A Brill Calendar: November 9

November 9: A Fateful Date

Few numerical expressions in English have become so recently, drastically and unavoidably used as ‘nine eleven’; short-hand for the day that Manhattan’s Twin Towers, symbols for the American Dream, were destroyed by flying machines, - another American dream realized during the dawn of the previous century.

The rest is, as they say, history, and an ongoing one at that. Still, consider the label ‘nine eleven’: the month, September, ninth of the Gregorian Calendar, takes precedence over the day-ranking, the eleventh, within that month; following US calendar convention.

The nightmare and anguish in New York and Washington DC in the morning of September 11 2001 can be compared to a few more instances of similar ‘nine eleven’ events; especially if you take a moment to reverse the dating system. First, the day of the month, next the month. In this way, September 11 echoes November 9.

Of course, it is seldom that ‘nine eleven’ is seen in a German, rather than an American awareness. But look at the 20th century progression. ‘November Neun’: on that fateful calendar day immediately following World War I the second ‘Reich’ collapsed as well as heralding the ‘finest hour’ of Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann (1918); following this chronologically, we have the ‘Münchner Putz’ (1923), when Hitler’s amateurish attempt to gain political power failed; then, the ‘Kristallnacht’ (1938), when Nazi Germany showed its ‘professional mettle’; and last, but not at all least, the Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). All ‘eleven nine’.

Small wonder, that the heartlands of Northern Europe came to call this calendar day ‘Schicksaltag der Deutschen’. ‘Schicksal’ is hard to translate: it represents is a notion hovering between ‘destiny’ and ‘fate’. ‘Tag’ is simply ‘day’, of course.