Pandemics are forgotten. But not in this museum.

DRESDEN, Germany – In a showcase of the German Hygiene Museum, there is a pretty blue glass bottle, the grace of which belies its purpose. Made in 1904, it is a bottle for tuberculosis patients that is worn on the hip to allow them to spit out infectious mucus with relative discretion. (In Thomas Mann's novel “The Magic Mountain”, published in 1924, the residents of a sanatorium call this device Blauer Heinrich.)

Using a spittoon instead of spitting on the floor was considered polite at a time before tuberculosis could be treated with antibiotics, Carola Rupprecht, head of museum education, recently explained during a tour, as was wearing masks or coughing up Elbows are etiquette points during the current pandemic. "The idea was to take hygienic measures to prevent the disease from spreading," she said.

The museum in the east of Dresden has been looking for escape for a long time The idea that it has focused closely on medicine and instead worked hard to apply as a "Museum of Man and the Human Body," said Klaus Vogel, its director at the institution, exhibits on everything from food to friendship.

Part of these efforts to rebrand can be traced back to the fact that one wants to distance oneself from the own dark history of the German Hygiene Museum, to promote eugenistic ideas of "racial hygiene" in the Nazi era. The museum has a deep ambivalence about its own collection, which leads it to approach some health issues with caution. But as the coronavirus has given disease prevention a new and deadly urgency, the museum is grappling with tackling exactly what it's named for.

Lessons can be drawn from the museum's hygiene-relevant holdings, according to Rupprecht, in particular about how often the same debates recur in the history of medicine: These debates often address questions of privacy, individual freedom and the best communication of health information a skeptical public.

For example, the museum has more than 10,000 posters for the prevention of H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases – a handful of them are now on display in the permanent exhibition. They represent the most diverse communication strategies, sometimes threatening, sometimes playful: “Small encounter, great danger”, it says on a poster from 1949, which shows a dancing man and a woman in an ominous shadow. Another poster from 1987 shows a sultry man in a raincoat and boots above the writing “Good guys always wear their rubber bands”.

The permanent exhibition also features posters calling for people to be vaccinated against smallpox, the first disease against which there was an effective vaccine. "Right from the start we had a problem getting people to vaccinate," said Rupprecht.

Smallpox vaccination eventually became mandatory in many places, including parts of the United States and what is now Germany. "Today we are very happy that smallpox no longer exists," said Rupprecht. "Because millions, mostly children, really died." However, this was only achieved through the introduction of mandatory vaccination, which was controversial at the time, similar to the vaccination mandates proposed today. The arguments are still the same She added. “The central question is: what is more important? The supposed protection of the whole society through vaccinations or the freedom of each individual to decide for themselves? "

Some objects are more polluted – one because of its history. The museum's famous “See-Through Woman”, a clear, life-size model, has raised arms and organs that are visible through plastic. She is slim and classically beautiful. When visitors press buttons at their feet, various organs light up. "It shows you very clearly and simply where the organs are, arteries, veins, nerves," said Vogel in an interview. "Everything is in the right place, you can explain it to children, they understand immediately."

But the woman worried him about its use in the Nazi era, when she was standing on a raised platform – a model of what a healthy National Socialist should look like in an era when health was considered a civic duty. “It was like an idol”, he said and represented “the perfect person, without wrinkles, without age, without sweat, without tears, without blood, without disease, without pain”.

Founded by mouthwash magnate Karl August Lingner, the museum emerged from the International Hygiene Exhibition, a carnival-like exhibition from 1911 that attracted 5.5 million visitors, attracted by innovations such as the ability to view bacteria through a microscope. Lingner founded the museum with the money he raised at the event.

In the program of the museum there were traces of eugenics from the beginning, according to Vogel, including a section "Racial hygiene" in the exhibition of 1911. Under the Nazis, the museum became the arm of a propaganda machine, and the idea of ​​racial hygiene was at the center of the genocidal ones Nazi agenda.

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

This legacy is a "very difficult thing," said Vogel. "You have to wear it all the time."

After the fall of the Third Reich, the museum became a state institution in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and an eastern equivalent of the Federal Office for Health Education. Their aim was to promote a healthy socialist citizenship. After German reunification in 1990, the museum turned away from its earlier incarnations, kept its name, but shied away from the subject of hygiene and expanded to other medical, historical and cultural areas.

“They didn't want too much connection to their own past in the GDR. and the Nazi era, ”says Thomas Macho, a cultural historian who was previously a member of the museum's advisory board.

He added that anti-Semitism and the fear of foreigners are recurring themes with any pandemic, suggesting conspiracy theories with Jews and a surge in anti-Asian rhetoric recently. "Even in the times of the Spanish flu, more than 100 years ago, we had the discussion about the national quality of the flu," he added. “Was it the Spanish flu? Or was it the Belgian flu or was it the Flemish flu or was it the Russian flu? "

At the same time as people reenact the trends and debates from previous health crises, there is also, Macho said, a strange kind of cultural amnesia that makes them difficult to learn from. Twice as many people died from the Spanish flu as in World War I, he said, and yet one plays a far greater role in historical memory than the other.

“Why do we forget these things? Why will we know a lot about 1969 and 1970 but nothing about the Hong Kong flu, which was very important in those years? We'd remember Woodstock and maybe Charles Manson, ”he said, but not a pandemic that killed millions around the world. Macho said it was all the more important for cultural institutions like the German Hygiene Museum to do some of the work of remembrance. "We always forget about pandemics."