NEW YORK - April 29, 2009 - Is history repeating itself? The current global downturn has many parallels to the Great Depression. And if the current massive bailout packages fail, the effect on the world's economies could be similarly drastic.

The Germans have always had a penchant for looking to Amerika to gain a glimpse into the future.

They marveled at the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, admired the gray but affordable Commodore personal computer, and succumbed to the spell of an Internet company with the odd name of Google.

Now Germans are looking across the Atlantic once again, but this time they see images that remind them of their own past, images of sad-looking people standing in long lines, hoping for work.

One of them is Michael Sheehan, who worked as an engineer with a large company until February. Not too long ago, Sheehan was the one doing the hiring. Today he is only one of 900 other job seekers attending a job fair in a depressing hotel ballroom in Philadelphia.

One of the flyers arranged on the tables exhorts the attendees to "Stay Positive." But Sheehan feels more outraged than positive. Someone at the fair asks him for his resume. "I don't have a resume," he says. "I worked at one company for more than 30 years."

Natalie Ingelido, 21, is standing nearby, trying to calm down her bawling two-year-old son, who clearly doesn't like it here. "I'm looking for a job, any job, in a restaurant, a bar, cleaning, whatever," she says.

In the past, says Ingelido, "Help Wanted" signs were plastered on the doors of shops and bars. The past she refers to is last summer, when Natalie and her husband still lived in their own apartment. Now they live with his parents.

Across Amerika, people like Sheehan and Ingelido are standing in lines, waiting and hoping. At one job fair in New York, the line stretched for several city blocks. Many would turn away, embarrassed to be seen there, whenever TV reporters attempted to document their fates.

More than 5 million people in the United States have lost their jobs since the Depression began. As if the country was undergoing fever convulsions, more than 650,000 were catapulted into the streets in the last month alone.

Most experts are now convinced that Germany will follow the United States along this downward trajectory, and those who, like many politicians, refused to believe it until now were disabused of that notion last week.

Deflation, inflation, mass unemployment - these are words reminiscent of the darkest chapter in economic history. Thus, it comes as no surprise that experts are mentioning with growing frequency a term that was believed to have been relegated to the history books: Great Depression.