Lachen der Täter

Theweleit, Klaus - Das Lachen der Täter: Breivik u.a. .... Psychogramm der Tötungslust. Unruhe bewahren. 2015

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Vom Lachen der Killer wird in zahlreichen Fällen erzählt, auch die deutschen Wehrmachtssoldaten sollen einander in englischer Kriegsgefangenschaft ihre Gräueltaten mit großer Heiterkeit berichtet haben. Hinter dem Lachen verbirgt sich aber auch die andere Seite der Tötungslust: die kalte Rationalität der Rede, wenn die Täter ihre Taten öffentlich begründen. So kommt Anders Breiviks Verteidigung vor Gericht dem Text eines Statistikseminars über Einwandererzahlen in Norwegen nahe. Theweleits Essay entlarvt die Begründungssprache als Deckmantel der Tötungslust, denn, so die provokante Kritik des Autors, begründen lässt sich alles, doch glauben sollte man davon eher nichts.

Freud: Totem und Tabu. 1915: Die berühmteste These des Buchs ist die vom Mord der Brüderhorde am Urvater als Quelle der Kultur.

Garland-on-lynching - Description cr.middlebury.edu/amlit.../Garland-on-lynching-with-notes.doc...David Garland, “Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in ..

If public lynchings were like executions, they were most like the executions of a bygone age, above all the seventeenth-century punishment of burning alive reserved for the crime of petit treason-typically a wife who killed her husband or a slave who rose up against his master (Banner 2002:71) This choice of methods was no accident. When they seized their black suspect, lynch mobs reached for methods that would most forcefully convey the hatred and contempt they felt for the supposed perpetrator and his unspeakable crimes. It was thus unsurprising that the specific techniques they came up with-burning alive, hanging in chains, torturing and maiming the offender-were the same harsh forms of penal debasement that had historically been used in America and elsewhere, to set inferiors in their place and strip them of their humanity (Banner 2002:71; Merback 1998:141). Regular punishments were too good for these "offenders," regular justice too respectful and too dignified. Torture, burning, dismemberment, and display were all traditional, simple, and readily available modes of combining an excess of pain with the debasement of the person and the desecration of his body. By reviving these ancient penalties, the lynchers created an aggravated form of capital punishment, more terrible than official justice, and more nearly proportionate to the horror and rage provoked by the lynch victim's "crimes." The public torture lynching was invented to communicate impassioned sentiments that could no longer be expressed in the official idiom of the criminal law, and to inflict a level of suffering that had long since been officially disavowed.

Hence what appears, from the perspective of penal evolution, as the strikingly anachronistic character of these events. Southern crowds began to torture, mutilate, burn at the stake, and display corpses centuries after America's criminal justice authorities had abandoned these very same practices (Banner 2002; Masur 1989; Friedman 1993). They did so not because they were "primitive" or "pre-modern." They did so to invoke a set of meanings and distinctions that America's increasingly egalitarian legal system had sought to leave behind. The lynchers' use of "cruel and unusual" punishments was a deliberate32 flouting of the norms of modern law and civilized penology, a self-conscious choice, intended to degrade and defile black offenders and to refuse them the treatment afforded to convicted criminals by the criminal justice institutions of the time.33 The penal excess of these new lynchings was not an accidental effect of a crowd getting carried away-it was at the very core of the event's penal purpose and political meaning. In the eyes of the mobs, the legal process was not just slow and uncertain; it was also too removed and too restrained. For these particular "criminals," and for these particular "crimes," Southern mobs wanted to wreak their own brand of vengeance without intermediaries. The mode they preferred was impassioned, personalized, and communal; the techniques they utilized were deliberately cruel and unusual. Why? Because the crimes in question were perceived as crimes of lese majesty-challenges to the social order and the racial code upon which that order depended. Homicidal assaults upon white employers or law officers or public officials were serious affronts to the caste hierarchy around which Southern race relations were organized. Sexual assaults on white women violated the most intense taboo of the Southern racial code. Crimes such as these carried a collective insult, a racial dishonor, and a background threat of insurrection that implicated the entire white community. The outrage they produced was more intense and more collective than that produced by ordinary crimes and ordinary criminals, and this collective aspect was never more apparent than when relations between racial groups seemed volatile and uncertain.