People at Waterloo train station in London pause to observe three minutes of silence in honor of the victims of the Asian tsunami. (Photo: Nicolas Asfouri / AFP-Getty Images)

Thousands have drowned and millions are still homeless but the Asian tsunami is receding from the front pages of Europe’s newspapers. Are things returning to “normal”?

From the Arctic circle to the shores of the Mediterranean, tens of millions of Europeans stopped whatever they were doing Jan. 5 and observed three minutes of silence in honor of the more than 150,000 people who died in southern Asia and around the Indian Ocean from the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami.

To convey the sheer magnitude of the disaster, the German weekly magazine, Der Spiegel (Jan. 7), published a cover that folds out like a movie poster, showing a hotel on Penang at the moment it was swallowed whole by the “killer wave.”

For days, European newspapers filled their pages with large color photos of the dead —often the last taken of families together. The images of tanned, smiling Europeans celebrating Christmas in a tropical paradise were juxtaposed with corpses rotting on the beach. “Honeymooners, grandparents and students: the sea claimed them all,” reported Britain’s Independent (Jan. 8).

“Countless bodies floated lifeless in the sea,” a survivor from the German town of Worms told the local newspaper, Wormser Zeitung (Jan. 4). “The beach of Phuket was strewn with the dead. We were in paradise but this paradise is dead.”

There were, however, tourists who partied on, adding an element of surrealism to the trauma. Germany’s Bild Zeitung (Jan. 2) ran a cover photo of two overweight men wearing bathing suits and drinking beer among the rubble. “1,000 German tourists dead, but the beer tastes good again!” explained the headline.

Carole Damiani, a psychologist interviewed by l’Humanité (Jan. 4), described repatriated French holidaymakers as “massively traumatized by the smell of corpses permeating their skin.”

“Many of them can no longer stand to look at the sea,” she said. “All of them say they left for paradise and returned from hell.”

In the French weekly, Le Point (Jan. 6), Patrick Besson wrote, “Now we know, for sure — there is no paradise on earth. We will have to stop calling beaches ‘Paradise Beach,’ hotels ‘Paradise Hotel’ and islands ‘Paradise Island.’ If paradise is not indestructible, it doesn’t exist.”

‘Compassion Fatigue’

Peter Cole, a professor of journalism writing for Britain’s Independent (Jan. 9), has monitored Europe’s “compassion fatigue,” which is “one of those dreadful phrases that make you cringe, yet accurately describes a condition.”

Cole identified the “four phases” of the tsunami coverage: “The waves themselves and the devastation they wrought; the growing realization of the scale of the death and suffering; the generosity of the ordinary people of the advanced world; the entry of the politicians and their tawdry competition over aid and silences.

“Now there is phase five, aftermath,” he concluded.

For M. J. Akbar, editor of the Asian Age, the aftermath means a return to habitual indifference. “Tomorrow — tomorrow, not the day after, for I am in the news business and know how ephemeral is the nature of news — the tsunami will ebb from the headlines,” he wrote in an editorial (Jan. 8). “The poor will remain with us. The privileged will return to their indifference. … The privileged, in the meanwhile, are wallowing in conscience-management. Every so often the rich need a tsunami after another glut of Christmas shopping.”

A Belgian priest, Felix Van Meerbergen, also seemed to think the catastrophe will be quickly forgotten. He astonished the mothers of newborn babies with the suggestion that “Tsunami” would be an ideal first or middle name for children who have just come into the world, reported Belgium’s Le Soir (Jan. 12). “It would allow us to remember this terrible event for at least a generation,” he said.

When will the northern European tourists return en masse to Thailand? Bali has not fully recovered as a tourist destination since the terrorist bombing of a nightclub and bar on Oct. 12, 2002.

“The consumer is a destination flipper,” Emmanuel Foiry, C.E.O. of Kuoni France Travel, told L’Express (Jan. 3). “It all depends on effacing the traces of catastrophe, quickly rebuilding and doing a good job communicating about it.”

The people of Thailand and Sri Lanka, who have greatly impressed European tourists with their dignity and courage, seem to be doing exactly that. “They have to bury their dead swiftly and make others forget them,” Patrick Besson advised in Le Point, “because no one wants to swim in a cemetery.”