driven
by a fatal passion for a woman. His journey’s fatal end
signifies the start of a wide-reaching cultural appropriation,
of a fundamentally new interpretation of the “alien wild
man” stereotype. Subsequently the amok runner would not
mean something distant, but something very near: the excess
of that era’s illness, of hysteria, and in this case of
its male variant.
The teacher Ernst Wagner had already presented Europe with its
real Ur-image of nerves run amok in 1913. One night the unsuccessful
dramatist and Nietzsche disciple started off by killing his
family and then went out on the street to randomly shoot down
passers-by as well as “two pieces of livestock.”
His shooting rampage left fourteen dead and twelve seriously
injured. “And I will laugh so clearly and beautifully
that everyone who hears it will later say that it was the laughter
of an angel,” wrote Wagner before the massacre. “I
will be the angel of death in the house, the angel of merciful
death. I want to perforate my hate into your guts, and the flame
of my hate shall devour your houses and my house and my father’s
house and the public house as well.” Then he began his
massacre.
Wagner’s significance for cultural history is that he
– and with him all the mass murderers and serial killers
in the literature of the following decades – marks a turn
in the way that unfettered evil is dealt with. Both Robert Musil’s
Moosbrugger and the hero in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf
(1927), who wildly opens fire on innocent motorists, appear
as something more than pathological exceptions. In the amok
runner’s visage, bourgeois society glimpses the reflection
of its own face. In Hesse’s novella Klein and Wagner (1919),
Friedrich Klein, “a civil servant of almost forty years’
age with scholarly tendencies, the father of lovely children,”
is made to look into this mirror as a surrogate for his epoch.
What he sees is “his face, the face of (Ernst Wagner),
an insane, contorted face with deep shady crevices and demolished,
detonated features.”
Andre Breton was more affirmative – and also more aggressive
– in dealing with the recurrence of that which had been
repressed: “The simplest Surrealist action,” wrote
the leader of the Surrealists in 1930, “is to go out on
the street with two revolvers in one’s fists and blindly
shoot down as many as possible in the crowd.” The absolute
revolt expressed in Breton’s sentence is not directed
against the measurable wrongs of bourgeois society, but against
life itself, against the unacceptable conditions down here.
The revolver-laden sentence makes manifest an existential desperation,
the dark side of desire and the death wish resulting from it.
The blind violence described
