A couple of markers
Jonathan Freedland wonders why did the 1918 Flu disappear from the collective memory so swiftly?
Look around almost any British town or village and you will see a war memorial, usually first built to honour the fallen of 1914 to 1918. But scour this country and the rest of the world, and you will struggle to find more than a couple of markers for the event that, globally and at the time of the war’s end, took many more lives. The first world war killed some 17 million people, but the “Spanish” flu that struck in 1918 infected one in three people on the planet – a total of 500 million – leaving between 50 million and 100 million dead. The number of dead was so much greater and yet, as the leading historian of that pandemic, Laura Spinney, writes, “there is no cenotaph, no monument in London, Moscow or Washington DC” for any of them. The great writers of the age, the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, all but ignored the plague that had descended.
Think of all the war movies there are and then about the comparatively small number of flu movies. By comparatively small I mean zero.
Why is that? An explanation begins in the novelist Graham Swift’s conception of man as “the storytelling animal”. Wars offer a compelling, linear story. There are causes and consequences, battles, surrenders and treaties, all taking place in a defined space and time. Pandemics are not like that. They sprawl the entire globe. And the facts can take decades to emerge. For many years, the 1918-20 pandemic was thought to have cost 20 million lives. Only relatively recently has the truer, more deadly picture emerged.
Crucially, a pandemic lacks the essential ingredients of a story: clear heroes and villains with intent and motive. The Covid enemy is, despite our best efforts to anthropomorphise it, an invisible and faceless virus.
That’s only one kind of story though. Clear villains aren’t an essential ingredient of all stories. (There’s also the fact that bumbling or outright criminally negligent people at the top could step right up for those villain roles.) You’d think heroic nurses and doctors would make plenty of good story.
We are practised in the collective memory of war, but with pandemics we do something different. “We remember them individually, not collectively,” says Spinney. “Not as a historical disaster, but as millions of discrete, private tragedies.”
That’s what the precedent of 1918 suggests we’ll do this time, and yet I can’t help but hope that’s wrong. When this is over, I hope we take each other’s hands and remember this strange, dark period together – even if we spent so much of it apart, so much of it alone.
I think we’ll remember it, but whether we’ll pass the memory on or not – I have my doubts.
Not quite zero – My husband and I watched a documentary about a year ago on the 1918 flu. I think it was made this century, but it could have been late last century.
I did name a villain in one of my novels Corona (novel corona – hey!). Does that count?
Prior to a few years ago, I think I only really knew about the flu pandemic for two reasons: it’s the reason the Stanley Cup wasn’t awarded that year (the series between the Montreal Canadiens and the Seattle Metropolitans was called off after one player died and multiple others hospitalized, and it’s a plot point in a favorite novel.
In recent years but pre-COVID, I saw it mentioned a few times in the context of ebola or other feared pandemics. But it really is amazing how much it’s disappeared from cultural memory. Of course, so has polio and measles and many other diseases.
iknklast – I was thinking of dramatized movies as opposed to documentaries – you know, “war movies” as in Guns of Navarone or The Longest Day or Saving Private Ryan etc etc etc – about real events but full of fictional characters.
I think I’ve seen that documentary too – I remember being prompted to seek out the John Barry book for another read.
I don’t know about monuments, but there certainly seems to be some cultural memory of the Black Death, for what that’s worth.
Polio is maybe a little less hidden away, because of FDR. But yes the vanishing of the pandemic really astonishes me. The one non-vanishing I know of is Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, which starts with a family trip from Seattle to Minneapolis when she was a child, that ended with both her parents dying of the flu shortly after they arrived.
As a doc, Contagion (2011) was one of the most realistic depictions of a pandemic before, you know, the pandemic. “And the Band Played on”, was an excellent semi-doc on the AIDS outbreak – which occurred at the outset of (and greatly complicated) my medical career.
True. Boccacio’s Decameron is framed by a group of people taking to the hills to avoid the Black Death.
That one makes even Covid look like a picnic – it wiped out between a third and half the population in many places.
Here’s one I didn’t know about until the other night, though I was (barely) alive at the time:
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-woodstock-pandemic-1968-idUSKBN22J2MJ
Well, the only thing I’ve never written is a movie. I intend to do that someday, just to say I’ve done it. Maybe it’s time for a 1918 flu movie…with eerie flash forwards to a 2020 pandemic.
There is a very loud clue in how it has most frequently been referred to as the “Spanish” flu –
it’s ground zero was am American military base in the U.S. . . .
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
It’s worth mentioning It’s a Sin, a miniseries set during and largely about the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 80s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Sin_(TV_series)
It’s also worth mentioning, of course, because it’s the series the muculent Owen Jones would like to ban “transphobes” from liking.
There are quite a few memorials around to the 19th century cholera epidemics – a visitation of a disease with dramatic and terrifying symptoms. You couldn’t have been unaware that cholera was raging in a community, whereas Covid and its virus-borne predecessors have been stealthier killers, and perhaps the psychological impact has been proportionately less.
I remember the 1968 pandemic – I was nine – because some of my neighbours got it, and I’m pretty sure there were daily news reports of the number of cases (though I might be getting fused with reports of the foot and mouth epidemic around the same time).
I’ve lived in several cities with cholera cemeteries in and near the centres. Were there those kinds of mass graves in 1918? I’d have thought there must have been, given how many people died.
In 1957/1958, a flu pandemic (the Hong Kong flu) caused up to 3 million deaths worldwide, 100,000 in France alone. It circled the world in less than six months and caused untold misery. Like COVID19, most of the death occurred among older people (over 65) but, at a time when life expectancy was much lower than it is now, that didn’t shock that much, maybe. How to explain that the devastation was so quickly forgotten?
So quickly forgotten that when what was pretty much the same virus came back in 1968, the same mistakes were made, the same complacency prevailed and the same results were seen: a worldwide death toll of between 1 and 4 million.
Then, THAT pandemic was in its turn swiftly forgotten. I myself was born in 1970 and I must admit, I’ve never heard of it until a couple of months ago. That’s two pandemics that the people experienced and didn’t care to remember.
So there is, definitely, a pattern of forgetting, of erasement of these events from our collective memories. It doesn’t have to be so, the memory can be kept alive: one of the reasons a lot of Asian countries did much better in fighting COVID was their own memories of SARS nearly 20 years but the effects can be perverse. While governments and people who lived through it in China, Hong Kong, Viet Nam remembered it vividly, the rest of the world, who never was affected much thanks to stringent security measures, dismissed it too easily as scaremongering. (The same thing happened with the 2K bug!)
I don’t know why this happens to be honest, this forgetting. You could say there is a certain fatalism, a tendency to accept epidemics as a fact of life but surely that cannot be entirely the case, how can you accept as a fact of life something you refuse to remember? Maybe because, as OB hints, there are no great stories, no great deeds and derring-dos or at least none that the entertainment industry care to commemorate?
As an aside, I remember the 1918 flu epidemic (not personally of course!) and so do a lot of people here in Europe. I cannot speak about the US but in my opinion this one left an imprint. Mind you, it was particularly awful.
https://www.latribune.fr/journal/edition-du-2210/enquete/294134/1957-100.000-morts.html
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