Photo Gallery Can the Violence Be Stopped?
The evacuation of the Olympia-Einkaufszentrum shopping center in Munich on July 22: After the massacre in the city, police received more than 4,300 emergency calls. Many believed Munich was experiencing the kind of terror previously seen in Paris. The calls turned out to be false alarms and the attack turned out to be a mass shooting rather than an Islamic State-inspired terrorist incident.
Police secure the area around Munich's Karlsplatz a week ago Friday. Reports had circulated on the Internet that terrorists were roaming the city and that shooting had taken place at the site. The quickness with which erroneous information spread on the Internet and social networks underscored just how high anxiety has become in Germany over the potential for terrorist attacks.
Several days later, another attack was perpetrated at a festival in Ansbach, Germany, also located in the state of Bavaria. Here, police are deployed to the site. This time, officials are investigating the possibility of real Islamic State links. Chancellor Angela Merkel says the "abstract threat" security agencies had been warning about for years had now become a concrete one in brutal ways, right in front of our own doorsteps.
German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière (left) and Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Hermann attend the scene of the massacre at the Munich shopping center the day after the shooting spree. In a recent interview with SPIEGEL, de Maizière said: "That there are such excesses of violence is, unfortunately, a fact of life. We do everything we can to prevent something like that, but to a certain extent, a society must endure it."
