Running Amok
September 20, 2009
During my first week at school in Dakar, I had heard an odd noise during a meeting with the school’s director and could not resist looking out the window. The sound turned out to be the bleating of a sheep, and I was amused, as this was not the sort of thing that would ever occur during board meetings in New York. This strange noise and the occasional bit of homework not done were memorable among the ‘challenges’ I faced during my time teaching school in Senegal. The students were bright, articulate, rose to greet their teachers and, more astonishing still, usually (though not always) remembered to clean the board without prompting at the beginning of class.
At my first school meeting in Dortmund, on the other hand, two big topics of discussion were a) the swine flu and b) what to do in case a student went amok. Fears re the latter had intensified because of a recent incident in a quaint city of half-timbered houses near Stuttgart. In the usually peaceful haven of Winnenden, Tim Kretschmer killed fifteen people and then himself on March 11, 2009. He was only seventeen and came from a fairly well-to-do background. Talk about culture shock! Such an occurrence would have been simply unthinkable in my Senegalese school, so I decided to conduct a bit of research on such incidents in Germany.
Thankfully the most recent attempt, on May 12, 2009, was thwarted in yet another idyllic town, Sankt Augustin, near Bonn, the former German capital. “First I want to see my classmates cry, then I’ll die,” declared Tanja O., 16, a good student, in her farewell letter. She had her attack with a homemade bomb all planned but was foiled by a fellow student who came in to use the bathroom as she was preparing to launch her attack. After badly cutting the other girl, Tanja fled the scene. She was later apprehended and brought to a mental hospital.
On April 26, 2002 in Erfurt, 19-year-old Robert Steinhaeuser killed 12 teachers, a secretary, two classmates, and a police officer, culminating in the most massive explosion of violence ever seen in a German school to that date. Towards the end of his shooting spree, he came upon a teacher named Rainer Heise, who looked him in the eye and said, “You can shoot me now.” The youngster allegedly responded politely, “Mr Heise, I’ve done enough for today.” Mr Heise locked the student in a room to await the police; it was in that room that Robert shot himself.
The motive for all this is of course hard to pinpoint, but Robert had been kicked out of the school in 2001 for falsifying a medical excuse note. Without a diploma of any kind, job perspectives were slim and his future thus in jeopardy. He was an avid fan of violent films and video games, so that shortly after his death tighter restrictions for minors were passed in this domain.
In Emsdetten, a town in North Rhine Westphalia, an 18-year old boy named Sebastian Bosse entered his former school with guns, smoke bombs and a knife on Nov. 20, 2006, injuring several classmates and a teacher before killing himself. He had been the victim of mobbing by his classmates for years and had to repeat two grades because of his poor academic performance, which are some of the reasons given for his action, which he had announced on an internet site two and a half years prior. He worshiped Eric Harris – notorious for his involvement with the Columbine massacre – and towards the end of his life Bosse wrote exclusively in English in his diary so that people all over the world would be able to understand him, as he indicated on Nov. 17, 2006:
All I want now is killing, hating, and scaring as much people as possible!
Sometimes I write shit in English because I want everybody to understand what the hell I’m talking about.
The boy’s diary ends on the date of the shooting with the pithy note: ”That’s it.”
http://www.menschenkunde.com/
Bosse was apparently also a fan of violent video games, which once again launched a whole political debate about the wisdom of forbidding such games altogether. Even in the preeminent German legal magazine Zeitschrift fuer Rechtspolitik the subject of school killings is raised. In a convincingly argued piece, Michael Koehne argues against stricter regulations on violent video games, saying very sensibly that such games are certainly not the cause of violent behavior and that we need to get to the root of the social problems instead.
In the introductory phase of the class I am now teaching in the social sciences, I will be discussing the topic of violence in schools with my students, along with such insidious new phenomena as ‘sexting’ and cyber bullying - though I sincerely hope with no new incidents to report from anywhere in the world!
(Sadly, the day after I finished this piece a new occurrence of school violence rocked Ansbach, Germany: an 18 year old loner who had long been in psychiatric treatment came to school armed with an ax, two knives and bombs and wounded 8 students and a teacher before the police were able to subdue him).
About the Author : Tamara-Diana Braunstein brings us her stories from Senegal every week. She was born in
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