Jacob Kushner

Not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, three young people in the East German city of Jena become friends. At a time of economic crisis, they began attending far-right rallies with people who described themselves as National Socialists and blamed minorities for their grievances. From 2000 to 2011, the most gruesome series of murders by white nationalists since the Holocaust took place – their target: immigrants.

Look Away follows the National Socialist Underground (NSU) around Beate Zschäpe and her two accomplices as they radicalized themselves in Germany’s far-right scene, went into hiding and carried out their terrorist attacks. As the police did not want to admit that the brutal murders and bomb attacks were carried out by white Germans, they targeted immigrants instead.

A masterpiece of investigative journalism and novelistic storytelling, Look Away reveals how a group of young Germans perpetrated a shocking series of white supremacist acts of violence and how a nation and its government ignored them until it was too late.

Jacob Kushner is an international correspondent who writes for magazines from Africa, Germany and the Caribbean. He reports on migration and human rights, foreign aid and investment, terrorism and violent extremism, science and global health, climate change and wildlife, and press freedom. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic and VICE, among others. Kushner is also the author of China’s Congo Plan, which was favorably reviewed in the New York Review of Books.

In cooperation with Fulbright Germany, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and the Max Planck Law Network