fame:
on 26 April 2002 he shot dead twelve teachers, two pupils and
a police officer at his former school in Erfurt. This was the
worst shooting rampage in Germany since 1945.
Joseph Vogl, professor at the University of Weimar’s media
department and known for his translations of Deleuze into German,
has been studying the amok phenomenon for years. The Germanist
recognizes a number of familiar patterns in the Erfurt rampage.
Overall, Vogl seeks to differentiate between two forms of amok,
that which is spontaneous and that which has been planned over
a longer period of time. Erfurt is of the second type.
Since the tragedy in Erfurt – which here will be used
as an example – many attempts at providing an explanation
have been made. But can such acts really be explained at all?
Interestingly, one quickly finds many possible explanations
for the Erfurt incident and others like it – the media,
expulsion from school etc. – but just as quickly comes
to the conclusion that none of them are sufficient. It is also
highly apparent that these explanations very quickly proceed
into vague generalizations addressing things like conditions
in schools or the anomie of modern life. Explanations of a more
concrete nature – e.g. the unusual final exam regulations
of the German state in which Erfurt is located – are ignored.
The punch line of every generalized inference, like the one
about videos featuring extreme acts of violence, remains the
same: It cannot be verified.
Is the Erfurt incident the insane act of an individual, or is
a problem involving the entire society behind it? There arises
the question of what answers the act itself supplies. The shooting
rampage in Erfurt was not an irrational or insane act. It was
rationally planned and set in a strongly symbolic framework,
as is shown by the perpetrator’s Ninja warrior costume
and self-stylization as an avenger. The perpetrator staged his
act with considerable precision. Furthermore, he represents
a specific type, that of the warrior, and his victims are also
completely deindividualized. The act does not strike the victims
merely as individuals, but also as members of certain categories.
That means that no personal exchange takes place.
In the moment of the Erfurt incident at which one of the school’s
teachers advanced toward the perpetrator and spoke directly
to him, thus establishing personal contact, the whole thing
was over. In this incident, as in many others, a certain milieu
becomes the stage upon which the deed is acted out. Here it
was a school. Civic spaces are often among those selected for
such warlike rampages, which apparently are the manifestation
of an enmity to the point of life and death. Of course the question
arises as to why these perpetrators always use public or civic
spaces as the setting for their acts. Public spaces are spaces
where not only actions are carried out, but also where symbolic
actions are carried out, in which each person takes on a certain
role. The perpetrator is concerned with creating a public setting,
and he is also making a desperate attempt to attain fame through
infamy. Here at an exemplary location, the perpetrator declares
himself to be the unconditional enemy of everyone, an enemy
of the entire society.
The amok runner lives in disturbed contact to a world that doesn’t
fit him. “Reality, as it presents itself to others, in
other words a normal day in a normal world,” says psychiatrist
Lothar Adler, “is something that he never really experiences.”
Thus the perpetrators do not stage their expanded suicides in
remote places, but in the midst of peaceful everyday life, in
the place where the break with reality appears most glaringly:
in schools, businesses, pedestrian zones, libraries, office
buildings or churches. It is here, in the zones of public order,
that the amok runner can take on and play out his final role
as the negative instance. He alone designates where and when
his sudden theater of cruelty will begin and whom it will strike.
Just as with regular theater, his theater only works with an
audience. When the media report live from the scene of the crime,
the amok runner momentarily becomes completely unified with
his image. As the protagonist of his own fiction, he transfers
his inner scenario onto the victims. Analogously, many survivors
describe their experience of such massacres with the total loss
of their sense of reality. After the shooting rampage in a Fort
Worth church, a youth said that he had at first felt like he
was in a “sort of theater.” It is precisely with
this “sort of theater” that the perpetrators are
reckoning.
In the correlation between society and amok, the homicidal rampage
gives rise to a problem of attribution in that one is dealing
with a generality of affronts, attacks and reproaches, while
at the same time it becomes increasingly difficult to assign
blame to particular people. It remains somehow abstract. Erfurt,
for example, demonstrates the perpetrator’s feelings of
being subjected to manifest antagonization and exclusion. It
also shows that he found it difficult to hold particular individuals
or
