That is given us

[selenak]

You've probably heard by now what happened in Munich last night. I wasn't anywhere near the Olympiazentrum, I'm in the mountains an hour form Munich right now and in another part of Germany tomorrow, so I did what most people outside Munich did - follow the news and social media in between texting friends to check on them.

Incidentally: re: social media, the people managing the twitter account for the Munich police did a great job (as they've done last year when the refugees from Hungary arrived), reporting what happened, explaining as far as they knew, providing people with landlines and coordinating efforts from helpers. (Not just in German but also in English and French, and Turkish.) Also, the press officer, Marcus da Gloria Martins, who had to do the press conferences, became everyone's instant hero for refusing to be drawn into baiting and insinuating questions, staying calm, and projecting gravitas. (This is him.) Given that wild rumors had several shootings happen all over Munich (not true), and that for hours it wasn't clear whether it was one shooter or several, up to three (it was one), having someone providing information who refused to speculate and stuck to the facts while also communicating, not shutting people's questions down, was really a good thing.

Still: people are dead, killed in the city where I live. Within a week of the axe murderer in the train from Würzburg (which I often take). And a friend of mine, who is working in an organization devoted to helping underage refugees, says they're getting vile hatemail now. (Which has also been reported in the news.) These are terrible times we live in. Which reminds me of something Tolkien wrote:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I'm glad that you're safe in the middle of all this turmoil

[selenak]

All of my friends except two who aren't on social media have reported back safely as well, I'm glad to say.

[gehayi]

I'm glad you're okay! This is the first I've heard about it. Every media site I'm linked to has been focusing on the U.S. political conventions.

[selenak]

It's so overwhelmingly present on all German media and some British that it's easy to lose sight of how it comes across elsewhere. Still: Obama already gave a statement before 8 pm last night!

[lilysea]

I'm so sorry. :(

I'm so glad you're not physically hurt.

When I saw the news, my first thought was that "Munich mall" must be the name of a mall in the USA somewhere.

It's not the thing you think of happening in Germany...

[selenak]

Thank you. It's not the kind of thing that should happen anywhere, but it does...

[jesuswasbatman]

When there were the tube bombings in London in 2005, one of London's senior police officers, Brian Paddick (who was later to unsuccessfully stand as Mayor of London for the Lib Dems) held the first press conference on the day, and impressed me by very early on declaring that Islam in general was not to blame for the attacks.

[selenak]

Since it now seems that the shooter was inspired by high school killings (and researching same), not the IS, and felt himself mobbed at school, da Gloria Martins' and the Munich police's general refusal to baited into "IS terrorist" speculation in their public statements is looking better and better. By contrast, our boo-hiss governor of Bavaria whom I told you about, Seehofer, has started the day with sayings like "there can be no liberty without security", which made me think "you have that backwards, sir" as soon as I woke up, sigh.

[jesuswasbatman]

Hopefully the fact that he was inspired by a "counter-jihad" fanatic will stop people from making any allegation that this was Islamist, but I doubt it. (This is secondhand from my father, but the British media is reporting that the killer invited specific people he knew from school to the imbiss via Facebook so that he could shoot them.)

[fallingtowers]

This is secondhand from my father, but the British media is reporting that the killer invited specific people he knew from school to the imbiss via Facebook so that he could shoot them.

Yes, that seems increasingly likely. He used to live and attend school in the area where the shopping centre is located until the family moved to another part of town a couple of years ago, so there seems to be some personal rather than ideological connection. Police have also reported that they found media coverage of the 2009 Winnenden school shooting when searching his room.

[st_aurafina]

I'm glad you're okay, and your friends too. It's really scary when something terrible happens close to home.

[selenak]

It is. But at least now we have the technology to check on (most) people - twenty years ago, I might still not know that they're all okay!

[gelliaclodiana]

I'm glad to hear that you are safe; I was thinking of you last night. But you have my sympathy for the suffering in your city.

[selenak]

Thank you!

[ratcreature]

Glad you are okay.

You'd really hope that disturbed teenagers wouldn't be able to get their hands on guns and ammunition to go on shooting rampages. :( I can see how you can't realistically control knives and axes, but as seen from the death/injury toll it takes more effort to kill people with those.

[wee_warrior]

I wish there was more easily accessible help, too. To catch people before the point where they decide projecting their pain to the outside and hurting or killing others is the solution, it has to be possible.

[ratcreature]

Apparently the shooter in this case already had been in therapy for depression? I mean, now they say he was obsessed with Breivik and picked the anniversary as date because of that, but I'm not sure how you can find out that kind of thing from a teenager if they don't share without being super invasive and do regular room and computer searches which would be really damaging to any parental relationship and trust. So the signs are there in retrospect, but I'm not sure you can tell in advance.

I mean, as a teenager I did cartoons in which avatars of a teacher I hated (in the form of a fish because of their last name) were violently hacked to death, and eaten by dogs etc. and such, which I actually made into stickers and distributed so everybody decorated their books and such with that cartoon (the teacher in question really sucked, so there was demand, and as a teenager was a little shit who lacked the empathy to see that no matter how crappy the teacher, that was a cruel bullying move even though I was in a less powerful position and the teacher was ruining an important subject, i.e. math, in a year crucial to our final grades). I suppose these days I'd get in trouble for cartoons like that, but actually because the teacher I hated was also disliked by her colleagues, the only thing my Vertrauenslehrer (a teacher advisor in a counseling role) did, was ask for a copy of the sticker. (Which in retrospect I boggle at because you'd think a mature adult would point out that this is inappropriate behavior.)

[wee_warrior]

[ETA: forget the first sentence, I misunderstood you. I'm sorry, my brain is like cheese these days. Heat doesn't help, either.)

I don't think you can tell in advance, which is why the whole idea of "exorcising" your pain by hurting others needs to become less enticing. I don't know if it is possible to manage that, since it feels like a whole lot of thinking needs to be examined for an idea like that to really change (I did a class at uni that I keep coming back to, how gendered reactions to pressure and crisis often are, and that men tend to take it outwards and women inwards. That was a class in the 1990s, and our texts went back to the 1980s, so it's certainly not a new phenomenon by any stretch, but it seems to happen so often these days.).

Remember in "Bowling for Columbine," when Moore interviewed the creators of South Park? One(?) of them went to the same school the boys who shot their classmates did, a few years earlier I think. And he took his rage and anger and made a cartoon show with it - and I never liked South Park, it's not my thing, but somehow, that seems like a more appropriate way to deal with being bullied or depressed. In that respect, I don't think what you did in drawing that caricature was bad - it certainly was better than hurting the respective teacher, or even worse, hurting others who had nothing to do with your situation.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, things would be much better if men only went on suicidal rampages as often as women. So presumably we just have to fix patriarchy for things in the socialization of boys to go wrong less frequently. :/

And yeah, in a range of responses doing a violent cartoon is much better than many alternatives. I've always found violent fantasies a great tool to remain outwardly calm. In retrospect I don't feel bad so much about using drawings to express my frustration as how I used them against her, because now I recognize that that teacher had serious problems herself, and I'm pretty sure me doing a cartoon campaign where she had to look at images of herself being violently killed on every student workbook in class made her workplace much worse, so on a human level I was shitty to somebody who was probably already suffering. Though as students we were suffering too, and back then I only saw that part (for me wasn't even that awful because I was very good at math and already understood differential calculus anyway, but none of my classmates did, which for their math requirements was truly disastrous).

I have no idea how she got to be a teacher in the first place -- she was totally lacking in interpersonal skills with both students and her colleagues, and knew her subject but was unable to teach it. Because pretty much everybody was dissatisfied with her performance, and both students and parents protested, eventually she had to go after just six months, after we got somebody from the supervising education department to audit her classes (which considering the German school system is astonishing and tells you something about how bad she was).

[wee_warrior]

So many situations would seemingly be much easier without the patriarchy complicating things. What were the benefits of keeping it around again?

I think back at some of our student-teacher relations with similar feelings. I guess as a teenager, one is really that self-absorbed, but to be fair, teachers do seem like they have all the power from the teenage point-of-view. And neither you and the other kids nor the teacher herself were done any favours by having her do this job she was apparently only qualified for on an intellectual level.

As for getting hired in the first place, according to my teacher friends, the Referendariatszeit is basically hell on earth (I guess it varies by Bundesland, but Niedersachsen is reportedly horrid), but maybe one of the people responsible for testing the would-be teachers was impressed by her.

[ratcreature]

She wasn't a young teacher, so maybe she used to be better at it, and it worsened in some kind of negative feedback loop. I think she's been shuffled around for a time because it is so hard to get rid of teachers once they're in. (We also had an unfortunate case of a teacher rumored to have traded blowjobs against grades with girls at the school they were transferred from, but at least the guy could teach...)

[wee_warrior]

I'm glad you're okay. And yay for the press officer staying calm.

"May you live in interesting times." Isn't that supposed to be a curse?

[selenak]

Indeed, and just the other day I had to explain to a kid in the train why...

[musesfool]

Such a sad and terrible thing. I'm glad you're okay!

[selenak]

Thank you!

[cadenzamuse]

I'm sad for the world, these days.

Really impressed with your press officer, though.

[selenak]

I don't think I'd have had the focus and patience not to snap for longer than five minutes under these conditions, so, yes, same here.

[petra]

My deepest sympathies on people doing the wrong thing in your city. All praise to the officials who respond appropriately.

[selenak]

Thank you!

[monanotlisa]

Thanks for sharing. Oh, Germany. <3

[selenak]

When you wake up, check the news about Ansbach. This has been the worst week in Bavaria for the last 70 years, to be sure.

[wendelah1]

It's so horrible that this violence is happening and keeps happening.

Great quote. Thank you for reminding me of that.

[selenak]

You're welcome. Tolkien could have a way with words...

Friday Night in the City Center (tl;dr)

[fallingtowers]

I'm just glad that one of my best friends chose to take a four-day weekend this week and go on a spa trip to Austria. Her office building is in Dessauerstraße, a seven-minute walk from the fast food restaurant where it all started, and she often goes shopping in the OEZ after work. She couldn't have had more perfect timing for her mini-break.

I was nowhere near the shopping centre, but I was stranded in the city centre for a while, and to my shame, I completely freaked out. My mobile network kept crashing, so it was hard to verify what was actually going on. The only reliable information I had was a mere headline from my news app that read "Shooting in Munich -- several dead -- terror alert". That didn't really help.

When policemen with machine pistols marched up at Munich Central Station, I wanted to get as far away from there as possible. So I started heading home, in the direction of Stachus, but at the corner of the Karstadt department store, someone approached me and warned me of the alleged shooting at Karlsplatz -- a rumour which they took to be true at the time. I didn't know I could run that fast. ;)

I was pretty panicky and ended up waiting in a random shop down Augustenstraße because I was afraid of being out alone in the street. By that time, I had heard that completely false rumours about an "incident" at Tollwood, the actual news about Marienplatz and Odeonsplatz being evacuated by armed police officers, and the update that the police were looking for up to three shooters.

Fortunately, another customer was looking for friends to come and pick him up by car, and they kindly offered to drive me home. Conclusion: I would be totally useless in an actual emergency, and in a bad Hollywood movie, I would be the hysterical civilian who gets killed in act one or two.

But I'll never again complain about my Friday nights usually being dull as fuck.

Re: Friday Night in the City Center (tl;dr)

[wee_warrior]

I got caught up in a huge brawl once - ironically, that was in Munich as well - and even though I wasn't attacked myself, I was near hysterical. Which in my case usually manifests as helpless giggling, so it added a certain flavour to the situation. And yes, I can run pretty fast, too. Which is to say, don't be hard on yourself for freaking out in a situation like this. Shock makes you do the strangest things.

Re: Friday Night in the City Center (tl;dr)

[selenak]

Oh, I'd definitely be the canon fodder dying in act 1 as well. Your experience sounds awful. I'm just glad I wasn't in Municih at the time; my parents already lost a child and they'd completely lost it if they couldn't have reached me once the news hit.

[maidenjedi]

I am really glad you are okay, and really pissed off and sad that this happened at all, anywhere. :-(

[selenak]

Yes, same here!

[stelleappese]

I'm glad you're ok. The whole thing still feels surreal to me.

My aunt, cousin, and great-uncle live very close to the place where the shooting took place, and my aunt and cousin had actually just left the mall when it all happened. My cousin was supposed to meet some friends there, but she got grounded and my aunt was about to take her back home when they started hearing gunshots and were stopped by the police. She said her friends were hiding in the mall and texting her while the shooting happened. I can't even begin to understand what that must have felt like.

[selenak]

Same here. My mother would say your cousin had a guardian angel lookingn ou for her.