools adequate for those contexts.

Note that this is not to say that political and social philosophers actively ignore the issue of Neo-Nazi organizations; rather, it points to the systemic ignorance in our profession. As Mills argues, ignorance of marginalized standpoints should not be thought of as a “conscious conspiratorial manipulation, but rather in terms of social privilege and resulting differential experience” (2005, p. 172). The injustices we see in the world and the interests we have in explaining and, ultimately, changing them are deeply linked to our own social positions and what we experience in these positions; racist police investigations or fear of Neo-Nazi organizations is for many of us not part of our daily lives and we have to direct our gaze elsewhere to be able to see these contexts as worthy of research. Yet, the ignorance of the profession—that brings is about that we often fail to see and understand adequately the issues that are the topic of this paper—can nevertheless be described as willful; in Pohlhaus’ words, dominant knowers refuse to learn about resources from marginal knowers and our profession is, unfortunately, no exception.

This omission is problematic as it points to a failure to include marginalized researchers (and their research) in our academic world. It is even more problematic in light of what I have argued above, namely that the presiding judges help to shape the landscape of what can be said and done in our social world. Counternarratives within political and social philosophy (as well as other disciplines) could provide necessary objection to the problematic presuppositions, statements, and silences brought forth by the presiding judges in the NSU case and, thus, help resist the shift in standards of what and who demands our (legal) attention. Such philosophical research should take into account the already existing structural injustice of anti-Muslim racism that is tightly entangled with willful hermeneutical ignorance and testimonial injustice and take seriously the voices of marginalized individuals such as the relatives of the deceased and other members of their communities. In other words, counternarratives can function as correctives to the problematic frame of intelligibility and by directing our gazes elsewhere highlight marginalized interests and experiences and work towards social justice.²⁰ In fact, as political and social philosophers concerned with structural injustices, it is our duty to break the silence that is created by unjust structures and other dominant social agents.