Standing around the television, we were all speechless. What was transpiring before our eyes, live, unedited, was nothing short of a nightmare.
It was the lobby of the Munich office of the consulting firm for which I work, and everyone in the building had gathered to witness the unspeakable. Government heads from around the world rushed to declare their solidarity with the United States in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
These were not empty diplomatic platitudes. On the contrary, the scene in that lobby in Munich was identical to the one playing itself out a thousand times over in the United States. The sense of shock, of utter incomprehension, that overcame my German colleagues coincided perfectly with friends' descriptions of the mood prevailing among those who, say, gathered around the big-screen TV in Frist. Judging from what I saw, on that September day, the world was united, for some brief moments, in its profound sense of incredulity.
I had intermittently been making frantic phone calls to the United States to determine whether my sister and her husband, who live and work in downtown Manhattan, as well as my closest friends in New York and Washington were safe. Once the dust had settled - figuratively, if not literally - I found out that everyone I knew well was physically unharmed. My frenzied efforts to contact friends and family did not go unnoticed, and the outpouring of coworkers was truly comforting. They inquired into the evening whether everything was all right, and showed every understanding over the following few days.
Nevertheless, the emotions Europeans shared with Americans seemed to disappear almost as rapidly as they arose. As Americans continued to grieve, to question, to celebrate the heroes who had ensured, some at the cost of their lives, that this catastrophe was not even greater, Europe - or at least Germany - returned to normalcy in an almost chillingly short period of time.
By the end of the week, aside from the constant news from the United States, there was little indication that anything had happened on Tuesday. Indeed, when the country was to hold five minutes of silence in honor of the victims a few days later, I was one of only two people in the office, again in Munich, who ceased work for the duration of the period. I glanced out a window and noticed that the indifference was not limited to the admittedly busy consultants with whom I work. Residents of Munich of all walks of life were going about their lives as normal despite the official nation-wide observance.
In some ways, it was comforting to witness Germans swiftly resume their daily routines. It demonstrated that the citizens of this Western democracy would not be deterred by the attacks of freedom-loathing terrorists. But I don't think this was the intent of Germans, at least not in general. Rather, I sensed in a number of cases that Germans and other Europeans hurriedly resumed their quotidian habits as a way of avoiding or even fleeing from the burdensome truths with which Americans were openly coping.
As firefighters were frantically searching for survivors under the rubble of the fallen twin towers, it was not uncommon to hear Europeans complain about the comparatively meaningless disruptions to air travel. In some instances, I could only explain this conspicuous lack of sympathy through a deep-felt need to avoid the consternation everyone, Americans and non-Americans alike, had experienced on Sept. 11.
This is not to say that Europeans generally did not care. There were certainly a number of gestures through which a good many people exhibited their empathy, from the laying of flowers at the American embassy in Berlin to a number of gatherings throughout Germany in which a people nowadays not accustomed to displaying national symbols fervently waved American flags.
However, in general, something bothered me about the way in which the vast majority of people went about their daily lives just a few days after the calamity. I knew that I had so much to be thankful for. My sister was well, as was her husband and my friends who lived or worked in downtown New York. I had been to the World Trade Center myself many times, and was fortunately as far away from it as I could have been on Sept. 11. At the same time, it was painfully clear that so many other people had been devastated by this tragedy. To me, several days after such an unfathomable tragedy, Europe's resumption of normalcy simply did not seem quite right. Arthur Steinbock '01 is a former Wilson School major. He is currently in Cologne, Germany, and can be reached at steinbck@alumni.princeton.edu.
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