In Germany last week, a man attacked passers-by with an axe at the Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof, the city’s main railway station. Seven people were hurt, with three sustaining serious injuries, and the assailant was captured alive, after jumping off an overpass and injuring himself. By all accounts the attacker was of Yugoslav descent, and had mental health issues. The conclusion is that the incident appears to have no connection to anything political or ideological, and relates only to the global human tragedy of people losing their minds and acting out the madness violently.
The problem for Germany is that it is one of numerous single person attacks over the past year or so, and the apparent lack of any orchestrated political motive in this case makes not a jot of difference to those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, as well as the rest of the German people, many of whom are frightened.
Just a day earlier, I had been in multiple German railway stations—Berlin, Leipzig, Nürnberg—on my way to Austria. In fact, I had been in Germany for the previous month, travelling around via train. Do I think I’ve somehow dodged a bullet? Of course not. Does it make me think that train travel in Germany is inherently unsafe? No. But equally, I don’t live here and the German people are experiencing a cumulative effect, because this is far from the first incident.
There has been a sudden and alarming increase in the number of lone attacks around the world, and especially in Germany. It appears to have started in February 2016, when a teenage girl in Hanover attacked a policeman with a knife, in what turned out to be a radicalised act. Three months later, in May, a single man with a knife and shouting Allahu akbar attacked four people at a railway station in Munich, killing one of them. Despite all this, it became clear that the attacker was a German national with serious psychiatric issues and no link to extremists. In the following July, a young Pakistani man who had come to Germany, pretending to be a seventeen year-old Afghan refugee, attacked five people with an axe and a knife on and near a train close to Würzburg in Bavaria. This attack was found to have connections to, and was claimed by ISIL—the Islamic State group.
Just three days later and Munich again became the target. This time it was a shooting in a shopping area, with ten deaths (including the shooter) and thirty-six people injured. This time the attack displayed all the hallmarks of the style of rampage that has become sadly common in the US. The shooter was of Iranian descent, but despite early reports that he’d been shouting Allahu akbar, he appears to instead have been shouting Ich bin Deutscher. Ich bin hier geboren—I am German. I was born here. It became clearer afterwards that the man had a history of mental illness and suffered from depression. It’s been suggested that he was targeting people of Turkish and Arab origin, because of bullying when he was at school, and that he had lured people to the location through a Facebook hack.
Only two days later, another attack in the small Bavarian town of Ansbach. This time it was a suicide bombing, the first in modern German history. Fifteen people were injured and the bomber died. While this was certainly a jihadist attack by a Syrian asylum-seeker, the action, as with many of the other attacks, was also the product of despair, given that the perpetrator had had his application denied and was about to be sent back to Bulgaria, his first point of entry into Europe.
Later in 2016 there was a machete attack in a small town near Stuttgart by another Syrian refugee, which killed a woman and injured two other people. It all appears to have been motivated by unrequited love. But then in December 2016 came the attack that truly capped off a year of violence. It was the truck attack in the Berlin Christmas market, where 12 people died (including the driver, a Tunisian man whose asylum application had failed) and 56 were injured. If Germany hadn’t felt persecuted and under siege before this, they were starting to now. Which is sad and ironic, given that the county, under Angela Merkel’s watch, had set the high bar for moral responses to the escalating refugee dilemma facing Europe.
Germany had taken the fairest, but strangely unique, position of metaphorically plucking drowning people out of the water before asking about their ideological, religious or political affiliations. On balance, any other response seems indefensible. And yet Germany has taken a hiding for their openness. One anomaly in all is that, in truth, it isn’t Germany that reacted this way. The individual Bundeslände, under the German Federal system, had the freedom to accept or reject the Merkel policy, which meant that many, or most of the individual German States did not choose to take refugees. As a consequence, the heavy lifting fell to only a handful of regions who have taken vast numbers of asylum-seekers, by world standards. Along with Berlin, Bavaria has had one of the largest intakes, showing a large degree of grass-roots support for the new arrivals. The sadness, is that so many of the attacks have targeted, or at least occurred in Bavaria, which ought to have done irrevocable damage to public sentiment. But in many areas, the reverse has happened.
I was in Ansbach in May 2016, just two months before the suicide bombing in that town. I was working on a series of radio documentaries that was looking specifically at this contemporary story of borders and refugees. Speaking to paid and volunteer workers who were dealing with the influx of asylum seekers, as well as people in the wider community, the level of determination to get this right and not become a fortress was impressive and quite moving. People were doing all this when they had no idea of an outcome. There was no precedent for this vast movement of people. So this made the bombing in this small regional centre all the more shocking and disappointing. After the attack I immediately rang my friend Ulrich Herrschner, who had enabled my visit just a few months prior. His job is to run the local office of the Bavarian ministry that looked after the arrival of unaccompanied minors—finding them homes, schools, toothbrushes, everything. They were doing an extraordinary job with limited resources, but a great deal of public good-will. I was concerned that an attack like this would cause that good-will to evaporate. When I spoke to him, this was clearly also his greatest fear. The possibility that years of hard work could be jeopardised in one flash of violence, was deeply upsetting for Uli. I rang him again two weeks later and asked what the fallout had been. He laughed. He said that the most surprising thing had happened. After the initial shock and fear, the widespread community response turned to active concern for the refugees, who they now perceived as fragile and traumatised and clearly needing support. This was such a sophisticated and counter-intuitive reaction from the people of Ansbach and I was amazed. Suddenly Uli felt strangely bolstered by what had happened.
Every now and then, there is also the sobering reminder that inexplicable cruelty can happen in any direction. This is a photo I took two weeks ago in Berlin. It’s the ongoing public memorial to the people that died in the Christmas market truck attack last December. But the other picture, below, is one I took in October 2015, also in Berlin. It’s a memorial for two little boys who were abducted, sexually assaulted and killed by a German man. One boy was a 6 year old from Potsdam, the other was a 4 year old asylum-seeker from Bosnia whose name was Mohamed Jasnuzi. He was snatched, just a week before I took this photo, from in front of the Landesamt für Gesundheit und Soziales, the State Office for Health and Social Affairs which is the registration point for refugees arriving in the German capital.
The memorial is some indication of the tragedy here, not just for the refugee community that couldn’t believe such a thing was possible after they’d reached sanctuary. It also caused deep pain for Berlin, at a critical time in the story of this refugee influx. Berliners had worked very hard to open their arms wide in welcome and many had actively re-engineered their worlds to accommodate and work with these new arrivals. These murders hurt everyone. They threatened the trust that had been built up and they proved that monsters were everywhere. But it proved to be a unifying grief, and I find this memorial particularly moving, because the tragedy and sadness brought everyone to this little makeshift space to honour the lives and mourn the deaths of two innocent little boys from both sides of a divide.
There are precedents for this sort of complex reaction to violence. One example is Gernika-Lumo [1] in the Basque region of Spain’s north. This year the community commemorates the 80th anniversary of the carpet bombing of the town by the German Luftwaffe, under the command of the Spanish Nationalists. This was more than two years before the start of the Second World War, and was one of the first examples of the targeting of civilians, breaking one of the fundamental rules of combat. It was a deliberate ploy to terrorise and break the spirit of the people and of any resistance. As a result, the technique also became known as ‘terror bombing’ or ‘obliteration bombing’. The utterly disproportionate scale of the attack could have gone largely unnoticed by the wider world, except for the serendipity of witnesses with loud voices. An Australian journalist, Noel Monks, was the first to visit the destruction, but it was English journalist George Steer’s reportage that would echo around the world like a gunshot. The speed with which this was publically recognised as a crime against innocent people was remarkable and it triggered something else. The widespread horror and outrage prompted the artist Pablo Picasso to embed the more abstract notion of unconscionable cruelty and destruction in his painting Guernica, which remains one of his most recognisable works.
However, it still comes as surprise when the Director of the Gernika-Lumo Peace Museum, Iratxe Momoitio Astorkia, calls her town ‘lucky’. What she means is that, being the first of a type of modern wartime casualty—plus having witnesses, a champion (in Picasso) and global recognition—her town was afforded a remarkable level of sympathy and profile. This sense of acknowledgement allowed them to be creative and, in a way, transcend the pain. It took many years though. It was not until the end of the Spanish fascist regime of General Franco in 1975 that the Basque people could own, tell and reframe their story. What they did though, was akin to the Ansbach response. Instead of endlessly regurgitating a story of victimhood, one for which the only response could be a memory filled with violence, hatred and unfulfilled vengeance, the story became one of peace and a determination for collaboration and conversation with other sites of disproportionate violence—places like Sarajevo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Coventry and Dresden. And this last one is significant, because it recognises that cruelty and innocence exist on both sides of a conflict.
Dresden—25th Feb 1945 after the Allied firebombing. (WALTER HAHN/AFP/Getty Images)
The other significance of this German-Basque conversation, is that it was the late German Greens leader in the 1980s, Petra Kelly, who visited Gernika-Lumo and felt moved to start the process of setting up the Peace Museum—the Gernikako Bakearen Museoa Fundazioa—and the partner Peace Documentation Centre—the Gernika Gogoratuz. A legacy of this today is that the Deputy Director of the Documentation Centre, is German.
I think this is why the diminutive town of Gernika-Lumo punches above its weight on the world stage. Not only does the name Gernika/Guernica triggers almost instant recognition and meaning around the world, not unlike a brand, but the almost transcendent reinvention of its story has also guaranteed the town’s place as a Mecca for victims from other mass trauma sites. Every year, on the anniversary of the 1937 bombing, people gather from around the world to remember, be inspired and to meditate on new conversations.
All this would be almost too perfect, except for the spectre of another narrative of home-grown terrorism. The Basque separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, known around the world by the simple acronym ETA, developed as a militant resistance organisation, in the post-war years, as an attempt to undermine the harsh, ongoing rule of Franco and to fight for Basque independence from the domination of Madrid. This was, in many ways, completely understandable, given the history of brutality that Franco’s government, the only fascist government to survive the end of the war, had shown to the Basque people. The bigger problem was that, when Franco’s fascists did finally lose power in 1975, ETA didn’t stop their program of violent resistance. One reason for this was that their main goal of independence had not been achieved. Another reason is that, although Franco had gone and the political landscape had become far more democratic, the Spanish government and state bureaucracies were still riddled with Franco sympathisers—a trailing effect that, to some extent, persists to the present day.
I don’t want to go too deeply into the politics of resistance and terror groups, but there are some serious questions to be asked in the case of ETA, which despite numerous failed ceasefires over decades, finally declared a permanent cessation of violence in 2012—although they have never formally disbanded There is no question that the organisation have systematically carried out bombings, kidnappings and executions over the years. For this reason, they are almost universally proscribed as a terror group. But I remain puzzled, and it’s a confusion that is shared by others. In 2000 I was in the Basque city of Bilbao. It was the year that ETA dramatically resumed hostilities after a lull of more than a year. I became very aware how frequently these attacks seemed to be carried out in Basque towns, often using bombs. Only a few days after I left the city, a bomb exploded in the market square of Bilbao, not far from my hotel. The targets were usually identified as players in the Spanish ruling establishment, but the risk of collateral injury against Basque citizens was enormous. So why so much violence on home turf, and not further afield, in ‘enemy territories’ like Madrid or elsewhere?
Many years later, my question was echoed back to me by someone else who’s had a lot of dealings with the Basque people. He said, ‘Are you so sure that all these attacks were in fact committed by ETA?’ He told me that there was widespread suspicion that many attacks may have been in fact carried out by Spanish authorities in order to discredit ETA at home. But you can’t really get anyone in the region to talk about ETA, because the organisation is still illegal and members still face jail. One person I spoke to in Gernika-Lumo has a brother in jail, accused of crimes as an ETA member. But I can never broach the subject. What for me is perhaps more of an abstract intellectual question is, for them, not at all abstract—it’s real, dangerous and affects friends and family in an ongoing and very distressing way. And it’s a period that seriously divided the community that it was trying to unite in solidarity.
The point of this is that, what can start off as an understandable socio-political grievance can quickly become a polemic that backs the actors into a corner where the only perceived option is an extreme form of behaviour. In the process, they unwittingly self-demonise, leaving authorities, by implication, always able to occupy (legitimately or otherwise) the opposite end of the moral debate. This theoretically is an open ticket for the authorities to do whatever it takes. It also then means that the activists can rarely ever come back to a socially acceptable position. Any movement towards conciliation feels like a failure of the cause, and public sympathy for the cause usually gets trashed along the way.
Another impact of such random actions is that, after repeated attacks or threatened attacks, even the terror starts to diminish over time. For London, the coordinated bombings in 2005 were truly shocking and unnerving. The scale of the attacks was hard for people to comprehend. But less than 15 years earlier, London was still one of the main targets for IRA bombings and had been for decades, and so back then there was little shock, only weary resignation. I lived and worked in London from 1990 to 1993 and that was a period of renewed aggression by the IRA. A friend of my brother lost her partner in a pub bombing in Covent Garden in 1992. I remember delivering flowers to her and the look of incoherent shock on her face haunted me. I felt like I’d intruded into her grief. But after just two years of experiencing what Londoners had been enduring for far longer, I was becoming somehow inured to the violence and the attempts to cause fear. After numerous real bombs and many, many more false alarms, the truth is that fear becomes something else that’s far more nebulous. There was an eye-rolling, collective frustration every time a threat closed the Underground. Suddenly millions of commuters had to rethink, replan their journeys, sometimes even having to walk home—all in the full knowledge that this was likely to amount to nothing.
Of course, the threat was frequently real and in just the three years that I was living in London, between 1990 and 1993, there were at least 79 bombs and incendiary devices planted, although some failed to explode. One of the largest IRA attacks in London was known as the Baltic Exchange Bombing. A massive device had been loaded in a truck and was detonated in The City, London’s business district at 9:20pm. I know this, because I’d just finished work at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s office in Great Titchfield Street in the West End. I was walking to the Oxford Circus Tube station for the Victoria Line down to my home in Brixton, but just as I was about to head underground, an unambiguous boom echoed across the city. I hesitated and then turned around and returned to the CBC studios, convinced that, whatever it was that had exploded, it was big and they’d be wanting story feeds back in Toronto. The late hour of the attack limited the human damage, but there were still 3 people killed and 91 injured. On top of this, £800 million pounds of damage was done to the buildings in the area. To put this into perspective, according to Ciarán de Baróid [2], the damage from all previous devices over the many decades of The Troubles—estimated to be approximately 10,000 explosions—amounted to roughly £600 million. This one explosion was a third more costly again, and yet, other than feeling a jolt, I don’t remember being suddenly afraid or feeling at risk—just a bit numb.
There is a point when escalating violence of this sort can end up having the opposite effect. This is not the case for people living in war zones. The terror of living in somewhere like Aleppo or Sarajevo is the stuff of madness. But in other spheres, the sort of terrorism I’m describing can start to take on the quality of pantomime parody, which of course is not the intended effect. The one difference in the current spate of what are being referred to as ‘lone wolf’ attacks, is just that—each attack is usually carried out by an organisation of one. The prompting from a distance, from IS or Al Quaeda or whatever group is calling for Jihad, is not control—it’s simply pushing as car without brakes from the top of a hill. Also, given that so many are suicide attacks, there is no chance for organisational or network learning, because each time, the organisation of one dies in the attack. The result must inevitably be like some groundhog-day/sci-fi scenario where everything resets to zero after each tragedy. It guarantees a certain repeatability, because there are no cautionary tales to be told or wisdom to be passed on. It’s a blunt process that has little chance to evolve beyond the limited knowledge and intelligence of the perpetrator, especially if that person is acting out of a mental illness.
Despite all this, while fear remains a background effect, fully intended by the distant, radical groups, the risks are low. Bodies are not piling up across the European landscape. The fact that this is feeding into the rhetoric of ultra-nationalist, far-right politics is unfortunate. But my experience is that Europeans are engaged in wrestling sophisticated responses out of these complex questions. There is a growing fortress mentality in some quarters and this is having as huge impact on how the European Union reshapes in uncertain times. But there is equally a push back against the right-wing fear-mongering. Austria’s recent Presidential election proved that lurching to the right is not the only option. However, these attacks will continue and the urban west has become the new battle ground for certain extreme outbreaks of disaffection. For some, it is possibly the only coherent cry after a life-time of pain that is beyond our understanding. We might not like it. It’s certainly not right. It just is.
[1] This is the Basque spelling of the town that is more widely known as Guernica
[2] De Baróid, C. (1990). Ballymurphy and the Irish war. London: Pluto Press. p.325