The Death of Osama Bin Laden: A Perspective from Germany

It was a pretty normal Monday morning in Germany. May second, the first Monday back from the Easter holidays. I had just had a really pleasant week of relaxing in Hamburg--sun, 70 degrees, friends, books, barbeques, a quick trip out to Friesland to see a fellow Fulbrighter--and was getting ready to get back into the swing of things at school. Like every 20-something with a laptop, I jumped on Facebook to check up on things quickly before leaving the house, and this is the first thing I saw:


It's quite a comment on our world today that this is how a major, MAJOR piece of world news got broken to me. I remember the chaos on the radio when I woke up on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. How none of the commentators on X96 or NPR had any idea what was going on that early in the day, only a couple hours after the first plane hit. How everyone in Frau Kerr's 8'th grade German class were staring at the TV in the corner watching the second tower collapse. Little details stick out in particular: the confused, frightened expression I saw on Frau Kerr's face when I walked into the classroom; the bewildered way we all walked around the school, trying to comprehend an event with implications that totally surpassed the understanding of a bunch of suburban junior high school students; Jenny Moody crying in the hallway.

Almost ten years later some lolcat-inspired photo of Obama in sunglasses and a handful of status updates brought that chapter in American history to a close for me. The world is a strange place.

It's stranger still thinking and looking at how this event is happening in the US. On Monday I went to school, taught some kids, went to a cafe and wrote some emails, finished the day with our weekly game night at Down Under on Grindelallee, and went to bed. I didn't even talk about Bin Laden's death to anyone until I met up with a few other Americans in the city later that night.

I did a lot of thinking about the whole thing, but that was basically it for me.

The atmosphere on the other side of the Atlantic, as I understand it, was electric. There were spontaneous rallies in the street all over the USA on Monday. Firefighters and policemen parading around Ground Zero with thousands of New Yorkers cheering them on. People dancing and singing on the National Mall and in front of the White House. American news websites were overflowing with reports about Bin Laden's death, and I imagine the big cable news networks were abuzz the whole day with coverage. There was a fierce division among my friends about everything. Some praised the actions of our military, jubilant that the face of terrorism for the past ten years has finally been brought to justice, God-Blessing America up and down. Others were torn about the event, or even critical of it, commenting on the irony of the celebration of death--even the death of the most famous mass murderer in the world.

I don't even know what to think really. Looking at America nowadays is like looking at a foreign country. If you put me on a plane and sent me back tonight I would be totally overwhelmed by the response. While the comparative silence of the Germans around me is weird enough (I'm still an American, after all), the videos and news reports and blogs I see and read are strange as well. The death of Osama Bin Laden has so many implications for so many different parts of the world that it's hard to form a single opinion about it.

I wouldn't say that the Germans around me have been ambivalent about the event, but their silence is strange. I haven't even talked to any of my teachers about it, which goes to show how the topic is being treated over here. Interesting how something as major as the death of the mastermind behind 9/11 is hardly something worth talking about over here, and I don't think I'm tainting that judgment with my own cultural background--the event had deep and long lasting implications all over the world. Granted, it's more relevant in America and the Middle East than in other parts of the world, but somehow...I would expect something else I guess. A different response. Europe as a whole has been very opposed to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars since the beginning. One of my friends who went on a trip to France close to the beginning of the Iraq war said that some people on the street would spit at him for the sheer virtue of his nationality. This could be the beginning of the end for those conflicts, and yet this past Monday was just like any other day since I've been here.

And my own opinion on the matter? I can barely put it into words. Am I ultimately glad that there's one less evil person in the world? Yes. Am I going to sing and dance in the streets about it? No. I think the world needs to move on from this period in our collective history. This one man wrought so much evil and put so many terrible events into motion, and even his name and the ideas and ideologies he stood far have been misused and twisted and manipulated to justify even more acts of violence and death. It would be an absolute shame to let his influence outlive him. "We got him," as our President puts it, and I really, really hope that this marks a turning point for America and the rest of the world. After ten years we finally got him, and we need to put what he did to rest.