Marcel Winatschek

Call 911

It was my first day of school in 2001, but I don’t remember going to school. I remember sitting in front of a TV with everyone else, watching the same footage over and over. The towers burning. Planes hitting. People jumping. Nobody changed the channel because nobody knew what else to do.

What I remember most is the weirdness of the whole media machinery just stopping. Shopping channels went dark. MTV stopped playing videos. Every network aired the same images because there wasn’t anything else that mattered. The infrastructure of entertainment had broken down.

I don’t know if we actually had school that day or if we went home. Time got strange. We just kept sitting there, watching the building burn, watching people try to escape, watching the world reorganize itself in real time. It was the only thing on every screen.

Looking back, what sticks isn’t the trauma itself but the peculiar closeness of it—everyone in the country frozen in the same moment, watching the same screen, all of us trying to understand what we were seeing together.