Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants

From a journalist and foreign correspondent, the harrowing history of how an economic crisis and far-right extremists catalyzed a shocking resurgence of violence in 21st-century Germany.

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.

Jacob Kushner is 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, Harper’s, The New Yorker, VQR, The Economist, National Geographic, The Atavist, Foreign Policy and The Guardian. He is the author of China’s Congo Plan, which was favorably reviewed in the New York Review of Books. A Fulbright-Germany scholar and Logan Nonfiction Fellow, he was a finalist for the Livingston Award in International Reporting. He regularly does speaking engagements with ambitious young, internationally-minded journalists at The Overseas Press Club, The Pulitzer Center, and several universities.