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The first time I heard from my grandmother about the Spanish flu. His mother, my great-grandmother, became ill in 1918 when my grandmother was four years old. She survived, but retained severe heart disease. However, she still had two children. She remained bedridden until her death, and my grandmother took care of her father and younger siblings for years. The Spanish flu shaped his life. Like countless people around the world.
The author’s great-grandmother (left), around 1917, before she contracted the Spanish flu.
The pandemic moved my family, so I can write this here. Experts estimate that between 50 and 100 million people died worldwide in the three flu waves in 1918/1919.
How the Spanish flu changed the world
A comparison of the two diseases is, of course, lameness: we didn’t know what killed people at the time (viruses as pathogens were only discovered in 1933). The genome of the novel Sars-Cov-2 virus, on the other hand, was deciphered after a short time, and specific drugs and vaccines are being intensively investigated. In medical terms, we are much farther today than we were then.
And yet there are similarities: just as back then, a disease plunges the world community into a deep crisis. Even if we are still at the beginning of the Corona pandemic: What could we learn from the history of the Spanish flu for our future “after Corona”?
A book by British science journalist Laura Spinney, published in 2018, provides information: “1918 – The world in fever. How the Spanish flu changed society.”
When I read it two years ago, I could never have imagined in my life that I would soon experience the classic epidemic control measures outlined in it: contact closure and event ban, border closure and quarantine regulations. Protective mask requirement.
Who is guilty? Fears feed xenophobia
Even a few months ago, this seemed unreal to me, when we received the first news of deaths in China. But even before the wave of infections spread to Europe, the virus exuded its venom: Under the hashtag #ichbinkeinvirus, Asian-looking people tweeted how they were racially insulted and hostile.
“Yellow Danger”? Cover photo of the magazine “Der Spiegel” from 1.2.2020
And the news magazine “Spiegel” published a creepy and controversial cover image in early February: “Corona Virus: Made in China.” The yellow letters on the photo of a person in red protective clothing evokes associations with the derogatory term “yellow danger”, which has been used repeatedly since the 19th century to provoke resentment against the peoples of East Asia, especially China.
Unfortunately, the opposite is the same now: From China, which claims to count only a few cases of domestic infection, foreigners are now reporting xenophobic experiences; they are now feared as possible virus carriers.
Read more on the topic: A Corona Virus Free Meal Please
A Spanish, German or even Brazilian disease?
Even when the Spanish flu broke out, people’s fears were expressed in guilt. For example, in the names given to contemporaries of the new disease: in Brazil it was called “German flu”, in Senegal “Brazilian flu” and in Poland it was called “Bolshevik disease”.
This was particularly unfair to Spaniards: the “Spanish flu” certainly did not come from there, as Laura Spinney (but most likely from the United States) shows.
American soldiers at an emergency hospital in Kansas in 1918.
In Spain only they were written about first. Because the country was neutral in World War I, newspapers in May 1918 reported the outbreak of disease in Madrid without military censorship. Although the flu has been present in the trenches of belligerent parties in Belgium and France for weeks, the name “Spanish flu” was kept.
Crown crisis: when the “future changes direction”
Crises not only promote fear and resentment, but also bring positive impulses and creative solutions. The futurologist Matthias Horx sees us in a historical moment when the “future changes course”. Illustrate what this future might look like with a mind game: re-gnosis. In contrast to the forecast, he looks back from the future to the now. Not only does it recognize the obvious and remarkable drive for modernization through hands-on training in digital technologies, such as tele and video conferencing, Internet teaching, or mobile work (this text was also created in the home office). But also how our “human-social intelligence” will have helped to overcome the crisis.
“Re-Gnose”: Futurologist Matthias Horx looks back on the present
Forced physical distance will have promoted a new closeness, he says. True: I am already communicating with colleagues, but also with old friends, by video chat or by phone with more intensity than before and before buying, we asked the older neighbors, of course, at a safe distance above the fence. from the garden, what should we take with them.
Will this new and friendly coexistence continue? Why were we able to overcome the crisis together “despite radical restrictions in solidarity and constructively,” as Horx “re-predicted”?
Impulses for modernization and new power relations.
The global community can only master these massive crises together, in close international cooperation. This finding led to the establishment of the League of Nations Health Organization, WHO’s precursor after the Spanish flu. Many states also realized that they were responsible for public health care, and not just for charities, churches, and private health care organizations like before.
Health systems around the world will also be tested “according to Corona”.
Furthermore, the flu experience also changed political and social power relations in many places.
Mahatma Gandhi survived the Spanish flu in 1918, and later became the leader of the Indian independence movement.
For example in India. Not the British colonial masters, but the Indian population died en masse. Injustices in health care increased resistance, and Mahatma Gandhi, who had the flu, became the leader of the independence movement in 1919.
Huge crack in 1920s art
The consequences of the Spanish flu were also visible in art and culture. The painter Egon Schiele left one of the most impressive testimonies: his painting “The Family” shows him, his wife Edith and their son. A boy who was never born. Because pregnant Edith died of the flu, like the painter, three days later. Painted the image in the meantime.
Trinity that never existed: Egon Schiele’s painting “The Family”
After such traumatic experiences of war and disease, there was a rift in art in the 1920s, “as violent as the division of the Red Sea in the Bible,” as Laura Spinney puts it. Just two examples: Arnold Schönberg’s twelve-tone music created a whole new musical system, and the architects broke away from the romantic ornamentation of Art Nouveau and designed functional Bauhaus buildings.
Even today, artists are intensely dealing with the subject, and museums are already collecting photos and everyday objects to document the current historical state of emergency for subsequent generations.
Covid-19 is also a zoonosis: a personal decision
We still don’t know how much the world will change “after Corona”. However, we can already help improve them. Anyway, I want to try that. Because there is something else in common: both diseases are zoonoses. In other words, diseases caused by viruses that are native to animals and that have somehow crossed the biological barrier of humans. So they have mutated into deadly diseases.
Mask Graffiti: Corona Street Art in Hong Kong
“By domesticating wild animals, have we actively brought in animal reservoirs for the influenza virus and even created new ones?” Laura Spinney cites a scientific thesis in her book on Spanish influenza. I think it is very likely. The Spanish flu and the new corona virus are far from being the only examples. The HIV virus, the SARS virus of 2002 and the so-called “swine flu” influenza virus of 2009 also originally came from the animal kingdom. So what if we stop eating animals?
I decided for myself. Not only, but also by Corona. Maybe I’m helping the virus slip away? That would be my very personal contribution to a world “after Corona”.
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