World Trade Center site
I visited the World Trade Center site for the first time on Wednesday. As millions of people know, and as Mako said, it's now a huge construction site surrounded by a sort of outdoor museum. The museum part is not officially permanent, but it seems unexpectedly durable and surprisingly elaborate. I found Christoffer's name immediately on one of the plaques -- which called all the people who died "heroes" -- and felt like I was at the Vietnam memorial in D.C.
I found "heroes" to be a very loaded term. To me, the September 11th attack dead are murder victims, most of whose last moments are shrouded in mystery. They say that many people tried heroically to stop the hijackers. The plaque calls every one of the dead a hero. Is it heroism to be murdered sensationally or notoriously? I'm sure the plaque aims to honor the dead; what if the plaque simply said "we honor the dead"?
When I walked around the site, I kept looking up and trying to imagine where Christoffer died, but I have no idea of the geography of the attacks and formed no image. The site was constantly surrounded by mourners and tourists, although the city seems to disapprove of the favored sign of mourning -- that is, leaving mementos behind. A sign starkly warns that all objects left behind will be removed immediately. It seems that people who want to leave something behind have to visit, not the actual WTC site, but rather some place like the New York New York casino in Las Vegas, which I found awash in September 11-related expression when I visited a few years ago. (I left something in honor of Christoffer there. I have never seen anything else that serious or genuine in Las Vegas.)
At the House of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, about which I still need to write something up, there is a very prominent display to try to show you exactly how things were. There is a photograph of the room in the Wannsee Conference era, there is a seating chart: here was Heydrich, here sat Muller, here was Eichmann. There is a conference table where the Nazi conference table was placed. The Nazi documents that were sitting on the table are sitting on the table. You see: this is how it was, this is where it was.
Even with the museum-like signage around the WTC site, I did not feel any sense of where the planes had been, or where the explosions had come, or where the debris had fallen, or where the people had fled, or which tower had been which, or where Christoffer had died. There are very few cues for someone who was not already familiar with these details.
Maybe that distinction is one reason that I started to cry when I first walked into the room where they planned the Holocaust but that I didn't start to cry when I saw the ruins of the World Trade Center. There is very little there that speaks to me of the actual unfolding of the disaster, no lines that invite you to walk the path of Christoffer's plane or the path of the fleeing workers, but rather a lot of backhoes and a new PATH station (brimming with security and barricades as if it were someone's priority to try to destroy this PATH station a second time). In fact, usually what people seem to say about the WTC site is that they simply see an enormous gap and notice its emptiness most of all. There is no re-enactment or re-construction or explanatory diagram, and (with the exception of that famous cross) practically no artifact. What they say is that you just notice what isn't there.
