The European Precedent

The contemporary landscape of most European cities is shaped as much by what is gone as by what remains. In a region ravaged by millennia of tragedy, no area has been spared the violent destruction, not only of many historic landmarks, but also of countless individuals who once lived and worked among these landmarks, giving them life and imbuing them with meaning.

America was supposed to be different. The terrors of the Old World were safely quarantined far from our shores shortly after we gained independence, perhaps sometime around 1812. While we regularly sent our sons off to war, foreign attacks on our forces were always something happening "over there," far away from the moms and dads back home. The one previous exception to this rule, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, remains a scar on the national psyche to this day. It should come as no surprise, then, that the only parallel most American commentators have found for the events of September 11, 2001 are those of December 7, 1941.

While one must not downplay the importance of what happened in Hawaii 60 years ago, comparing the debatably greater tragedy of what happened in New York and Washington on Tuesday with the bombing of Pearl Harbor obscures the significance of these recent events. There is no analogue in the American experience of World War II to the attack on the Pentagon, let alone the destruction of the Twin Towers. Instead, one must look to the experience of those like the Europeans who saw the war being waged in their own cities — who saw their own cherished monuments reduced to rubble, and their neighbors felled by the debris, with no regard paid to the distinction between combatants and civilians.

Like Londoners during the Blitz, the American victims of today's terrorists are innocents, and the attacks against them are wholly unprovoked. Yet the experience of the aggressors during the second world war is also instructive. Upon returning from a summer in Berlin, I cannot help but think of that city at the close of Germany's suicidal attempt to conquer Europe when I think of lower Manhattan today.

The ruins from over half a century ago, such as the shattered spires of the once-glorious Kaiser Wilhelm church or the dome of the half-rebuilt New Synagogue, are still some of the most important elements of the Berlin skyline. Yet today Berlin is once again a united and thriving capital, the capital of a democratic Germany. As new monuments rise from countless lots left vacant by a century of wars both hot and cold, architects struggle to create a livable city while paying proper respect to the unimaginable magnitude of what has been lost. Perhaps no building better succeeds in this latter task than the new Jewish Museum designed by Daniel Libeskind, in which the enormity of the Holocaust is eloquently conveyed by the void of a massive, empty tower.

While I admired the efforts by contemporary Berliners, particularly Jewish Berliners, to live with the memory of what their city has tragically lost, I never imagined that I, as a New Yorker, would be faced with an analogous task, and certainly not within a few days of my return from Berlin. While in Berlin empty towers are being constructed in commemoration of tragedies half a century old, in New York far taller towers have been brought down while still full, creating a frighteningly similar void. Like Berliners, New Yorkers are a spirited people, and we will rebuild as surely as they have done. Skyscrapers far taller than those so recently destroyed will soon rise over the island of Manhattan. The grandest city in America can and will shake off the ashes now covering it, just as the grand old cities of Europe have done repeatedly over the violent course of the centuries. Like Berlin, however, New York will at best be able to memorialize what has been lost, never to replace it. From now on, New York's skyline will consist as much of the buildings that are gone as the buildings that remain.

It makes no sense here to cite the cliche about a nation or a city losing its innocence. New Yorkers have been called many things over the years, but innocent has never been one of them. Perhaps it is better to say that New York has finally entered the Old World. Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.