Graz is split by the river Mur into two sides: 8020 on the west and 8010 on the east. The 8010 side contains the historical city centre with all that medieval and baroque architecture, the universities and the Schlossberg from which the city derives its Slavic name.
The 8020 side is split once again into two more slices by the railway line that travels north from the Hauptbahnhof up to Vienna, and south down to Ljubljana and Slovenia. This westernmost slice of Graz is squeezed between the railway and the Plabutsch hills that run the whole length of the city.
It is within this area that today’s shooting occurred. Across from the Hauptbahnhof lies the Reininghaus district, where the remains of the derelict brewery stands in the midst of new and unfinished housing developments.
A little north from this the Smart City live/work developments are being built. Helmut List Halle, a recently-built inverted cone where occasionally events of limited interest occur, was where injured students and staff were taken by emergency services during the incident.
All of this area is flat and relatively low-rise. Walking up along the Plabutsch on a clear day, you can see it spread out below you. The sound of hammering in the railway maintenance yards, or the whine of a drill in the Smart City developments, can be clearly discerned for kilometres. Gunshots would have rang out distinctly across the morning.
We moved there, or across the tracks from there, a couple of months before the first lockdown. Probably around the time of the shooter’s last years at the school. It’s an empty place to return to.
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