Shades of America

Weekly Review: "America" was on the lips of eyewitnesses and German commentators alike following the rampage in an Erfurt school that cost 17 lives

"Germany is America now," Guardian reporter John Hooper overheard someone say on Friday. He was in Erfurt, an "exquisite old town," as he calls it, in what was once East Germany. Robert Steinhäuser, 19, had just burst into his old school and shot 13 teachers, two students and a police officer before turning one of his guns on himself.

It was the pistol, not the "pump-gun" he was also carrying, as German reporters were calling it on television; another word imported to the German vocabulary. Spiegel Online evidently felt obliged to explain just what a pump-action shotgun is and remind readers that they'd seen them in "action films and computer games." But not too often in real life. Until now.

On Saturday, the Süddeutsche Zeitung ran an editorial that in one respect at least pretty much echoed what all the other papers were saying. This was "the worst rampage in the history of the Federal Republic, a crime the likes of which one had thought could only happen in faraway America."

Few papers, though, actually gave voice to the implication: Following the Americanization of Germany's pop culture, its economy and politics, even its eating habits, a school massacre, complete with a Ninja face mask and black clothes from head to toe, was probably only a matter of time.

"The quiet realization is slowly sinking in," writes Goedart Palm in Telepolis, "that it's not just terrorists, sleepers and fundamentalists that pose a threat, but that violence right here at home can explode anytime, anywhere."

By Saturday evening, though, Telepolis contributor Marcus Hammerschmitt had heard enough explanations. Dusting off an old Boomtown Rats hit, he asserts that "no one wants to touch the emptiness that violence brings about, the actual theme of 'I Don't Like Mondays.' So they cover it up." With "words, with expressions of grief or commitments to take action, the main thing is: cover it up... And that's one of the reasons that, after Erfurt, everything will be as it was before Erfurt."

Elsewhere

Discussion of the Erfurt tragedy on Plastic and Metafilter naturally centers on differing attitudes towards gun control in Europe and America.