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Isolated/insulated

One of the things that maybe the Europeans don't quite appreciate is the scale of 9/11: it is a crude measure to speak of the dead in greater or smaller numbers [how does one define a catastrophe?] but there is something about the magnitude of the event that may not have quite dawned on Europe. 

DH: Well, the scale is one thing, but as many people if not more died in India in the chemical disaster in 1984 and we didn't pay all that much attention to it, unfortunately. So mass human death unfortunately in itself doesn't necessarily lead the world's populations to focus. It is not only the scale of it but the nature of the attack. 

And the intention behind it? 

DH: Yes, the intentions behind it. The nature of the attack, of course, was also: using an airplane - it wasn't a natural disaster. It was an intentional attack. It was a symbolic attack - also aimed at the Pentagon, and if it had been successful would have destroyed the US Capitol, the US Congress and The White House. One has to think of the pieces of the plan that did not happen, but were intended. It was intended to wipe out the main centres of the US government in Washington, not just the World Trade Center. 

And the other element: again, one has to understand a bit of American history and Americans' perception of themselves. My simple analogy is the differences and similarities with Pearl Harbour: in 1941, our debate was about neutrality - Americans being neutral in European conflicts. And the idea that we did not mean to take part in a war in Europe - and if you know something about that time, our Congress was focused on Neutrality Acts, neutrality laws - while President Roosevelt was trying to convince people that we did have a stake in this. The attack on Pearl Harbour - although Hawaii was not yet a state of the United States, so it was not an attack on the American homeland, in that sense - shattered the sense of isolation from the rest of the world. But it did not shatter our sense of insulation from the rest of the world. We realized we couldn't be isolated, we had to engage - but we could engage across oceans, and during World War II the battle never happened in America, it took place in other continents. 

And the Cold War, also, frankly, didn't happen on American soil: our troops were forward-based in Europe and in Asia, there was no sense that American society was at war. We talked about it abstractly - our cities could have been destroyed, of course, in a matter of seconds, from Soviet capabilities - but the sense of American insulation from the rest of the world: that our society simply goes on on its own, and all the complaints you hear about the lack of media coverage of foreign affairs and all these things continued, I think, until September 11th. And it is this sense of insulation from the world that was shattered on that day. It is a historic change in the American mindset. 

We're now coping with it - and that's why we're coping with it sometimes in some extreme ways and sometimes in more reflective ways than at other times, but we're still in this process of reaction and lashing out. The scars on the national consciousness are far deeper than the attack itself.

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 Illustrationsfoto: The White House (Tina Hager)

Portrætfoto: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, The Johns Hopkins University