A city in lockdown; millions of residents urged to stay in their homes; drivers ordered to free up the autobahn for emergency vehicles; and social media sites frantically sharing images of a gunman on a roof: the weight of what it means to get caught up in a terror attack hit Germany hard on Friday night.
The 18-year-old attacker, Ali Sonboly, turned out to have been a bullied schoolboy loner who was suffering from depression and used the shooting spree to vent his acute bitterness. But that, of course, is of little comfort to the victims.
And much will still be expected of chancellor Angela Merkel and her government as they attempt to demonstrate calm control at a time when the German people are worried as they haven’t been since the days when the home-grown Red Army Faction was carrying out its murderous attacks in the 1970s.
Merkel is already under fire over the axe and knife attacks in Würzburg last week, although it is still far from clear whether the assailant was the 17-year-old Afghan he claims to have been when he arrived in Germany. Postponing her holiday in the Alps, Merkel delivered a three-minute address to the nation on Saturday in which she said that Germany was in “deep and profound mourning for those who will never return to their families”.
She added that the attacks were even harder to bear coming as they did on the back of recent atrocities such as those in Nice and Würzburg.
The Munich attack has also brought home just how many “soft targets” there are available to potential terrorists – shopping malls and trains to name just two examples of spaces that have proved to be particularly vulnerable in the past few days.
German intelligence now faces the daunting challenge of trying to construct a suitable strategy to address these concerns.
Rainer Wendt, of the German Police trade union, said: “I think there are not many more ways in which you can safeguard public spaces than we are doing now,” he told German TV on Saturday. “I think we might have to conclude that what is far more reliable is encouraging more social intercourse.”
There is every reason to suspect Sonboly may have deliberately chosen the OEZ shopping centre location for maximum impact when he planned his attack. The state-of-the-art glass mall was converted from the site of the 1972 summer Olympics. Seared in the collective memory in Munich is how Palestinian terrorists, with the backing of the Red Army Faction, Germany’s urban guerrilla movement, took Israeli sportsmen hostage there. Eleven of them were murdered, as well as a German policeman.
Sonboly’s killing spree follows in the vein of other schoolboy attacks of recent years. In 2009 Tim Kretschmer, 17, took his father’s Glock gun and killed nine students and three teachers at his school in Winnenden, south east Germany. Robert Steinhäuser, a 19-year-old with a grudge against his Erfurt school because it had expelled him, returned to it in 2002 and gunned down 12 teachers, the school secretary, two students and a police officer.
Just like Sonboly, Kretschmer and Steinhäuser killed themselves before they could be caught. The first two teenagers chose to stage their attacks in the relatively contained environments of their school buildings.
That Sonboly chose to take his grievances on to the open street – and amid speculation he deliberately picked the fifth anniversary of Norwegian “lone wolf” Anders Behring Breivik’s massacre – is the main difference between his and the other school boys’ attacks.
He may have relished the inevitable havoc he would cause and the added notoriety that would come his way – having followed recent Isis-led attacks in Brussels, Paris, Orlando and Nice – by triggering the lockdown of an entire city and the ordering of thousands of security forces onto the streets.
Following the dip Merkel’s popularity underwent as a result of the refugee crisis, it has soared again in recent weeks, following the terror attacks, the Brexit referendum and the attempted coup in Turkey. Germans appear to look to their chancellor for stability. It is likely that far from seeking to criticise her, many Germans will now turn to her even more for a calm and guiding hand.
