© 2002 Editorial Board of Antipode.
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA
Change and Continuity in
German Landscapes of Fear and
Imperialism after September 11th:
“Nothing Remains” =
“More of the Same”?
Bernd Belina
Institute of Geography, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany;
bbelina@uni-bremen.de
Uli Best
Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK;
u.best@plymouth.ac.uk
and
Anke Strüver
Department of Human Geography, University of Nijmegen, Nijmegen,
The Netherlands; a.struver@nsm.kun.nl
After 9/11, there was a general feeling that “from this day on, nothing
will remain the same”. Geopolitical projects, cultural life, and political
constellations in North America and Europe seemed to have come to
a confused halt, and there seemed a distinct need for reorientation.
In this intervention, we would like to argue that the attacks of 9/11
actually resulted, not in a reversal, but in an acceleration of trends that
had prevailed during the previous couple of years—what we will refer
to as “more of the same”. Although we believe that this holds true most
importantly for the US, today’s self-declared world-sheriff, we will focus
on one of its deputies in the attempt to police the planet: Germany. We
shall concentrate on the geographies of xenophobia, militarism and
law and order and will conclude by discussing the possibility of a
“left” and “geographical” position on the attacks. We assume this is
especially important, as the first reactions of official German
geography were neither. These included a statement on the homepage
of the Geographentag (the biannual congress of German-speaking