Private lives; Germany's troubled war on terrorism.(Letter from Europe)

"Terror" isn't a simple word in Germany, and this winter, when I started trying to make sense of the arguments I'd heard in Berlin nearly every day since September 11th -- arguments about whether it was racist to let policemen question Arab students or immoral to send support troops to Afghanistan -- I was often referred to a large and, by the looks of it, abandoned construction site on Niederkirchnerstrasse, in Kreuzberg, the neighborhood where more than half of the capital's two hundred thousand Muslims live. All you can really see there are a couple of concrete stair and elevator cores that went up in 1998, just before work stopped on Topography of Terror, an archive and exhibition center planned for the site (and a building so dauntingly minimalist in design that no contractor could promise to bring it in on budget and, at the same time, guarantee that it would not fall down), and a row of stalls that have served as a temporary exhibit of that topography for the past four years. The exhibit is small, but there is nothing small about the curator's project, which is to recast the accepted "history of the perpetrators" -- the history of the Fuhrers -- to include the ordinary men and women who went to the office every day on Niederkirchnerstrasse, back when the street was called Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and the empty site was part of a vast complex that was headquarters to the Gestapo, the S.S., and the state-security police.

A few old Berliners still refer to the area as 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, the official address and, you could say, reception hall of Nazi state surveillance, and, of course, tourists know it by the name of the exhibit there now. But if you ask a Berlin cop or, for that matter, an intelligence agent trying to come to terms with the evidence that Al Qaeda terrorists are still "sleeping" comfortably in German cities, including possibly his own, he will call it "the reason," and sometimes even "the good reason," those sleepers are around, because it holds the memory of a scrutiny so chilling that today's Germans go to great lengths to protect themselves from the policemen and "intelligence connections" (the official euphemism for spies) they hire to protect them from one another. In western Germany, where some eighty per cent of the population lives, the right to nearly absolute civil and personal privacy amounts to a state theology, part of the canon of the Good German, along with the "right" not to fight, even in a just cause, and the "right" not to acknowledge that by September 11th the "lessons of German history" had become a trope that could be put to shrewd political uses.

Within a few days of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, most Germans knew that at least three of the nineteen terrorists suspected of having hijacked the planes had been living in Hamburg -- including the Egyptian student Mohamed Atta, who is said to have masterminded the attacks. Within a few weeks, they knew that Osama bin Laden's German network had probably included as many as seventy other sleepers spread across most of the big cities of western Germany, and that one hijacker had even been traced to a town in eastern Germany, a part of the country not known for extending hospitality or, for that matter, much in the way of safety to strangers. Within a few months, they learned that, in the fall of 2000, their national intelligence service had asked the agents at Hamburg's state service to put a watch on the apartment where Atta and another man on the suicide mission lived. The request had been either ignored or refused. But what no one knows, even now, is the extent to which the gaps in German security -- which were no greater than our own, merely different, as custom and law were different -- were a matter of indifference or turf or sloppy intelligence or a weakness in the law or, simply, a reluctance of spies and policemen to be seen behaving like spies and policemen, and a reluctance of politicians to be accused of Gestapo tactics or Stasi tactics or (if they were from eastern Germany and had been Stasi) of American or "Zionist" tactics. Power in Germany is still so cautiously divided that you would have to put most of the country's police and domestic-intelligence services together to arrive at anything analogous in its Draconian scope to the F.B.I., and on September 11th none of those services had much access to the other's data, or even to the warnings about a new generation of Islamic terrorists that German field agents claim to have been sending home from the Middle East for at least ten years.

Since the Second World War, the most revered word in western Germany has been "transparency," and it is used today to mean that the workings of the unified, democratic German state are going to be as transparent as the new glass dome that lets daylight into the Reichstag's parliamentary chamber. The kinds of deals that politicians in other countries negotiate with the doors closed are public here. This was something that rattled the Americans who began to arrive in Berlin in mid-September to work out what both countries called the "details of our cooperation" -- cooperation meaning some agreement as to what Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's "unconditional support" for America's war on terror really meant when it came to extraditing suspects or accessing bank accounts or trading state secrets. If the Germans found the Americans' demands insufferably high-handed, and many Germans did, the Americans ...