 Aaaah! For The Sweet Tramp Of The Goosestep.
Tragedy leads to nostalgia for stable past
German unification blamed by some for fatal school rampage
By Michael Riley
Denver Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 29, 2002 - ERFURT, Germany - The violent shooting spree that rocked this quiet town in southern Germany last week has put Hans-Peter Ahr in a nostalgic mood.
"You can say what you like about the Stasi (East German secret police), but this would never have happened while they were watching," Ahr said of the school shooting Friday that left 17 dead, including the 19-year-old assailant.
Talk of the tragedy of the present leads Ahr quickly to reminisce about the past, when the former East German government under which residents here lived until 1989 provided security and a stable economy.
It's a theme repeated among some residents who have seen their INSIDE: Teacher who shoved shooter in classroom
is hailed as a hero.8A community hit by economic crisis and rising crime since uniting with West Germany more than a decade ago.
The town's factories once sent typewriters to the Soviet Union and car bodies to Eastern Europe, Ahr said proudly.
As a member of the Eastern Bloc, Erfurt boasted Olympic champions in figure skating, gymnastics and, he said without a trace of irony, shooting. Some of that still survives. The German state of Thuringia, of which Erfurt is the capital, would have ranked fourth in Olympic medals at the Salt Lake City Games if counted as a country.
"Maybe this is the price of freedom," Ahr said of the shootings. But "If I were a father of a dead child or the wife of a murdered teacher, I might say it was too high."
Erfurt, like many cities of the former German Democratic Republic, has undergone a rocky transition since joining a united Germany.
True, residents say, there are oranges and bananas on the shelves, when apples were about as exotic as fruit got during the days of the former Soviet empire. Travel in Western Europe and the rest of the world is now accessable and common. Just about anything is available for those with money, residents say.
But since the region's rusting industries were opened to competition with the rest of Europe, much of the city's economy has withered.
The typewriters and most of the auto body factories are gone. And the city's unemployment rate is near 20 percent.
A German reporter at a press conference Sunday pressed the point when he asked the city's mayor whether the shooting spree might be linked to lack of opportunities in Erfurt's version of the new Germany. The killer, Robert Steinhaeuser, had been expelled from school recently and he targeted mostly teachers in his attack.
Some observers are also drawing a direct link between unification and the increasing level of gun violence in Erfurt and other former East German cities.
Horst Zeitschel is a manager of one of the city's largest gun clubs, which are now under scrutiny after police confirmed that Steinhaeuser killed his victims with a licensed 9mm pistol he obtained through another club in the city.
In a country proud of its stringent gun laws, sporting clubs like Zeitschel's are one of the few ways individuals can legally own and license a gun. Nationally, there are 2.5 million members in gun clubs, and commentators are now calling for new regulations for them.
But Zeitschel said that before joining more liberal West Germany, all guns at the club were kept in a steel vault. Members had to present identification to get access to the guns they used for target practice.
"Nobody had a gun in their home, not members of sports clubs anyway," Zeitschel said.
He doesn't believe last week's school massacre would have happened when this town was part of East Germany.
Even if clubs like his are regulated more closely, Zeitschel said the country has seen a flood of illegal guns come into the country through the open borders of the European Union.
"Today, if you have money, you can get anything from anywhere," he said.
Certainly, not everyone in Erfurt would trade the security that an older generation says the region enjoyed before unification for the freedoms that have come since.
Many of the young boys who stand on the city's street corners wear shirts with logos of American sports teams and listen to American rap.
Several young survivors of the shootings at Johann Gutenberg high school told reporters that new restrictions on their freedoms - either censorship of violent movies or tougher gun laws - weren't needed.
They seemed to be willing to take the risk that a more open society brings.
One of those risks, some feared, is that Erfurt will now be remembered for little else than the worst school shooting in the country's history.
The town's mayor and city council told reporters Sunday that Erfurt is determined to move beyond the killings.
"We will make a new start," Mayor Manfred Ruge said. "We will begin with the schools."
But Heike Grimm, an economist who has studied the region, says Friday's shootings will present a real problem for Erfurt in the future.
Grimm said she is already worried about attendance at a conference she is organizing here next year that was meant to boost small-business development in the region. She is afraid that many of the American and other invited foreigners won't attend.
"It will be hard now to convince businesses to come here," she said. "When businessmen look at moving into a new area, they look at schools for their children. They want to know they're safe."
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2002-05-04, 05:24
