9.11, 24/7

What are the consequences of focusing all but exclusively on the attacks in the US?

Were these "normal" times, the eyes of every political junkie in Germany this weekend would have been focused on Hamburg. Instead, Germans and everyone else on the continent hold their breath, look to Central Asia and hope they haven't promised too much to the Americans.

"9.11," the "attack on America," or whatever we end up calling the event that took all of 110 minutes, changed the world, pretty much everyone agrees, and brought a decisive end to either the "easiest, sleaziest, richest, most meaningless decade we've yet known" (media critic Dan Kennedy) or a "truly grand" Belle Epoque (science fiction writer Bruce Sterling). Whichever it is, you can wrap it up, slip it between two covers and file it on the shelf next to your other history books. 1989 - 2001. Done.

Remember, say, Genoa? What an anachronistic ring the name of that city has to it now, just two months on. 200,000 took to the streets and, days afterwards, the Italian police were still arresting them on trumped up charges, beating them, torturing them, holding them captive for weeks. During the heat of the battle, one of them was killed, but now, everyone has a different Giuliani on their minds.

This week, the Italian Parliament gave its thumbs up on a report that completely and unquestioningly absolves the Italian police of any wrongdoing back in July. Within hours, thousands of demonstrators were on the streets in Rome, but it's tough in the current wartime climate to find anything more than a mention of it in the papers.

No, despite an atmosphere in which there's hardly a conversation on the continent that isn't laced with mentions of Osama bin Laden or the World Trade Center, it's not as if there's nothing else going on. Poland, for example, is poised for what the BBC calls "a major shift in the country's political landscape." The reformed communists may well form the first one-party government there since, yes, 1989.

Oh, and there was that massive explosion at that chemical fertilizer plant in Toulouse, France. 29 dead, over a thousand injured, many of them seriously. But of course, it happened on Friday, that is, after September 11, 2001, so, as Nathalie Roller writes in Telepolis, everyone's first thought was: terrorist attack. The airport and train station were closed and Le Monde wrote of a "syndrome de Manhattan."

It can't be helped. You can hardly look at anything at all without seeing it through shades tinted by 9.11. Take the markets. The DAX in Frankfurt has nose-dived 21 percent since that day and the Neuer Markt, Germany's counterpart to the Nasdaq, looks set to evaporate altogether. Yes, there was a downturn going on before, but now the talk among economists is all about whether the "event" has pushed the global economy over the edge. One expert, Udo Ludwig of the Institute for Economic Research in Halle, has estimated that 100,000 jobs will be lost in Germany alone as a direct effect of the attacks. Considering the immediate hits already taken by the airline industry around the world and the general wringing of hands among insurers, that estimate sounds a tad conservative.

Meanwhile, politics rolls on, if not quite as usual. Hamburg, the filthy rich media capital of Germany, staged a breathtakingly close election over the weekend. The Social Democrats (SPD) have governed the city for 44 years, but Ole von Beust of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is giving the incumbent, Ortwin Runde, a run for his money. How will Beust's near-promise to bring the Party for a Law-and-Order Offensive into his governing coalition if elected effect the outcome, post-9.11? As of this writing, it's too close to call.

Like Hamburg, Berlin is both a city and a state and will hold its elections in October. Here, the effects of the terrorist attacks are plainer to the eye. For one thing, all parties agreed to call off all campaigning immediately following the attacks and have resumed only this week. More telling politically, though, has been Gregor Gysi's support for military action against anyone proven to be behind the attacks. Gysi, you see, is the PDS (Party for Democratic Socialism) candidate for mayor. During the Kosovo crisis, he was adamantly against Germany's participation in the bombing of Serbia and even went to Belgrade for a controversial chat with Milosevic.

But this situation, it seems, is different. The PDS is the only party in Germany not to rubber-stamp every "anti-terrorist" proposal the governing red-green coalition has put forward, including the decision to provide the US with what little military might Germany has to offer. Party leaders are said to be furious with their charismatic spokesman for breaking ranks, but without him, the PDS doesn't stand a chance of taking City Hall in the capital.

These two elections were supposed to be bellwether events pointing to how national elections would go next year. Instead, the press, which would surely have been exaggerating their import in "normal" times, is barely troubling itself to remind the public that they're happening at all, much less reading any implications for national politics into them.

Because, after all, politics is on hold. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD), whose government was deemed to be in a state of "emergency" by Der Spiegel just one day before 9.11, is now, like Tony Blair in Britain and Jacques Chirac in France, widely perceived as a self-assured statesman, voicing the country's grief and inspiring confidence in his decision to place his bets with the Americans. How long he and his counterparts throughout Europe will be able to float their political careers on the aftermath of 9.11 will depend on how, when, where and, above all, at whom the US fires its first shots back.

In Telepolis

The attacks and their repercussions have naturally dominated a very busy week at Telepolis, but articles that aren't directly related are creeping back in. Konrad Lischka, for example, has an appreciative historical overview of Zork, the first computer game to make "the leap from hacker subculture to the business world and the home computer." Lots of screenshots and links to background in English.

Even so, you can't even go to the movies these days without being haunted by 9.11. Spielberg's A.I. has finally opened in Germany, and the sight of New York submerged in water, a victim of the greenhouse effect, gives reviewer Peter V. Brinkemper the shivers.

Otherwise, for the most part, it's been 9.11, 24/7. The Greens, the junior partner in Germany's governing coalition, have vainly tried to put the brakes on cybercrime legislation, but, as Stefan Krempl reports, even some in the SPD have warned that "more surveillance = less security." Harald Neuber marvels, and not in a good way, at the speed and ease with which the German Parliament committed itself to military participation in the coming counterattack. There have been a few bumps in the road. Schröder's declaration that what happened on September 11 was "an attack on civilization" resulted in "points off" his political rep momentarily, but Parliament went ahead with his package anyway, 565 to 40, with six abstentions.

In English

What did they know and when did they know it? That's the question on the mind of Wayne Madsen, a Senior Fellow of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. US intelligence and law enforcement agencies, he writes, "may have had advance warning " of the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. But particularly the WTC. Madsen's reviews of what the CIA knew about money-laundering operations and the "virtual sieve" that is the US embassy in Islamabad are intriguing, but his reexamination of past plane crashes as possible thwarted attempts to do what hijackers were finally able to pull off on September 11 are chilling.

Civil liberties continue to be a major concern at Telepolis. While Jamie King spells out the dangers of the Mobilization Against Terrorism Act, "which the US Senate spent a scant 30 minutes debating this week and which could be passed in the next couple of days," Jelle van Buuren sounds the alarm regarding a proposal put forward by the European Commission on Wednesday: "According to the Commission, attacks on information systems are a new form of terrorism." Not to mention "urban violence." How's that for broad terminology?

Also mid-week, I outlined the controversy sparked here in Germany by comments the legendary composer Karlheinz Stockhausen made when he was asked about 9/11. Concerts were canceled and newspaper columnists spit venom. Since the article appeared, Stockhausen has released a statement reaffirming that, "Not for one moment have I thought or felt the way my words are now being interpreted in the press." Letters of support are pouring in. But Kürten, where Stockhausen lives and teaches, is threatening to cancel his courses and take away his status as an honored citizen of the community.

Elsewhere

For the time being, the current crisis has done wonders for the political fortunes of Chancellor Schröder and French President Jacques Chirac. It hasn't been too good, though, for French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. John Vinocur explains in the International Herald Tribune.

Immediately after the attack on the WTC and the Pentagon, European leaders to a man were declaring their unconditional solidarity with the United States. By last Thursday, though, The Economist was fretting over conditions under which "Europe's solidarity might begin to crack." That same day, The Guardian commended European leaders for "speaking with one voice to President George Bush and in particular, to his more hawkish advisers." The message: Simmer down. Or, as The Guardian put it, "Robust responses need not be measured only in rockets."

But that night, Bush spoke to both houses of the US Congress, and when it came to thanking the world for "its outpouring of support," Europe got the first honorable mention: "America will never forget the sounds of our National Anthem playing at Buckingham Palace, on the streets of Paris, and at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate." Writing in Salon, Steve Kettmann emphasizes the importance to the Europeans of what he calls the internationalist tone" of the speech and of Bush's reassurance to the world that he would not go wildly shooting from the hip. Post-speech, according to Kettmann, "there seem few signs of Europeans bickering or carping among themselves."

On a political level, and certainly following Friday night's emergency meeting in Brussels of the leaders of the European Union wherein they made their support of the US more concrete with 37 anti-terrorism measures, that's probably true. But New York Times Berlin Bureau Chief Steven Erlanger sees plenty of dissent among European intellectuals.

Also in the NYT: The recent round-up of suspected terrorists all across Europe has been eye-opening, but it actually began quite some time ago: "The scope of the network was illustrated by an operation that started with the arrest of four militants in Frankfurt last Dec. 26."

The independent intelligence firm Stratfor sees "the highly sensitive nature of intelligence-gathering and the pursuit of national priorities" making for "an uneasy transatlantic partnership".

And then there's the American, Edward Champion, holed up in Hamburg during all this, posting fun things, like the front page of a German tabloid, and not-so-fun things, like worrying about the state of the country he'll be returning home to, and just generally ranting.

But again, there are other things going on. In The Guardian, for example, Maya Jaggi profiles WG Sebald, whom Susan Sontag has called the "contemporary master of the literature of lament and mental restlessness." Sebald may be "the most interesting and ambitious writer working in Britain today" (Michael Ondaatje), but he writes his "prose fiction" ("each line has to be weighed as carefully, and with as much energy, as in a poem of half a page") in German.

Over 170 galleries from 28 countries are preparing to present new work at the sixth Art Forum Berlin from October 3 through 7.

A baker's dozen of artists addresses "contemporary corporate values, systems, hierarchies and aesthetics" in an exhibition entitled White Collar, opening in Berlin for a full month this Thursday evening.