Global time, public voices insist, was indelibly marked by the destruction inflicted on New York on September 11, 2001. 1 In symbolic Manhattan, the erased architecture of the Twin Towers evoked the loss of human lives and dramatically visualized the vulnerability of a superpower to acts of terrorism. The project of rebuilding the site was thus placed under enormous weight. At the same time, it has been argued that the initial reaction of a global public, that is, a public with access to mass media, was intensified by a perceived dislocation. The televised images of September 11 seemed to have left their established place in the realm of fiction, suddenly representing a" real" world where destroyed bodies signifY pain and deaths. The distinction between the" real" and the imagined, declared obsolete in concepts of hyperreality, was therefore reclaimed as a necessity. 2 Implicitly or explicitly, these debates about reality and representation called up the film studios of Hollywood as the place where imagined disasters are produced. What was rarely mentioned, however, is that many Hollywood narratives actually choose California, especially metropolitan Los Angeles, as their primary locus of destruction. Fictional disaster tends to be triggered by a variety of causes, among them invasions by aliens and virus attacks-themes loaded

Current dissonances on both sides of the Atlantic are often explained through their attachment to historical dates. For many continental Europeans the historical marker is declared to be the fall of the Berlin Wall on October 9, 1989. For supporters of US foreign policy it is supposed to be September II, 2001. 2 CNN's broadcasting and its strategies of remembering, however, also produced counterclaims focusing on the generative power of representation.