Germany Remembers Worst-ever School Massacre

A year ago on April 26, 2002, 19-year-old Robert Steinhäuser gunned down twelve teachers, a secretary, two students and a policeman in his former high school in Erfurt. The incident rattled Germany, and prompted some painful soul-searching among the country's media and experts to address problems of violence among young people. There were calls for stricter gun control measures and the banning of violent computer and video games.

On the anniversary of the massacre, society is starting to take stock of the past year, and many experts in the country say Germany hasn't learned lessons from Erfurt's tragedy.

"The new gun control law that was adopted in reaction [to the killings] is in large part useless and doesn't solve the problems that we are facing socially," Konrad Freiberg, head of the German Police Union, told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. Freiberg said the barriers the new legislation created would not stop young people from getting access to weapons.

The law, which came into effect early this month, raised the minimum age for ownership of sporting guns from 18 to 21 and for hunting firearms from 16 to 18. Anyone younger than 25 must now have a certificate asserting they are mentally capable to own weapons unless they are registered sport shooters or hunters.

Atmosphere of violence

Although nothing along the scale of Robert Steinhäuser's bloody rampage had ever taken place in Germany before, assault and vandalism are everyday occurrences on German schoolyards. In the violent atmosphere that prevails in schools, bullying is the most common phenomenon.

"The weaker children are tormented, and these tormented children are then so frustrated that they could one day become aggressive -- very aggressive -- and carry out massacres. Or there is the bully who is so confident and invigorated by his own behavior that he believes he could commit a massacre," criminologist Hans Joachim Schneider told DW-RADIO.

The German Teachers Union wrote in an unpublished memorandum on the anniversary of killings that violence in schools has increased over the past year, Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported. "Nothing has changed since Erfurt -- not in the media, not in the schools, not in society," the paper quoted Teachers Union president Josef Kraus from the memo.

Dealing with trauma

Experts say that laws are not the right way to address the problems. "We are just dealing with the symptoms," media researcher and Catholic theologist Thomas Hausmanninger told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. "Without such a debate nothing will change and our society will be shaken by terrible experiences again and again."

As memorial services take place in Erfurt on Saturday, April 26, nearly 100 students from the Gutenberg Secondary School are still suffering form the psychological trauma of Steinhäuser's actions, The Associated Press reported.