One of them went wild. You can see immediately. Totally beside himself, pure brutality, a murder machine, it has a huge knife, waves – and stabs. No pixelation can cover it up, the horror of the scene in Würzburg, and the mental cinema starts with many: Who tells me that the one next to me won’t go crazy too? No, you say to yourself: No, if you go crazy like that, you have to be of a certain kind. And some people wish: May this strain be found out. And then there are those who think: and lock everyone away.
So there has to be an explanation for the crime in Würzburg. The perpetrator was mentally ill, that’s one thing: traumatized in the civil war, then psychotic, just gone crazy. The perpetrator was politically radicalized, according to another: Addicted to Islamism, on the jihad trip. The third explanation is that it was a femicide: a misogynist who murdered three women out of misogyny.
Smartphones are evaluated and psychiatric reports are read. And in the end, the facts about the story of one kind of person are merged. These Somalis, say the right wing, they just have such a brutal culture, knife attacks are normal for them, women don’t count for anything, so they come here and just kill women. These mentally ill, the anti-racists say, are simply aggressive, and when they run amok, they do it because they are mentally ill. For them, ideological motivation is just one of many slides that they could put over it. These patriarchal men, say the feminists, turn their insecurity and oppression outwards, they channel their anger into misogyny because society teaches them that. So who do we have to lock up now? Civil war refugees, radicalized Muslims, sexist men, traumatized?
But then come the disturbances of the story. Wait, only the very few mentally ill are violent, say the psychologists, special circumstances must arise: Certain forms of psychosis combined with severe trauma, drug use, social isolation or a lack of treatment. Wait a minute, only very few femicides take place so publicly, say the feminists, most are perpetrated by men in the family. Wait a minute, say the defenders of the open society, only very few men traumatized in civil wars who flee and come to Europe commit murder here.
And so slowly, very slowly, a story emerges that no one likes: The complex story of a 24-year-old man who must have accumulated such an explosive mixture of violence in his not-too-long life that he collapsed under it. And the complex history of a society that wants to be an open society, but is so overwhelmed by dealing with mental illness, social isolation and violence that it fails to care for the most powerless. Let it be said: very few of the most powerless empower themselves in such a brutal way.
This story is so full of contradictions, it doesn’t tell about the kind of person to be locked away. One can work for peace, against civil war and (male) violence. One can develop better social services and psychiatric facilities (much better). You can turn many screws. But not on one. This story is not a story.
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