I am sure almost everyone of us remembers this day quite distinctively. Everyone has their memories about what they did at the time when they learnt about the attacks on the USA, when they saw the planes flying into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the images of the site where a fourth plane had crashed. It was a series of incicendes so incredibly evil, drastic and incisive, that it made our minds work more sharply and detailed at the time. I for one remember the day very well.

It was a sunny Tuesday, early afternoon, I was living in Oldenburg, Germany at the time, still studying, preparing for a University exam. My son Linus was in school and would come home later. I sat at my desk at home, trying to focus on a text about predicate logic (elementary for linguistic studies, albeit quite a mathematical topic and therefore brain-wrecking), and for distraction I was e-mailing to and fro with a good friend about all sorts of nonsense. He had just taken on a job where he had to deal with SAP and was about to loose his mind on that, and I was complaining about having gained weight, whereupon he responded, that if I went into a park, the ducks would be wanting to feed me, which I found annoyingly funny. Until today, when we talk about 11. September we keep saying that it is the day where T. (my good friend) made the ducks-that-want-to-feed-me-comment.

That day the radio was tootling in the background, and I heard something about an attack in New York, so I switched on the TV, and on the news channel I saw an image of a plane flying into the World Trade Center. I couldn’t quite believe this was serious, so I wrote to my friend that there‘s a very bad movie advertisement on TV. He just replied “This is no joke. This is real“ – and from then on I left my studies and e-mails be and sat in front of the TV, watching the terrible events unfold. I remember feeling sick to my stomach, and I remember wondering how anyone could be so deeply evil to do this to people, accepting to kill thousands of innocent people in order to hurt a whole nation. It was unbelievable, it still actually is.

My son came home from school, he was ten years of age at the time, and I explained to him, what happened. He looked at me with a serious expression and asked me, if there would be a war now (Mimi, haben wir jetzt Krieg?). That is something I‘ll never forget. I told him, that maybe the USA would go to war against those who did this, but there wouldn‘t be a war in Germany. I told him to not be afraid, that we would be safe here. And I told him what just had occured to me, that the world sometimes is much much more evil than we could imagine, that bad things happen to good and innocent people, and that I would always be taking care of him, as good as I could. I wasn‘t sure if he was old enough to see and hear what happened, but I knew he would learn about the attacks in America anyway, so I thought it would be better if I explained to him as good as I could to reassure him and take away any fear he might have, and I think it worked. That night Linus slept in my bed and it was good to have him there.

To us America was far away but I felt for all these poor people who had been killed or injured – and for their families.

Other than my memories of that day I have no words. Evil is hard to understand and to explain. But that day I learnt that evil exists, and that it comes around unexpectedly and literally out of the blue, and that it can hit anyone – as it continues to do so with its various faces and incicents, to this day. Maybe the only positive lesson to take from that day is to be good to one another and to oneself, every day and every moment, just in case something evil occurs. Then at least it ends with the certainty that I, you, we, everyone tried to be good. In the end, being good is the only decent weapon against evil. I think this applies to the little daily things as well as to those enourmously violent and dark events such as 11. September 2001. I am not saying it‘s better not to fight back, but answering evil with more evil would eventually lead us all into the darkness. I have no straight answer, I just think it is better to be kind to everyone around you, hug your loved ones and be a good person. That is all I can come up with.

I have seen and heard a few truly evil things throughout my life, but 11. September is a collective memory, one I share with millions of people who saw it happen on TV, witnessed it firsthand or were hurt immediately. All those memories add to a big collective one. We all did something different that day, and yet we all remember more or less the same feeling, I guess – that we witnessed something truly evil. And that is how I remember this day.

I am deeply sorry for everyone who was and is directly affected.