becoming friends. Julia could have been my daughter. She reminded me of my younger self – confident and idealistic, driven by an unshakeable trust in the idea that it is possible to shape the future. From the very start, Julia’s face touched something in me, bringing back the memory of things I had lost and for which I must have been mourning – much more strongly than I was aware. In that picture in particular, she looked so proud and safe and at home in her skin and her beliefs. I found myself vacillating between fascination and disgust – after all, this woman had blood, so much blood, on her hands.
On the day following the terror attack, Julia’s ‘manifesto’ was published on the front page of every newspaper in the country. The number of her victims had risen to twenty-three, and one woman, still in a critical condition, would later succumb to her injuries, bringing the total to two dozen. Apart from the manifesto, Julia, who had turned herself in to the police straight after the attack, remained silent. She refused to see anyone but her lawyer. She refused all contact with her family. She refused to receive friends and members of the various political groups to which she had belonged. She refused to speak to journalists. Even during her trial, she never uttered a word. It was almost as though her silence was her second, perhaps even crueller attack: she simply refused to grace us with an explanation.
Her manifesto rehearsed some standard anti-capitalist slogans and a few anti-globalization catchphrases. She denounced the unethical exploitation of workers in the so-called Third World; she decried the apolitical consumerism that dominates our age and the shocking lack of public interest in the suffering of the oppressed in countries other than our own; and she called for a radical rethinking of neoliberal economic policies that pursue growth at all costs. But the manifesto’s rhetoric was strangely unimaginative and lacklustre. I couldn’t help feeling that she was mocking the idea of manifesto-writing, or perhaps even political activism as such. I feared it was nothing but a teaser, a deliberate slap in the face for those in search of answers.
Unsurprisingly, as Julia remained shtum, others began to speak in her stead – both about her and (unauthorized, of course) on her behalf. A chorus of overexcited voices populated the airwaves and flooded the print media, trying to drown out Julia’s uncanny silence. Anecdotes, half-truths, legends and myths soon began to circulate and multiply at an astounding speed. People from all professions were anxious to categorize and analyse Julia and her acts, to explain and thus somehow to master them. Predictably, psychologists and psychiatrists were the most sought-after talk-show guests – psychology, after all, is still the most apolitical and reconciliatory master narrative out there, as everything can safely be explained with recourse to Mummy’s or Daddy’s lack of unconditional love for their offspring (I feel like Amanda just kicked me hard in the shin from afar). But there were also politicians, historians, sociologists, economists, teachers, theologians – the line-up of so-called terrorism experts eager to share their views on the matter was endless. Was Julia ill or evil, pathological or a sinner? A victim of false ideology or a dangerously deluded radical? A disturbed maverick or an alarmingly symptomatic product of our perverse age? Should the professed political justification of her deed be debated seriously, or was she simply a nihilistic sadist? How did she fit in with her terrorist cousins – Latin American guerrilla fighters, IRA activists, the German Red Army Faction, Islamist suicide bombers, militant animal-rights campaigners? What did the anti-globalization movement, the causes of which she had seemingly embraced in her manifesto, make of her? Had she acted alone or were there others who had supported her? And who were the parents who had