Der verweigerte Bildungsroman. Amok zwischen Avantgarde, Genre und Ritual

»Das Leben ist ebensosehr eine Nachahmung der Kunst wie umgekehrt.«

Victor Turner: Vom Ritual zum Theater (1982)

Summary

To »run amuck«: To be in a frenzy to do violence or kill; one man’s war; a rampage. Sociologists look at such rampages as evidence of societal conditions and at the actors as beacons that »bring the buried truths of modern society to light.« Novelists like Stefan Zweig see rampages as a genre and write stories of a character fighting a war for one. Amuck runners contribute to this genre too. Ernst August Wagner wrote a four-year autographical sketch leading up to his rampage in 1919 — an eerie similarity to modern rampages where high school students document their journey to amuck on pc’s. But literature is not simply a passive instrument that collects and tells stories; literature also instigates rampages. For Robert Steinhäuser (Erfurt school, 2002, 17 dead) the instigator was the fabled Ninja. Steinhäuser turned his fictional world into real life when he dressed up as a Ninja and ran amuck; at the end of the scene he unmasked. The above mentioned Wagner saw himself as the people’s educator in the style of Fichte and Nietzsche. The »Calgary-Mall-Sniper« in the US fantasized about being Conan. These killers ritualised literature and brought their interpretation full circle to a violent end. This text discusses these various perspectives of running amuck with the thought provoking realisation that in Europe amuck does not exist — at least not for academia and science.