25 Years
my memories of 9/11 and German guilt
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9/11/20264 min read
Today’s Western world seems to be divided into two groups: those who still remember exactly what they were doing on September 11, 2001, and those who were too young or not even born at the time. I belong to the first group; I was fifteen years old, in eighth grade and living in Germany. Without smartphones, we didn’t find out about the disaster that had unfolded that morning in New York starting at 9 a.m. local time until after school, when we saw it on TV. The next day, September 12, there was speculation and agitation during recess. A classmate told us that her mother’s friend had an appointment in the Twin Towers on the 11th but had overslept. To this day, I don’t know if she was telling the truth or just trying to shock us. My Turkish friend, on the other hand, said nothing; she just stood there, ashamed, because people were discussing the footage of the Islamists celebrating the attack in front of rolling cameras—the tendency to lump all Muslims together was popular even back then; my friend was viewed with suspicion. Then it was my turn.
A teacher told us that one of the terrorists was from Hamburg-Harburg, our neighborhood. “Marienstraße,” I heard him say; I looked at my friend in disbelief and turned bright red. That was my street. On my way home on September 12, a few houses down, I saw several camera crews and realized that must be where the killer had lived. I kept seeing a camera crew there spring 2002 when we moved away. We didn’t do that because of the terrorist Mohammed Atta, who until recently had lived next door; my parents had bought a townhouse. I never stopped wishing the move had happened half a year earlier.
But it didn’t: we lived in an apartment building with the number 62; Atta, considered the leader of the terrorist group, who flew the first plane into the North Tower of what were then was the world’s tallest buildings, rented an apartment in building number 54. Four houses away, but with a street between 58 and 60, which put my mind at ease—the camera crews surely wouldn’t be interested in me. I felt dirty, as if I were living in the “gutter,” or as people used to say—politically incorrectly—in the “ghetto,” where fanatical murderers spend years planning, unnoticed, to kill as many Americans as possible. In total, nearly 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001, and more than 5,000 lost their lives later because of the attacks, which the terrorist group Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for.
Those who are old enough know: First came the war in Afghanistan, followed by the Iraq War, and the Germans, like many other nations, became G. W. Bush-haters. Propaganda videos quickly began circulating on YouTube accusing the U.S. government itself of carrying out the attacks (the situation was similar with the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023). 9/11 was followed by numerous terrorist attacks claiming hundreds of victims, including those in Bali, Madrid, London, Mumbai, and Paris. Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls in Nigeria, for which some Western media outlets blamed Barack Obama instead of the terrorists themselves. ISIS established a terrorist state and committed genocide against the Yazidis. Following the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban are making life a living hell for Afghan women. Although Osama bin Laden was killed and his al-Qaeda organization decimated, Islamist terrorism persists.
Those who were too young at the time seem indifferent to this: Surveys show that the majority of Gen Z in the U.S. don’t even know who al-Qaeda is; the situation is likely very similar in Germany. On TikTok, Bin Laden’s crazy “Letter to the American People” even briefly trended in 2023; influencers from Western countries then claimed that the bloodthirsty hater of the West was right all along. Comedian Pete Davidson, whose fireman father died in the 9/11 attacks, recently performed at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia. When asked why he was working for a regime indirectly responsible for his father’s death, he replied, “For the money.”
But back to Hamburg: As early as 2001, I felt that Germany’s response to its role in the terrorist attacks was too subdued. A full three suicide bombers—the pilots of the three planes that attacked the U.S. on September 11—were part of the so-called Hamburg cell. Added to that are five other terrorists who were either arrested or managed to escape. As a teenager, I was used to the German press and television’s thirst for sensationalism. Where was that now?
No feature films were made; no fellow students or professors from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg—where Atta had been enrolled for a full nine years (!)—were questioned on talk shows; no one resigned from any position. The camera crews from Marienstraße had produced nothing illuminating except footage of a few embarrassed neighbors who said Atta had been unassuming and polite. The Hamburg mosque, which the terrorist cell frequented—and where they surely didn’t just chat about their studies at the Technical University—wasn’t closed until 2011. The campus barrack where the terrorists had met for their “Islam Club” wasn’t removed from the TU campus, as I recently learned (and immediately wondered if I might have ended up there by accident at some college party). I also read that several lawsuits were filed against the so-called “computer-aided search" by the German police, rather than accepting it as a necessary counterterrorism measure.
Just one year after 9/11, when I was sixteen, I saw Ground Zero on a class trip to New York—a sight that moved us all to tears. Ten years later, I visited the new World Trade Center complex, which appears graceful, colossal, and sad. When I tell Americans about the strange coincidence of where I was living at the time, they’re shocked. They say I was in danger. It wasn’t until much later that I realized so much more could have happened in Hamburg. But people acted as if the danger was far away or already overcome. We were lucky, but that doesn’t absolve us of responsibility for 9/11. The least we can do is to never forget this catastrophe and pass it on to future generations with greater urgency, so that they don’t flatter murderers for money and likes.