There is a peculiar quality of innocence defiled in the school murders in Trollhättan: the murderer was photographed inside the school by a 13-year-old girl who had nipped out from class to get a pen and thought he was dressed up for Halloween. So he posed, with his sword and in his cape and Star Wars mask, with his arms around two pupils, for her to take a photograph. Apart from what she described as “spooky music”, it could all have been a joke.
Then a teacher came past – the Kronen school had earlier reported serious problems with discipline – and told them to move along. The masked man stabbed her and the children ran.
They escaped. Two others did not, and the killer himself died after being shot by the police. Two more are intensive care. It’s a story I find particularly horrible since I know the country there well. My son was born in that hospital. In those days such a crime would have been unimaginable. What has gone wrong?
The most obvious answer is “intolerance of immigration” but I believe that this is insufficient. The Swedish media are extremely careful about reporting racial details but it’s already clear that the murderer was white and probable that his victims were not. Trollhättan has a large immigrant population. The girl who took the photograph has five siblings, which suggests that her parents may not be native Swedes. The school itself is in a deprived part of town. Certainly, tensions are running very high in Sweden at the moment about multiculturalism, and the nationalist Sweden Democrat party is hovering around 20% in the polls.
Yet the murderer seems not to have been ideologically crazy in the sense that Anders Breivik was. He is reported to have had extreme rightwing views, but also to fit a much more American pattern of the quiet loner who needs to be famous: the mask he wore was out of Star Wars, and his weapon was a sword, as if he were a Jedi.
The culture of rural Sweden is fixated on an imagined America of the 60s: American cars and American music are everywhere. When all is known, I think this school attack will be more American than fascist, and no less tragic for that.
