The Overshadowing of the Memory of ‘Spanish’ Flu in Poland

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

Łukasz Mieszkowski

Published:

2021

Publisher:

Oxford University PressOxford

Abstract This chapter examines the role of the ‘Spanish’ Flu in Polish collective memory, tracing its prolonged oblivion over the twentieth century to the revival of memory in the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. The process of forgetting is charted chronologically through examples of cultural representations of the epidemic in contemporary works of fiction and quasi-religious ceremonies to a modern-day feature film. While the absence of archival records is explained, the comparative case of the policies through which the newly independent Polish state combated a contemporary typhus epidemic is discussed as a possible explanation for the suppressing of the memory of influenza. Overall, the image of the establishment of the Polish state in official propaganda could not accommodate the mishandling of the influenza epidemic crisis in the wider context of an almost complete collapse of sanitation and civilisation. On the background of such a history of forgetting, the recent prominence of the ‘Spanish’ Flu in Polish cultural and social memory a century after the events, as new-found interest was aroused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, may not prove to last in the long term.

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