A Provincial Pandemic: European Ignorance of the 1918 ‘Spanish’ Influenza as a Shared Event

What is it about?

This article argues that the 1918 flu appeared so suddenly, spread so rapidly, killed so quickly and disappeared so swiftly that Europeans’ focus on their immediate circumstances led them to experience and interpret it as a local health crisis rather than as a global or continental pandemic. It also demonstrates that Europeans were so inured to privation and death; so isolated by anaemic and dysfunctional media and medical regimes; and so distracted by economic, political and social chaos that they were either unaware of or unconcerned with the flu’s origin. It takes as its source base nearly 1,000 memories of the 1918 flu collected from individuals across ten European countries and archival materials from federal, municipal,religious and diary archives in France (an Allied power in the First World War), Germany (a Central power in the First World War) and Switzerland (a neutral power in the First World War).

Featured Image

Why is it important?

This article answers three fundamental questions about the "forgotten" 1918 influenza pandemic: 1) Were Europeans aware of the 1918 flu’s global, or even continental, presence? 2) Why did they so easily disregard it's importance in ‘real time’? Did they even understand the event was worth remembering? If we are to appreciate why the 1918 flu was ‘forgotten’ by European society and its historians until its ‘rediscovery’ at the end of the twentieth century, we must systematically engage the socio-cultural environment that made it ‘forgettable’ to begin with.