Three separate, cross-pressured but overlapping points to put a pin in (listed in, I think, increasing neglect and significance):
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As Morten Høi Jensen emphasizes in the piece above, it was happening, in broad daylight, despite the fact that very bright and attentive people thought it “couldn’t or wouldn’t happen here.”
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It didn’t have to happen. This doesn’t seem to be Jensen’s point, or at least not the one he stresses, but it’s in the piece. It was not inevitable. (Meacham’s Lincoln is excellent on this point, something I tried to say here, and that I need reminding of.)
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Not everything can or should be reduced to its place in a chain of events. Maybe you have the power to change something, maybe you don’t. But life can be lived well and joyfully regardless of what happens next. This is the here-and-now of what Buechner called the untouchable “having-beenness” of time. As Thomas Mann himself put it:
Even stories with a sorry ending have their moments of glory, great and small, and it is proper to view these moments, not in the light of their ending, but in their own light: their reality is no less powerful than the reality of their ending.