civilization
and primitivism, order and chaos, humanity and barbarity. The
unmotivated murderous wild man became a symbol of the dark and
hidden sides of an alien culture. And yet even the Asians saw
this both probable and indeterminate break with the continuum
of everyday life as a danger that could strike any person, but
that could also be perpetrated by any person. Here the colonized
peoples had at their disposal a complete system of concepts
describing the usual course taken by these outbreaks of rage.
Everyone knew that amok was preceded by sakit hati, a phase
of withdrawal, of brooding. It is suspected that the later deeds
were set in motion in this earlier stage by psychological motives
such as shame, hate or desperation. The actual act, the eruption
of violence, was and is named mata gelap by the Malaysians:
“the darkened eyes,” the clouded gaze. It occurs
without warning. Initially it strikes relatives, then neighbors,
and finally passers-by and strangers. The farther his path leads
him, the less connection the perpetrator has to his victims.
In this role of a person in desperation blindly acting out his
psychological drama, the amok runner also makes his appearance
in the psychology-laden media setting. One of the cases that
has survived in records is that of Hadji Ibrahim, a merchant
around the age of forty. His run amok cost three people their
lives, and five others were seriously injured. In 1888 he was
examined by W. Gilmore Ellis, head of the State Psychiatric
Hospital of Singapore. “There is not much to say about
him,” is how the physician described his interned patient.
“He was a tall, haggard man with pock scars; his heart
function was accelerated and irregular; his gaze was wild and
staring. When no one talked to him, he hardly spoke; however,
his replies were fully rational and coherent. He was cleanly
and industrious, slept and ate well.” Only the deed itself
remained veiled from the British psychiatrist. His ability to
diagnose failed with regard to the motive’s secret. Where
medicine, anthropology and in the end also penal discipline
fail, the amok runner emerges as the personification of an evil
that is as unexplainable as it is fascinating. After his psychiatric
discovery in the East, he then experienced an astounding mythological
boom in European media and mass culture.
Nowhere is the transfer – and with it the transformation
– of this figure from the Orient to the Occident clearer
than in Stefan Zweig’s 1922 novella The Amokläufer
(The Amok Runner). However, the title hero of this story is
not a wild dagger wielding Asian, but a cultured German physician.
He lives somewhere in a “cursed nest” in the Dutch
colonies of Southeast Asia. His frenzy is not one of violence:
instead he is
