Epilogue

ground zero—from the Holocaust tower to the twin Towers

Herbert Spiegelberg

pp. 257-265

in: Arleen Ionescu, The memorial ethics of Libeskind's Berlin Jewish museum, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

On 11 September 2001, watching the news of the terrorist attack against the World Trade Center, dumbfounded like so many millions of viewers, I was struck by the apocalyptic spectacle, which reminded me of Emil Cioran's invocation of 'smoke and dust as after a great cataclysm".¹ On what became universally known henceforth as "9/11", New York City, "enveloped in the smoke, dust, and debris …, experienced the real trauma of a real skyscraper catastrophe".²