In the moving documentary, well-known and unknown contemporary witnesses describe their personal memories of September 11, 2001 and the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Frankfurt – Many people still know exactly when and where they heard about the attack in the USA on the New York World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The pictures have been seen again and again since then, but the enormity of the attack is still shocking. In “Deutschland 9/11” Jan Peter and Daniel Remsperger recapitulate the events of that fateful day, but consistently from a German perspective.
The attraction lies in the completely different perspectives of the people with whom the two authors spoke. Joschka Fischer, Foreign Minister in the then government coalition of the SPD and the Greens, and former Interior Minister Otto Schily describe the political point of view, but Schily in particular has a very personal component: his daughter Anna, then around twenty, was in New at the time York. Contact was not made because the local telephone network was completely overloaded.
9/11 documentary (ARD) – The terror also caused fear in Germany
Schily had to keep a cool head and coordinate the protection of American institutions, because of course nobody knew whether there would be attacks in Germany as well. The external pressure must have been enormous; Parents can imagine for themselves what has been going on inside this politician, who has always been so self-conscious. The fact that Anna Schily was also ready to tell how she experienced the attacks is very respectable; unlike her older sister, actress Jenny Schily, she is ultimately not a public figure.
In order to document how unexpectedly horror fell over America, the film begins with carefree summer pictures. Several interviewees say sentences like “It was a day like any other”. Of course, the authors use the ARD images to reconstruct the process. Ulrich Wickert and the then head of the “Tagesthemen” service at the time, Jay Tuck, agreed that Wickert’s moderation should be emphatically factual; the pictures were disturbing enough, after all.
Another level that runs through the film is much more emotional: a woman from Baden lost her husband at the time, he was a passenger on one of the planes that were steered into the towers of the world trade center by the Islamist terrorists. Their daughter turned three that day.
ARD: “Germany 9/11” – A collage shows the whole picture of the dismay
Of course, not all conversations reach this level of intensity. Nonetheless, “Germany 9/11” works primarily as a collage, because the whole picture only emerges through the combination of the different affected areas. The writer Else Buschheuer, then primarily known as a TV presenter, had just moved to New York and described her personal impressions in an internet diary.
The statements of the former secret service coordinator Ernst Uhrlau are of a completely different nature. The American perspective is also included: Daniel R. Coats was US ambassador in Berlin in 2001 and is still moved today when he remembers the great sympathy of the German population. A military policeman describes the protective measures taken for Ramstein. The Palatinate town was and is by far the largest American air force base in Europe.
“Germany 9/11” (ARD) – This is how terror changed modern aviation
The remarks made by a Lufthansa pilot who set off for the United States on that day in his plane are about a completely different aspect. Because American airspace was closed immediately after the attacks, he had to move to Newfoundland with his fully occupied passenger plane. His comparisons between then and now are particularly interesting: It has been unthinkable for parents to take their children into the cockpit, where the pilots explain to astonished youngsters how an airplane works.
To the broadcast
“Germany 9/11”, ARD, 10.09.2021, 10.15 p.m.
The first 45 minutes of the film are focused on September 11th, with another 15 minutes on the day after. Now the focus is on Hamburg because it turned out that the assassins lived there in a “terrorist shared apartment”. The attacks almost inevitably played a significant role in the general election campaign and the long-forgotten right-wing populist “Schill Party” in the cards.
ARD: “Germany 9/11” also tells the prehistory of the war in Afghanistan
The insights that a police officer and a state security guard provide into the largest dragnet search in German criminal history are revealing, but the intensity of the film is now clearly decreasing, especially since the content is becoming more and more complex: Peter and Remsperger also tell them in the last third History of Afghanistan; not only after the attacks, when US President George W. Bush declared the “war on terror” and the red-green federal government declared its unreserved solidarity.
It began as early as 1979, when the United States supported the Afghans in the fight against the Soviet Union, sowing the seeds that culminated a good twenty years later in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington. “Germany 9/11” ends with the announcement of the withdrawal of troops; the latest news from Afghanistan form the sad epilogue of the film. (Tilmann P. Gangloff)
