Pandemics are forgotten. But Not In This Museum.

DRESDEN, Germany – In a display case here at the German Museum of Hygiene is a beautiful blue glass bottle, whose elegance obscures its purpose. Manufactured in 1904, it is a bottle for tuberculosis patients to wear on their hips so that they can relatively spit out infectious phlegm. (In Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel “The Magic Mountain,” the residents of the sanatorium call this device the Blue Heinrich.)

Carola Rupprecht, head of the museum’s education department, said on a recent trip that using a pocket spittoon instead of spitting on the ground was considered polite in a time before TB could be treated with antibiotics. elbow is etiquette during the current pandemic. “The idea was to take hygienic measures to prevent the spread of the disease,” he said.

The museum in the eastern city of Dresden has long sought to escape The idea that he focused on medicine in the narrow sense and instead worked hard to promote itself as a “museum of man and the human body,” said Klaus Vogel, the institution’s director, who organizes exhibitions about everything. food for friendship

Part of this rebranding effort stems from the German Hygiene Museum’s desire to stay away from its own dark history that promoted eugenicist notions of “racial hygiene” during the Nazi era. The museum has a deep ambivalence towards its own collection, which causes it to be wary of some health issues. But as the coronavirus gives disease prevention a deadly new urgency, the museum is grappling with how to tackle what it calls its name.

Rupprecht said there are lessons to be learned from the museum’s hygiene assets, particularly about how often the same debates are repeated throughout the history of medicine: Often, these debates turn into questions of privacy, individual freedom, and the best way to communicate health information. to a skeptical public.

For example, the museum has more than 10,000 posters on the prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases – some of which are now on permanent display. They represent a wide variety of communication strategies, some menacing, some playful: “Little encounter, great danger”, a 1949 poster depicts a man and woman dancing in an ominous shadow. Another poster from 1987 shows a hot man wearing a raincoat and boots over the “Good guys always wear their tires” type.

The permanent exhibit also includes posters encouraging people to be vaccinated against smallpox, the first disease for which an effective vaccine was found. “From the very beginning we had a problem convincing people to get vaccinated,” Rupprecht said.

Smallpox vaccination was eventually made mandatory in many places, including parts of the United States and what is now Germany. “We are very happy today that smallpox no longer exists,” Ruprecht said. “Because indeed, millions of people died, most of them children.” But this has been achieved only by making vaccination mandatory, he added, which is very similar to the recommended vaccination mandates today, which was controversial at the time. The arguments are still the same she loved it. “The real question is: Which should be considered more important? Is it the default protection of the whole community through vaccination, or the freedom of each individual to decide for himself?”

Some objects are more complex because of their history. The museum’s famous “Transparent Woman” is a transparent, life-size model, with her arms up and her organs visible through the plastic. She is slim and classically beautiful. Different organs light up when visitors press the buttons on their feet. “It shows you very clearly and simply where the organs, arteries, veins, nerves are,” Vogel said in an interview. “Everything is in place, you can tell the children, they will immediately understand.”

But the woman said it made her uneasy during the Nazi era because she was used on a high platform—a model of what a healthy National Socialist should look like at a time when health was considered a civic duty. “He was like an idol,” he said, representing the perfect human being without wrinkles, age, sweat, tears, blood, disease, or pain.

Founded by mouthwash magnate Karl August Lingner, the museum sprang from the International Hygiene Exhibition, a 1911 carnivalesque spectacle that attracted 5.5 million visitors, intrigued by innovations like the chance to see bacteria through a microscope. Linner founded the museum with the money he collected from the event.

Vogel said there were traces of eugenics from the beginning in the museum’s programming, including a “racial hygiene” section on the 1911 exhibit. Under the Nazis, the museum became the arm of a propaganda machine, and the idea of ​​racial hygiene was central to the Nazi agenda of genocide.

An established scientific institution with a highly developed public outreach device, the museum was a valuable tool for the Nazis in spreading false claims about Jews, the disabled, and other victims of the regime.

Vogel said that legacy is “a very heavy thing to take on.” “You always have to carry it.”

After the fall of the Third Reich, the museum became a state institution in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and became the Eastern equivalent of the West German Federal Agency for Health Education. Its purpose was to promote a healthy socialist citizenship. After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the museum took a drastic turn from its previous incarnations, retaining its name but refraining from hygiene as an issue and expanding into other medical, historical and cultural areas.

“During the GDR and Nazi era, they didn’t want to connect too much with their own past,” said cultural historian Thomas Macho, who was previously part of the museum’s advisory board.

He added that anti-Semitism and xenophobia are recurring themes in every pandemic, pointing to conspiracy theories involving Jews and the recent rise in anti-Asian rhetoric. “We discussed the national quality of the flu even in the times of the Spanish Flu more than 100 years ago,” he added. “Was it the Spanish flu? Or the Belgian flu, the Flemish flu, or the Russian flu?”

While people rekindle the trends and debates from previous health crises, there’s also a peculiar form of cultural amnesia that makes it difficult to learn from them, Macho said. Twice as many people died from the Spanish flu as those who died in World War I, he said, and yet one plays a much larger role in historical memory than the other.

“Why do we forget these? Why would we know so much about 1969 and 1970 but nothing about the Hong Kong flu, which was so important in those years? We remember Woodstock and maybe Charles Manson,” he said, but not a pandemic that killed millions worldwide. Macho said that this situation makes it even more important for cultural institutions such as the German Hygiene Museum to carry out some commemorations. “We always forget about pandemics.”