T. Thorn Coyle Provides A Different Perspective On September 11th

I'm going to be taking a class from Ms. Coyle, shortly. I am really looking forward to it. She does a lovely job in this post of reminding Americans to grow the fuck up.

September 11 is a big day in Darmstadt, Germany. Special flags are flown and at night, all the churches ring their bells. On this day in 1944 it was used as an experimental target to practice the effects of bombarding civilian populations. The center of the city was razed, leaving 12,300 dead and 66,000 homeless. This was considered to be so successful that the infamous bombing of Dresden was carried out, killing between 35,000 and 100,000 civilians.

Speaking of war, yesterday in Heidelberg I climbed the hill to the crumbling old palace, complete with Napoleonic Egyptian obelisks. Afterward, I visited the Heiliggeistkirche, a gothic cathedral in the Marktplatz, where an organist practiced as we wandered beneath the flying buttresses and painted flowers. The striking features of the cathedral were the intricate old stained glass windows on one side mirrored in a twisted way by gorgeous, freeform contemporary art glass on the other. The legacy of bomb blasts. One amazing contemporary piece was a war commemoration: beneath a bible verse and above the image of a shattered red world, was a small piece of glass reading E= MC2. I have searched for information on this window, but so far found nothing. The outside of the church had strange gargoyles: pigs, roosters, fish and bears jutted out from the sides of the church, high above the old built-in stalls selling souvenirs or coffee that shutter themselves up at night. I was told that these stalls used to sell the animals flying above our heads.