“Why was 9/11 so traumatic for America?”

Today marks the two month anniversary of my new affair with Germany. We are getting along quite well, but I doubt that we will be intimate for longer than three more months :-D

My life currently has been defined by classes, reading for classes, partying (shocking, right?), sleep, and travel. I’m excited to say that I have now been in five countries (USA, Mexico, Germany, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands), and I already have plans to visit more. For example, I have already purchased a plan ticket to Manchester on June 11-14 to visit my good friend TJ (which only cost 20€ round-trip, huzzah!), and I might be going to Krakow, Poland with my roommate in July to check out Auschwitz (everyone should, at some point in their lives, be humbled by history). I’m trying to see and do as much as I can, while still trying to live the everyday life of a German college student.

The main reason I wanted to write today is to talk about my “Migration and Global Horizon of Contemporary American Fiction” course. It is a difficult class because it is a graduate-level course and involves quite a bit of intensive reading, but it is one of my favorite classes mostly because it never ceases to be maddeningly interesting. It mainly focuses on globalization (What is globalization? How is it affecting literature?) and post 9/11 American fiction. For today, we had to read an article by Richard Gray called “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis” which is criticizing post 9/11 literature for dwelling on trauma, then trying to move away from it. To sum up Gray’s argument: he tells his readers that American fiction writers focus on how traumatic 9/11 was and how life will never be the same, but the basic plots of the stories remain the same as pre 9/11 stories. We also read a short story by Dwight Eisenberg entitled “Twilight of the Superheroes,” which was a fascinating (and slightly depressing) story about different lives that were touched and changed by the falling of the towers. The most interesting/surreal/slightly disturbing part of the class today, however, was when we started discussing 9/11. Our professor posed the question, “Why was 9/11 so traumatic for America?” and he moved on to point out that the attacks on the towers were not statistically that traumatic (only 3,000 people died). At this point, I want to clarify that my professor is a guest professor from the US who has obviously wondered about and struggled with this topic himself, and he is not a foreign asshole who sees no significance in 9/11. So what do you do when you are asked this question in a room full of Germans whose history is much more statistically traumatic than ours? How can you explain to a foreigner the fear that leaked into our country on that day? To a point, our professor was right: this was not the first time that terrorism had shown its ugly face in America (it’s definitely been quite prevalent in other parts of the world), and 3,000 is a relatively small number of casualties. Was it, as a few German students suggested, the media that created the atmosphere of fear and loss? Or were we devastated that our isolation and control was broken? Or perhaps we were afraid because we had no clear enemy to stand against? Were we just lamenting our pride? Needless to say, it was an interesting and rough class. It made me ask myself who we are as Americans. What is our culture, what is our history, what do we stand for or believe in? Are we naïve? Europe has definitely had much more frequent and up-close experiences with war and terror—were we so bold to believe that our soil would not/could not be tainted in such a way? I was forced to look at America as both an American and an outsider, and I don't know if I'll ever recover.