Zeitenspiegel Reportagen

Ingrid Eissele of Zeitenspiegel has published a book on the theme (Kalte Kinder, Freiburg: Herder, 2009).

They beat up passersby at random, continuing to hit and kick them while they lie on the ground. Children without mercy. The lack of empathy upsets the police and criminologists terribly. But what is to be done? And what has made this generation so conspicuously brutal?

His face is a jumble. His cheekbones, jaw, even his eye sockets are broken. One eye may not make it. Last week, the insurance company employee Wolfgang O. had the first of many operations intended to restore his face to some semblance of its former appearance. Now 46, he will have trouble speaking for many months and may never recover a normal appearance.

He had held a talk for colleagues at his firm’s Munich branch before heading back to his hotel. The three drunken 16-year-old boys who attacked him were merely looking for a good time, they later told police. They wanted to “bash some people” “for kicks.” High school students in Küsnacht, near Zürich, Switzerland, they were in Munich on a school field trip. “Unarmed serial killers,” as the prosecutor called them, they attacked a total of five men that day, including one who was mentally retarded. After the attacks, they returned to their youth hostel and watched TV. The arrest took place later that night. Asked if they were aware that kicking people over and over in the head can kill them, they replied that they didn’t care.

Psychiatrists call such a condition “a lack of empathy.” But psychiatrists are not alone in their concern. Increasingly, juvenile courts are confronting crimes notable for their brutality and icy ruthlessness. “A fight used to be over when somebody was lying on the ground,” D.A. Wolfgang Beckstein says. “Nowadays, it’s just getting started.”

The anecdotal evidence is chilling . . .