Contribution in an anthology

Appeared in: Framing Excessive Violence : Discourse and Dynamics

Editor list: Ziegler, D; Gerster, M; Krämer, S

Publication year: 2015

Pages: 137-159

ISBN: 978-1-137-51442-4

eISBN: 978-1-137-51443-1

DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137514431_8

Abstract: 
When, on 26 April 2002, the first school massacre with an enormous bloodcount of 17 people killed (including the offender) hit Germany, the shock and astonishment were enormous. Nobody thought that such a deed could possibly happen within German society, broadly peaceful since World War II and owing to the structures of the modern welfare state. Symptomatically, Germany’s leading newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), stated the following day: “Previously we have only seen images like this in reports from America.”1 In what is today, in cultural terms, a massively Americanised German society one thing still seems to be the trademark of America: the obvious problem of public violence. Thus the phenomenon of rampage and/or school shootings in Germany could generate questions that address both the lasting presence of violence within the social realm and the seemingly ubiquitous representation of violence through cultural artefacts. In this chapter I will focus on these two problems by examining German media coverage following the two most disturbing school shootings in Germany within the last decade: the Erfurt massacre of 2002 and the Winnenden massacre of 2009. This work is part of my research about rampages in Germany and the United States, which is still in its early stages. Therefore I will focus on two newspapers only — FAZ and Germany’s leading weekly news magazine, Der Spiegel. The data involved in the final project will be much broader in scale.

Harvard Citation style: Ahrens, J. (2015) German Rampage: Social Discourse and the Emergence of a Disturbing Phenomenon, in Ziegler, D., Gerster, M. and Krämer, S. (eds.) Framing Excessive Violence : Discourse and Dynamics. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 137-159. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137514431_8

APA Citation style: Ahrens, J. (2015). German Rampage: Social Discourse and the Emergence of a Disturbing Phenomenon. In Ziegler, D., Gerster, M., & Krämer, S. (Eds.), Framing Excessive Violence : Discourse and Dynamics (pp. 137-159). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137514431_8