3 WAYS COVID-19 IS LIKE WORLD WAR I
[3 minute 25 second reading time]
On May 10, 1933, at the University of Berlin, Joseph Goebbels and other members of the National Socialist Party assembled for their first mass book burning. Forty thousand people watched as twenty-five thousand books were burned as a way of protecting Germany from what Goebbels called “the intellectual garbage of the past.” One of the books targeted was Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front because of its anti-German message. All Quiet on the Western Front ran against what Goebbels saw as the sanctioned history of the Great War because it placed blame on the German government and it exposed flaws in the German account. Yet, the novel resonated widely with the public.
Did you have to read All Quiet on the Western Front in high school? I read it but I didn’t remember what the big deal was. Ask most people today about the book and they’re still not sure. During World War I, three factors came into play that set the stage for this novel to become the unofficial voice of the public. The novel resonated widely with the multitudes who read it and quickly became a best seller and was translated from German into almost every language imaginable. The novel gave voice to what people had experienced during the war for three reasons.
First, World War I became a shared experience in the civilized world. Every person from the age of 3 to 103 had to make sense of what was happening. In the United States, every socio-economic class was represented among the soldiers in the trenches. Look back at almost every university’s history, and you will find a group of men who enlisted to go to France to fight: Ivy League schools down to small colleges and everywhere in between.
Second, governments involved in the war relied heavily on media outlets to shape messages about the war. But at the war’s end, few people trusted what they heard from the government and the media because it did not cohere with what they knew to be true. As the government coerced the media to tell its story, both parties appeared as bad actors.
Third, the war was the first global phenomenon. It changed the way people thought about the world because never before could soldiers be mobilized to fight abroad so quickly. And never before did the actions of France, for example, shape our day-to-day life.
The parallels between WWI and our current pandemic are telling. In fact, much like a wartime president, President Trump has described the efforts to “flatten the curve” as a war. The stage is set to see an artistic work that will encapsulate how we felt during the shutdown for the same reasons Remarque’s work saw success. And the reasons are analogous.
First, the shutdown was a shared experience. Every person in the world is having to make sense of day-to-day life in the shutdown. I have four kids and each of them has renegotiated what a day looks like. What does school look like? What do family and friendship look like during the shutdown?
Second, the government and the media have presented us with many inconsistent forms of the story. Did the virus truly originate from a wet market in China? Did US government officials know the origin of the virus? When did the virus land in America? Are non-COVID-19 deaths counted in the virus-related tally? Do masks work? Will social distancing work? To what extent do death rates emulate flu deaths? Federal, state, and local governments have closed the economy. Will the externalities of the shutdown be worth the gargantuan economic price we’re paying? These questions create a situation where more Americans distrust the official narrative given to them by the White House and the media.
Third, this phenomenon is a global one. On Father’s Day, I woke up feeling sluggish and very quickly, my family became ill. After visiting a local clinic, I tested positive for COVID-19. It’s strange to think about the actions of a market or a lab in China directly affecting my life. My entire family has had to make sense of life with the virus and the shutdowns. Akin to the aftermath of World War I (the war itself and the Spanish Flu that followed), we are reconsidering what globalism means: its costs versus its benefits.
Who will emerge as the authoritative voice after the pandemic subsides? In the next year, be on the lookout for the movie or series that will give voice to what we felt during the pandemic of 2020. Because the pandemic has touched every life and because the government and media narratives were inconsistent, there is space for the movie or the series that will encapsulate our experience during those strange months of 2020.
Similar to the way All Quiet on the Western Front became the unofficial, official account of World War I, how will you remember the shutdowns in a way that stands in opposition to the “official” story. Who will have the authority to tell the unofficial official story?