Excerpt from We Are But We Are Not Psycho by Tim Krabbé

Credit to Thedragonrampant.

She was kind enough to provide some english excerpts of  Wij Zijn Maar Wij Zijn Niet Geschift (We Are But We Are Not Psycho), by Tim Krabbé



Columbine & everything related
Columbine was the result of the accidental meeting of two completely different boys who happened to form one disastrous combination: one boy who wanted to commit mass murder and was willing to die to get what he wanted; one boy who wanted to die and was willing to commit mass murder to get his wish. The arrest brought them together, their culture encouraged them, their environment did not stop them.
But when they went to school that morning, the shooting no longer was what either of them wanted. Eric did not want to die anymore, but he had become what he had blustered about: an Eric-without-NBK no longer existed. The only thing he had left was to actually do it. Dylan only wanted to die himself. His cry of triumph echoed throughout the school: “Today is the day on which I die!" If another couple hundred people had to die before his ascent to the halcyon — so be it. A few less deaths? Fine as well — it was so much fun to go crazy.

I love the way Krabbe succinctly summarized the two -  that about sums it up for me.



His friends from Plattsburgh and his friends from before that, from Oscoda (Michigan), would later call Eric ‘just a regular kid’. Kinda short, good with computers, doing well in school, polite, nice, a little shy. But he didn’t like all that moving around, which became apparent when he was a sophomore in Columbine and had to write an essay for English about the novel ‘O Pioneers’ by Willa Cather. Eric chose an angle that suited him far more than it did the book: the loss of friends/friendship. I have not read the book myself, but in discussions online it became clear that this was not a theme from the novel.
"It’s always hard to leave good friends behind," write fifteen-year-old Eric, “and because many of them live on the other side of the country, I might never even get to see them again." They had lived in woodlands during his three-year stay in Oscoda. The neighbours were few, but there were enough kids his age to play with. “We built fortresses in the woods, sometimes out of snow; we rode around on our bikes, or just roamed around the woods. That’s when I probably had the most fun in all my childhood."
..
Eric was a bit of a hoarder. Many of his essays and schoolwork, often tagged with dates, were found in his room after the shooting. “The Hangout", which he wrote as a Columbine-freshman, also detailed the lost happiness of Oscoda. At the same time, however, it shows how much he, as an eleven-year-old forest inhabitant and as a fourteen-year-old writer, was fascinated with weapons, explosives, battle.
..
Shortly after the move, Eric lets a friend from Plattsburgh know that “it’s no fun in Littleton".

Hopefully more to come!  I've been dying to get a glimpse of this book for a while now.  If more snippets are posted, I'll be sure to add them to this thread.

Excellent post !!

Chapter three:

In the last chapter I tried to make a smooth, fitting story of the masscare based on the witness statements in the government documents.
Madness, because only about the massacre itself it's more than tenthousand pages and all this work has ofcourse been done before.
But the official report often doesn't match these testimonies and the story's in books and on the internet are even worse.
Just to mention one thing, the police states: Harris and Klebold placed the two propane bombs in the cafeteria, and went back out to the student parking lots to their respective cars and waited for the bombs to detonate.
But neither the placing, nor the walking back, nor the waiting in the car is witenessed, the waiting is even impossible.
I have them both placing a bomb in the commons, but immediatly after that I let them go upstairs-The why I explain later.
The official story never mentions that something is not known, or just suspected, or is forced to be assumed- they act like retelling a movie.
Sometimes their own actions are embellished, they let officer Gardner arriving 5 minutes earlier at the westentrance, shooting at eric, than possible based on his own testimony.
Ofcourse these testimonies are a hopeless mess - Columbine was a complicated event with hundreds of witnesses, contradicting each other, contradicting themselves, seeing things that never happened,
don't see things unfolding in front of them, imagine stuff, influenced by the media and by each other - and the interviewers writing it down indistinct and don't ask in-depth questions.
The witnesses can't be blamed. Witnesses who had the opportunity to look concentrated to a normal situation often remember the strangest things - and many of these witnesses were astonished, terrified kids hiding under tables
and in cupboards for killers with guns and bombs. Most of them only saw legs or foots and heard voices that, amidst the pandemonium, were laughing cheering and yelled frightening stuff.
Only some saw their faces, or knew them good enough to make a distinction between their voices, therefore in many cases I had to write "they" said or did something. Things only seen or heard by one witness I left out,
Other things not witnessed at all, like Eric and Dylan walking up the outside stairs to the spot where they started shooting, I treated as a fact.
Of course there were good and clear witnesses, that even under the thread of a gun had an eye for detail and placed the events in a plausible chronologic order.
A remarkable number of kids had knowledge of firearms and bombs, some of them were able to hear by the sound of the shots which weapons were used.
I have given the most plausible reconstruction en ignored contradictions and ambiguities. The most importand of these, and some interesting side-issues are elaborated in this chapter.

In the rest of this chapter Krabbé shows where he got his information or he goes in-depth about a specific event or person. For example Page 9"today is not a good day to be here" in this part Krabbé gives background information on this thought of the day which is briefly mentioned in the previous chapter.
Since my english isn't that well and my typing skills are even worse, I give my fellow dutch posters the opportunity to translate other parts.

Thankyou so much for posting this!!

Removed at Tim Krabbé's request, his own translation is to be found here:

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Jaan wrote:

One more

Chapter one
This book started in april 2007. An insane student, Sueng-Hui Cho, then killed 32 people and commited suicide afterwards. In a video message he called himself a martyr
and compared himself to the Columbine killers. God yes, Columbine - what was that again? Didn't that happen a little less than 10 years ago, a massacre by students on a highschool
in a wealthy suburb of Denver, Colorado? Once I walked there for a day and what i specifically remembered was the clean, fresh air (it's a mile above sealevel over there) where something
that sinistre didn't fit. These guys made less victims than Cho, but still a shocking number; between 10 and 20 i thought. And they also killed themselves in the end.
And didn't they ask a couple of kids if they believed in god and killed the ones saying yes? One of the guys had a striking name, which I even recalled: Dylan Klebold.
I also remembered a thought which came up again: that Dylan made his parents extra piteous - you call your kid like that hoping that he's going to be valuable.
Didn't he get sucked in by that other? He had a very ordinary name, but I didn't remember it. And there was something about a group of alternative kids they belonged to, who were walking in long black coats
and who announced the shooting on their website - The trenchcoat mafia, that I also remembered. The most bizar detail I found out later, because of Bowling for Columbine, the anti-gundocumentary by Michael Moore.
Before they went to school for the massacre and their suicide, they went bowling. How to imagine that? Did they like bowling so much they wanted to do it one last time? Was it a way to collect courage, a ritual? Did they really play, did they care who had won?
Their suicide scared me because it was a double suicide - after the madness of killing the children there must have been a moment of calm consideration: we do it now.
I couldn't recall a motive. I assumed they were bullied and cooled their anger on random persons, just like Cho, But he was insane, he felt despised and left out, and he withdrawed himself in a unbreakable silence.
With Columbine I recalled these guys were normal, as far as you can be normal commiting an act like that. Just the plain fact there were two, there must have been a thought they both found sensible.
I decided to look up one and other about Columbine.
The kid with the normal name was named Eric Harris. He just turned 18; Dylan Klebold was 17 and a half. The massacre, they were preparing for a whole year, took place on april 20th 1999, on Columbine high school in Littleton a Denver suburb.
They started shooting outside during lunchbreak, killed two kids there, went into the school, shot a teacher in the hallways, went to the library and shot 10 kids there. They were laughing and cheering. 15 minutes passed, beside the 13 deceased
there were 21 injured. After that they roamed the school for half an hour, shooting and throwing bombs, but they didn't make additional victims even though there were 200 students and staffmembers pourly hidden in classrooms and other spaces.
Finally they went backt to the library and commited suicide there. With 15 deads Columbine was the worst schoolshooting ever, in the USA or where-ever.
In that first part, the wikipedia article, their were some immediate surprises. Eric and Dylan didn't went bowling that morning, they did ask a girl if she believed in god, but didn't shot her after she said yes, the shooting was't announced on the internet,
The trenchcoat mafia did excist but was only involved by implication. And especially: what they were doing wasn't what they intented to do - they wanted to blow up the school and make hundreds of victims.
But their timebombs failed and than they settled for the sideshow, the shooting.

More to come if anyone is interested, and if I have enough time.

Great translation job, Jaan. Wish I had the time...

Thanks for the translations!

Removed at Tim Krabbé's request, his own translation is to be found here:

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Quote :

They shout about anger and revenge, the desire to unite in death with a lover, de brainless mass which doesn't deserve to live - but it all seems justifications for an urge they don't understand themselves.

That is the best description of Columbine ever!

Everyone knows that "urge" E/D had was wrong, but at the same time it also seems like the most sane thing in the world.

Jaan, you are awesome for posting all this, and I'm certain that everyone of the board is extremely grateful.

Thank you for this, Jaan!

ETA: Does anyone know who actually said, "we are but we are not psycho"? I had a quick look and all I found was that "the boys insist". In my mind it was Eric (just sounds like something he'd say), but I'd love to know for definite.

I've only ever heard it be said in all descriptions of the basement tapes that both boys insisted "we are but we aren't psycho", although I am also leaning toward Eric actually being the one who came out and said it first. It just seems like the more logical option, to me, to have him say it first and to have Dylan jump in with immediate agreement.

It is nice to see my excerpts made their way on here! I translated one more segment and will probably do a couple more interesting bits and pieces, but I also realise that there are copyright issues attached to this thing that will make it impossible to translate the entire book as-is. (I really do not want to get into any legal trouble here!) I can only hope that it makes its way into an English-language release, because the timeline is an astounding piece of work and the dissections of both journals are very helpful. If there are any requests for a particular fragment of information or interpretation of a piece, though, please tell me and I'll do my best to locate and translate it!

This is the only other part I have translated at the moment:

Quote :

Of course, the witness accounts are a hopeless mess. Columbine was a very complicated event with hundreds of witnesses who all contradict one another’s statements, contradict themselves, see things that can’t have happened, don’t see things that must have happened right in front of them, make stuff up, are influenced by the media and each other.. and the questioners take everything down in vague wordings and don’t think about pressing on with other questions.
…
"Go, go!" called Eric
The whole “go, go!"-thing is a returning element of the Columbine-story, but there was only one witness who reported hearing it. That same witness claimed that it was not Eric or Dylan calling this, but rather a third boy he also saw shooting and throwing bombs later on.
This statement makes that witness attractive to the conspiracy theorists that always involve themselves in cases like this one. In the case of Columbine, the third shooter is their favourite — “Sometimes it looks like more shooters were in that school than students," as someone wrote.
..
Many third shooters can be explained away by the fact that the boys took their trenchcoats off, Eric first and later also Dylan. It gave cause for four different descriptions of shooting and bomb-throwing boys: a tall one with a trenchcoat, a tall one in a black T-shirt, a short one with a trenchcoat, a short one with a white T-shirt.
The “Go, Go!"-witness first saw two trenchcoat-clad boys at the top of the stairs. Moments later there was a third boy, in a white T-shirt. That’s the boy who cried “Go, Go!" at the two others, who then started shooting away. After that, the boy in the white shirt also began to shoot.
In that trio, of course, were two Erics; once with trenchcoat, once without. At the same time, this testimony is valuable: if the “go, go!" was called at all, then it was Eric who called it. And that does say something about the relationship between the two boys.

Excerpt from the detailed timeline provided in Wij Zijn Maar Wij Zijn Niet Geschift (We Are But We Are Not Psycho), by Tim Krabbé.

This book just sounds so fascinating! Thank you thedragonrampant, for translating this too. I'm really appreciative. Now I just need to learn Dutch or convince a US/UK publisher to publish it! I want to read the whole thing so much.

thedragonrampant wrote:

but I also realise that there are copyright issues attached to this thing that will make it impossible to translate the entire book as-is.

Unfortunatly there are, the first chapter is available for free in dutch so I guess I'm safe there. The biggest problem with translating this book is the ammount of text which is translated by Krabbé from original documents. We have a english-dutch translation and it's almost impossible to translate it back to the exact words which were used (so you should look everything up in the original documents), the problem can be seen in the different translations we have from the first chapter. Also you're first translation we saw here contains a part of one of eric's school essays, it's almost the same but there are minor differences. No offence though, I think you did a great job

You're very welcome, Kinney.  

Jaan, yes, I think that general availability of the first chapter would mean you're safe from any legal stuff where that's concerned. (I had no idea that part had been released online until just now. ) Thank you very much for the compliment -- and thank you for taking the time out to provide a good translation for that entire chapter, too. The minor differences in translation will always arise, probably even if someone were to translate it professionally, but if you were to translate the journal parts you could possibly just use the original texts and then add the translated interpretation from the book. Krabbé uses a huge amount of source material in his book indeed, so any professional translator would have their work cut out for them if they wanted to get it just right!

At Tim Krabbé's request I give you the link to his own translation of chapter one:

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Jaan wrote:

At Tim Krabbé's request I give you the link to his own translation of chapter one:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

At "Tim Krabbe's request"?   Thanks to both you and Tim.    This made my day!

That's great to see!  

I have some more excerpts for you. Hope these are to your enjoyment!

Excerpt 1:
"Klebold followed Harris wherever Harris went," as witnesses stated.
But when journalists saw the Basement Tapes, that vision changed. According to some, it was Dylan who seemed to be the dominant figure (the ‘psycho’ of the two) on those. He talked more often, seemed more determined, appeared to be the biggest hater. “Contrary to popular opinion," writes the Denver Post, “it is Harris who comes across as the most sympathetic of the two. He was seen in the first few days as angry and weird, but here he is apologetic and somewhat remorseful. (..) Klebold is monstrous on those tapes, raging on about his lifelong hidden anger and all the slights he suffered at the hands of his fellow students, teachers, and family. (..) He shows no contrition, just deadly aggression."
Years later, in 2006 when the journals of the two were released, that monstrosity took on a different meaning. Then it became clear what Dylan was really like, when nobody else was around: pathetic, down, interested in nothing but his misery and his reunion in death with an imaginary soulmate — not even the shooting mattered to him. It is this side that he kept hidden from Eric. His monstrosity was an act — it was showing off, begging for acceptance, the price he had to pay for his ticket to the halcyon. He misled Eric.
But he misled everyone. (..) On the Diversion list with thirty problems, of which Eric noted fourteen as being relevant to himself, Dylan only ticked two: money and jobs, exactly the two things that said nothing about himself. The Diversion-people swallowed the story; in the three-quarter year he had to deal with them, Dylan knew how to keep the kookiness of his journal hidden from them completely. Just like he hid it from his parents, his friends, the entire school. And from Eric.

Excerpt 2:
Eric and Dylan seem to have trusted one another until the very end. Nowhere in their journals do they have doubts about whether the other person will want to go through with it, or do they say something unfavourable about the other. But they were deceiving each other.
Dylan starts his journal in March ‘97 — one year earlier than Eric starts his, but around the time Eric starts his website. In that first year, until Eric’s “NBK.doc" from the end of april ‘98, Dylan names Eric once, and Eric names him twenty-three times. That one time, Dylan calls him “Eric", all twenty-three times Eric uses the confidential “Vodka" or the even more confidential “V".
(..)
In the privacy of his own journal, Eric’s ideas are meaningless to Dylan. His journal doesn’t speak about natural selection, the invalidity of morals, burning the world down to the ground.
Dylan named Eric once in the first year of his journal — in the year after that, he does so thrice. Once as ‘Reb’ in a list of otherwise redacted names; twice as Eric. One instance is a casual remark about the fight between Eric and Zach — the other time is his sigh on January 20th ‘99 or shortly thereafter:
"Im stuck in humanity. maybe going “NBK" (gawd) w. eric is the way to break free. i hate this."
Not only does it mark the first time, eight months after Eric and he decided on their earthshaking mass murder, that he says something about it in his journal; he also speaks guilelessly about the way he sees Eric.
(..)
The ‘gawd’ indicates horror that this is the way it’s going to be — he had dreamed about an NBK with Her. It is almost as if he recoils from using that ‘magical phrase’ NBK in combination with Eric Harris — as though it is sacrilegious to go on and do something so intimate as killing and dying together with him. Eric may be, without knowing it, busy to arrange the halcyon-journey for Dylan, but on this journey itself he is an unwelcome companion.
With this ‘gawd’, Dylan edges closer to writing something unfavourable about Eric than he ever did before.

Excerpt 3:
I wrote this one by hand, so I hope it's legible!
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Krabbé's comments concerning the item of Eric's [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]:

They found ‘a block of wood with a hole in it’, as police described the item, in the right pocket of Eric’s pants. It was later seen in the exhibit of the evidence.
In his essay that Eric had written at the start of his senior year, entitled ‘25 things that make me different’, he put something of interest in fifth place: “my berserk and zippo that I always carry in my right pocket”. He’d drawn a lighter (zippo) and, next to this, the same “block of wood with a hole in it” in yearbook writings to Dylan and another friend. That block of wood with a hole in it was nothing other than Eric’s berserk.
But what is a berserk? The word originates from the Norse sagas in which battle-frenzied warriors slip into a trance-like state in order to conquer enemies in battle — it was also the foundation for the English word “berserk”. But in Doom, the game Eric called ‘my actual life’, there is also a berserk. It’s a sort of black medicine box that you can pick up, after which the screen is covered in a red haze. Your health will return to maximum, and the punches of your fists will get extra power.
Eric’s block of wood was the berserk he always carried on his body — a talisman that would grant him invincibility.

thedragonrampant wrote:

That's great to see!  

I have some more excerpts for you. Hope these are to your enjoyment!
]

I like this depiction of Eric. I just recently noticed how down and sad he looks in the brief video of him buying propane on the morning of NBK.

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It took several viewings of this clip over a period of a couple months for me to really sense Eric's sadness. But I did finally get it from this brief clip and the clip really seems to correspond to the portrait presented in this thread.

I don't suppose there is any news about an English translation of Krabbe's remarkable book. I don't think I can bear not being able to read this! From the excerpts kindly presented here it sounds absolutely fascinating.

ThoughtBox wrote:

I don't suppose there is any news about an English translation of Krabbe's remarkable book. I don't think I can bear not being able to read this! From the excerpts kindly presented here it sounds absolutely fascinating.

It is acctually an amazing book, but you have to keep in mind, that we have access to the same sources that he used for his book. He never interviewed someone involved or had access to other sources. But most his conclusions are very interesting an it's a very good read.

I read somewhere that Krabbé really would like to have his book published in English, but there are not a lot of people interested in the U.S., because they believe that there allready is a good written book about Columbine  F*cking Cullen!

bump.

Columbine Books for all to read (including "We are but We aren't Psycho"):

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