The Implicated Reader: Abbas Khider's Ohrfeige Reckoning With the Refugee Crisis in Germany

This article explores how Abbas Khider's 2016 novel Ohrfeige reckons with global violence against refugees by employing formal and rhetorical techniques to implicate readers in such violence. Bringing Michael Rothberg's concept of ‘the implicated subject’ — a figure who is neither victim nor perpetrator but rather enables or benefits from regimes of violence — into conversation with narrative theory and formalist criticism, the article conceptualises what I call an implicated reader , a term that designates an implied reader who is implicated in the violent events and structures represented in the given text. My analytical framework of the implicated reader illuminates how Khider constructs his novel to address and challenge the implied German reader. In particular, I examine here how Khider employs formal ‘Sie’ second‐person address, among other literary techniques, to invite the reader to identify with a German state asylum officer who dehumanises and disregards refugee lives. The article ultimately suggests that rather than facilitating the reader's identification and empathy with victimised subjects, some works of literature, including Khider's novel, challenge injustice and provoke political responsibility by prompting readers to imagine themselves in the position of someone who contributes to rather than suffers from political violence.