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Scene from Washington DC during the 1918 Spanish flu: »An astonishingly small role in terms of culture of remembrance«
Photo: Underwood Archives / Getty Images
SPIEGEL:
Mr. Dimbath, you have done a lot of research on remembering and forgetting, including how disasters are remembered - is this pandemic a real disaster?
Oliver Dimbath:
Definitely.
Our society is experiencing enormous irritation.
Danger threatened and still looms, and to avert it, the usual systems no longer work.
And that means: there is an extraordinary, serious disruption of the social order - and not only that, we still do not know when this order can be restored;
perhaps some are just losing confidence that this will happen in the foreseeable future.
SPIEGEL:
This state of emergency has lasted for a long time.
When did it start - according to your own memory?
Dimbath:
I realized in January, February that this new virus could spread quickly in the middle of Europe.
The Webasto company is not far from where I live. The first cases that came to light here had to do with them.
There was a strange aha feeling mixed in with this assumption.
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