By far the day's most emotional words came from the tabloid Bild in which Franz Josef Wagner wonders aloud how best to mourn so much sudden death. It is too difficult, he says, to get mixed up in the "private grief" of individual families. Instead, "our way of mourning, when we are honest, comes from offering first aid, delivering machinery to transform salt water into drinking water. And our mourning also expresses itself when the German government pledges to give two -- rather than one -- million euros in aid."

The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung offers an oddball piece which essentially insists that when it comes to catastrophes, class and lifestyle differences disappear. That's why the world -- and western governments -- should do more to help southeast Asian countries set up proper warning systems to detect tsunamis before they hit. The main editorial begins asking what an Indian fisherman and a German tourist have in common? "Worlds separate the two," the paper writes. Or they did. Now people from all nations lie side by side, corpses on what were once idyllic shores, the paper says. As such, helping Southeast Asia has to be "the work of the whole world," the paper insists. "And after the catastrophe relief ends, the next task will begin: Protection against further disasters, and not only so that we can have safe holidays in southeast Asia."

Die Welt, also a conservative paper, sees the catastrophe as an opportunity for the beleaguered United Nations to stand up and show what it is made of. The world body, has had its problems, the paper says, but now it is perfectly poised to help the countries traumatized by the crisis. "Its weakness in military conflicts -- and the examples are legion -- also demonstrate its strength: diplomacy, helping others to help themselves and cooperation instead of unilateralism. All are being used to its credit now. The fact that the organization doesn't differentiate between autocratic and democratic governments is an invaluable advantage now. A success in the rescue effort in the Indian Ocean, of course, does not eliminate the need to reform the United Nations. But one thing is certain: The UN is still needed."

The center-left Sueddeutsche Zeitung insists that international aid is important, but far from the only solution. India, it says, too, needs to accept its share of the burden. "An altitudinarian and newly industrialized country like India is capable of some pretty amazing things. The country needs to place more value on protecting its coasts with an early warning system, emergency planning and more solid dwellings."

For the Financial Times Deutschland the aid already pouring into Asia is a sign of hope and of proof of how far the world has progressed. "The flood of the century in the Indian Ocean may be described as the first natural disaster that became what you might call a global domestic policy. Despite all the deficiencies and shortages in the aid action that is now beginning, the amount of progress for civilization that has been seen is not to be underestimated. One hundred years ago, it took days, even weeks, until halfway reliable news could be obtained from crisis regions. Institutions -- state or private who organize international aid didn't exist. And even just a few years ago, relief workers had to battle technical and, to some extent, political adversities that are no longer an issue today."

The left-leaning Tageszeitung turns out a searing critique of the media's flood coverage, saying, western oriented crews captured images in places where they had journalists placed, but not necessarily where the most damage occurred. "It's only because of the western media that the coverage at Thailand's beach resorts is more comprehensive than that in Indonesia's Aceh, which is located directly next to the epicentre," the paper says. "Some governments are trying to control the reporting, too. Sumatra -- a large part of the affected region -- is a war zone and because the foreign media didn't report what the government wanted to hear, they banned foreign journalists from Aceh. Because Indonesia traditionally focuses its coverage on Java, we will first learn of the many victims in Aceh later."