It has now been three months since the Covid-19 pandemic has held the world in its grip. Experts and journalists were quick to point out the unprecedented nature of the current crisis, caused and characterized by the global flows of goods and people, services and communications. However, the experience of a pandemic or transnational health crisis is not new to humankind, neither are other experiences of uncertainty and loss of control in the face of an invisible threat. In fact, from the very beginning of this crisis, the media made many historical analogies: from the pandemic known as the Spanish flu right after the First World War, to the AIDS/HIV pandemic that started in the late 1970s, or to pre-modern outbreaks of the plague. How useful are such historical analogies for understanding the current crisis?
Apart from issues of precedence and analogy, the current crisis poses many interesting questions to historians and historically oriented social scientists. Why are historical frames invoked and in what way? What role do collective historical experiences or memories play in how societies react to the Covid-19 threat and to their governments’ responses? Are memories of previous experiences of hardship an asset or a liability (or both) in the current situation? How do current experiences link up to national narratives and trajectories?
With its 'Kleio in Pandemia'-blog, the Imre Kertész Kolleg wants to draw attention to the complex historical and mnemonic dimensions of the current crisis. Drawing on our broad network of historians and other scholars originating from and/or working in Central and Eastern Europe, we hope to add another, and often underrepresented voice, to the ongoing intellectual debate about the wider meaning of this crisis for our present and future in Europe. Indeed, voices from Central and Eastern Europe might be particularly sensitive to memories and references to past hardships and deprivation of individual freedoms. Are these societies better equipped to face the imminent difficulties and restraints imposed to weather the current crisis? Are they more likely to submit to authoritarian temptations, as the examples of Hungary and Poland seem to suggest? What historical (social or political) fault lines are being exposed by this crisis and how do legacies of the past manifest themselves in the present?
By adding a historical perspective on the current Covid-19 pandemic, our authors contribute to the growing political and intellectual debate about what to make of this crisis and its meaning for our shared future.
· 11. Oct 2020
After the first case of the Coronavirus had been diagnosed in Poland on 4 March 2020, the government announced initial lockdown measures, gradually tightening them by the end of the month. Strict social distancing rules were loosened at the beginning of May. In July, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced that “the virus is in retreat”. He was obviously mistaken as the second wave of the pandemic is hitting the country even harder right now. Yet, it was the novelty of the situation during the lockdown ...
· 24. Aug 2020
The dynamics of responses to the current global pandemic have emphasized the importance of the national. Despite the apparent paradox of trying to contain a virus that knows no borders – its rapid spread from a clear point of origin to even the most remote locations has demonstrated the extent of today’s global interconnectedness – responses to it have been primarily national and, consequently, widely varied. This may be unsurprising ...
· 13. Aug 2020
In the autumn of 1986, I got a box of apples from my uncle. Beautiful, sweet-smelling, delicious apples. When I called him to say thank you, he calmly said: “Ah, that’s the radiation. Indeed, this tree has never borne so much fruit, and so superb. But this year, thanks to the radiation…” – he meant the Chernobyl disaster. Like many others, he had not perceived the fallout from the meltdown of the nuclear power station in April 1986 as being dangerous. ...
· 06. Aug 2020
In Hungary, the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic coincided with the preparations for the 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Trianon. Only a few days before the declaration of the state of emergency, the government distributed more than 10 billion HUF for programs and activities related to the commemoration – revealing its primary motive to mobilize historical memory in 2020. ...
· 29. Jul 2020
According to Croatian linguist Dubravko Škiljan, the importance of public communication is reflected in the fact that it provides the community with a sense of a structured and complete society. But what happens with public communication during a societal crisis such as the current Covid-19 pandemic? ...
· 22. Jul 2020
When Ibrahim Hoti came back from his pilgrimage to Ðakovica in Yugoslavia on 15 February 1972, the virus was already spreading in his body. Hoti felt it: everything ached, he developed fever and a rash without knowing what kind of infection he was suffering from. ...
· 15. Jul 2020
The emergency situation declared by the Estonian government on 12 March 2020 came to an end on 18 May. The restrictions imposed during the emergency situation were removed while some requirements, especially the 2+2 rule (a requirement to keep a 2 metre distance between people), would remain in force. Relying on the decreasing trends of COVID-19, ...
· 08. Jul 2020
In late October of 2019, there was a conference at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna titled “1919: The Politics of Peacemaking.” At the time only one presenter made mention of the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 (and that only fleetingly), which had killed more people worldwide than the Great War. By late April...
· 01. Jul 2020
The pandemic is an extraordinary situation, one that has disrupted the known order of things and ruined our confidence in the future. People’s reactions follow known historical patterns, from panic to laugh therapy. This was no different in 1918/1919 when the Spanish flu visited Poland ...
· 24. Jun 2020
On 6 May, the Romanian Constitutional Court decided that the governmental decree imposing fines against those who violated lockdown and social distancing rules (OUG 34/2020 passed on 31 March) was unconstitutional. The court argued that the ordinance had infringed on citizens’ fundamental rights, such as the right to property, work, freedom of information, and economic rights. ...
· 17. Jun 2020
War: this was the main metaphor that framed the Czech Republic’s early response to the Coronavirus crisis. Prime Minister Andrej Babiš seized every opportunity to stress that the nation was fighting a war against an invisible enemy. Very early on, President Miloš Zeman proposed giving the epidemiologist Roman Prymula an award for “success in the war against the Coronavirus”. ...
· 11. Jun 2020
By all measures, Moldova is an example of everything a country should not do. Achieving independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this tiny country started inauspiciously: already in 1992, a dispute with separatists resulted in a civil war the government lost, leaving 12 per cent of its territory only nominally within its borders. A string of reforms in the 1990s devastated its economy. Despite a highly educated population, people were thrown into penury. On a number of occasions, the country was left without heat and electricity; Moldova’s parliament was briefly forced to use candles, as were surgeons in operating rooms. As if that was not enough, a string of outrageously corrupt politicians bled the country’s collapsing economy dry. ...
· 05. Jun 2020
An American living in Europe writes a letter to his father in the United States: “Everyone’s individual lives are so swallowed up in the one great tragedy, that one almost ceases to have personal experiences or emotions, and such as one has seem so unimportant!—where before it would have seemed interesting even to tell about a lunch of bread and cheese. It’s only very dull people who feel they have ‘more in their lives’ now—other people have too much.” ...
· 02. Jun 2020
“Illnesses are not there to teach us anything,” Susan Sontag wrote in her essay Illness as Metaphor (1978), “illnesses are there to be treated.” But people have always assumed there are lessons to be learned from illness. An illness is a crisis; an epidemic is a global crisis. It undermines the faith we have in our system of values, which failed to protect us from it. The British anthropologist Mary Douglas (1921–2007) believed that in their reactions to catastrophes, human societies, irrespective of time and place, ...
· 01. Jun 2020
“The coronavirus is Germany’s greatest challenge since World War II”, said Angela Merkel in one of her rare TV-addresses in mid-March. She obviously wanted to underline the scale of the pandemic as being ‘unprecedented’ in our time, while simultaneously keeping the balance between her renowned factual, objective style and the need to alert the public to a truly dramatic situation. Her reference to the Second World War was intended to emphasize that this is bigger than the events of 1989/90. Covid-19 will claim many lives and has already done so. At the same time, she wanted to distance herself from the martial rhetoric of French president Emmanuel Macron. The Covid-19 pandemic is unprecedented in several ways. While one can easily think of events that were more threatening ...
