670.5
Negotiating, Narrating and Modelling Terrorism - Using the Example of the “Munich Shooting“ in 7/2016
Taking the Munich Shooting 2016 as an example, this presentation aims to investigate socio-cultural images and framings of violent incidents by tracing how they are negotiated and deployed in order to better understand the construction process of coherent narratives. Understanding that the public (i.e., media, legal and civic action) take an active part in shaping and modelling these narratives, this presentation will describe the conflicting debate of public negotiation that leads into a situation-definition that itself shapes and structur ses further images and understandings not only of history but also of future assessments.
It is crucial to investigate how the construction of a coherent narrative in response to fatal incidents works; in fact, is necessary for shaping the communicative memory (Assmann) and collective narratives of a society. For that, the presented findings are based on a “Mass-Medial Dialogical Network”- Analysis (Nekvapil) focusing on media data of the Munich incident in order to gain an insight into the cultural knowledge used to meaningfully denote such events for the societal public. A phenomenological lens is deployed that looks at norms in action by taking the sequence of social action a (Garfinkel).
The Munich attack is an important example since the first definition (Islamist shooting) proved false, the motive of right-wing-extremism was then dropped and it was then defined as deriving from personal trauma. Furthermore, this presentation will take into account the biographical perspective of the attacker’s fascination for violent right-wing extremism, documented in his manifesto.
Overall, this presentation will contribute to a better understanding of public debates that structure images and narratives of violence, spaces of memory culture and cultural knowledge. Also, it will investigate how forms of violence can be mediated through specific cultural narratives.