ASK some Germans how people should react to terrorism and most would probably agree with the historian Herfried Münkler that the best attitude is heroische Gelassenheit: heroic calmness. Let other countries declare wars on terrorism and near-permanent states of emergency, they say; Germany’s dark history has taught it not to over-react. Sceptics used to reply that talk was cheap coming from Germany, which had been spared major incidents of the sort that have struck America, France, Turkey and other countries. That changed in the space of one week this month, when Germany suffered four very different attacks.
First, on July 18th, an Afghan refugee stabbed and axed four passengers on a train and another on a platform. Four days later a German teenager of Iranian descent went on a rampage in a shopping centre in Munich (pictured), injuring more than 30 people and killing nine before shooting himself. Two days after that, a Syrian refugee hacked a pregnant woman to death with a machete-“relationship troubles”, the police said. Elsewhere that night another Syrian refugee tried to enter a concert with a backpack of explosives. When he was barred, he blew himself up, injuring 15 others.
Germans grew more jittery with each round of breaking news. There was a brief panic during the initial hours of the Munich rampage, as rumours spread on social media that three killers were on the loose rather than just one. Munich’s 2,300 police were inundated with 4,300 emergency calls, almost all of them false.
But Munich quickly recovered its poise. Under the hashtag #OffeneTuer (“#OpenDoor”), residents offered to accommodate anyone stranded for the night by the lock-down. Munich’s police spokesperson, Marcus da Gloria Martins, laboured tirelessly to sort fact from fiction. Mr da Gloria Martins, who wrote a thesis on crisis communication, ultimately became the country’s hero of the week. On a television talk show, he appealed to the audience and media: “Give us the chance to report facts. Don’t speculate, don’t copy from each other.” It was the biggest applause line of the night.
Most politicians heeded his advice, distinguishing carefully between the issues at play in different killings. The week’s worst disaster, in Munich, had nothing to do with Islamism. The 18-year-old gunman, David Ali Sonboly, had been bullied and suffered from depression, and had prepared his rampage for a year. He had read “Why Kids Kill” by Peter Langman, an American expert on school shootings. In 2015 he visited Winnenden, a town in Germany where a school mass shooting took place in 2009. He executed his attack on the fifth anniversary of the massacre by Anders Breivik on the Norwegian island of Utoya. Mr Sonboly’s case opened many debates. He had played “Counter-Strike”, a violent computer game also favoured by other shooters. Should such games be banned? The consensus seemed to be no; that would curtail liberty and be unfair on the majority of players who never become violent. Should Germany deploy its army in domestic emergencies such as this? Some, including Bavaria’s interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, said yes. Others pointed to Germany’s Nazi-era history and remained wary. Mr Sonboly had used a contraband Glock 17, the type of gun also preferred by the killers at Utoya and Winnenden. Should Germany’s gun laws be tightened? No, the consensus suggested; Germany already has some of the strictest laws in the world. Mr Sonboly had bought his gun illegally from Slovakia through the “dark net”, an encrypted portion of the internet. The weapon had been disabled for use as a stage prop; Mr Sonboly or someone else later restored it to shoot live rounds.
Public discussion of the other three attackers was equally mature. All were refugees from war-torn countries and probably traumatised. Two of them-the axeman on the train and the backpack bomber at the concert-acted in the name of Islamic State (IS). The former, an unaccompanied minor from Afghanistan, was only 17 years old. The latter, a Syrian nicknamed Rambo at his refugee centre, had been denied asylum and was to be deported to Bulgaria. He had already been in psychiatric treatment and twice tried to commit suicide.
Some worried that IS might have smuggled in terrorists amid the refugees who have arrived in Germany in recent years-about 1m last year alone. Germany is investigating 59 such cases, said Thomas de Maizière, the interior minister. (There are 708 other investigations into possible Islamist terrorist plots, involving more than 1,000 suspects.) But he cautioned that the vast majority of refugees are peaceful victims, rather than perpetrators, of terror. Most Germans agreed that refugees, especially the young and traumatised, should receive better counselling and supervision.
Only a few tried to make hay of the tragedies. During the Munich rampage, André Poggenburg, a leader of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party, tried to blame the open-door refugee policy of chancellor Angela Merkel-even before anyone knew who was shooting. “Our sympathy for the wounded and the bereaved, our disgust for the Merkelites and leftwing idiots who bear responsibility!” he tweeted. He earned immediate condemnation on social and broadcast media, followed by ridicule once it emerged that the shooter was German. Then the country went on being heroically calm.
