My favorite correspondent reports from Paris: “Because you believed in the first consternation of contagion, and the older guests of the Hôtel-Dieu collected a dreadful fear of screaming, the dead are not to have lived has been buried, it is said, so fast that you left them, once the motley fool’s clothes, and funny as you are, you are too funny in his grave. Nothing is similar to the confusion which now all of a sudden Backup preparations were made.”
A report on the current Corona-crisis? No, an article from the 19. April 1832 in the Augsburg “Allgemeine Zeitung”, at the time the most important journal in the German-speaking countries. Written by the German Poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) has it. He was, in 1831, the France correspondent of the newspaper, and sat with his reports of “milestones of German literature and of the press history,” as Heine-expert Christian Liedtke (56) writes, “with the history of modern political journalism, and the German Feuilletons begins”.
Tim Young (48), managing Director of Heine’s publishing House Hoffmann and Campe, is now given the occasion, this pandemic-report in a special pressure. “Heinrich Heine’s observations on the effects of an invisible pathogen in the spring of 2020, the striking current,” writes Young. The initial carelessness that soon, following confusion, the time of the serious faces, the empty places and streets, the numbers of grappling with Death: “Heine’s watchful eye nothing escaped, what doesn’t the world now with Corona again.”
It is the Cholera, which breaks out in Russia, 1830 in the Baltic States and Poland is spreading, and in 1831, in Germany, that is raging. In 1832, the disease kills in the metropolises of London and New York every day, dozens of people in Paris throughout the year 20’000. “The people murmured bitterly, as it saw, as the Rich fled, and, Packed with Doctors and pharmacies, according to healthier areas saved”, writes of the firm in Paris ausharrende Heine. “With the discontent of the poor saw that the money has also become a means of protection against death.”
And Heine also reported, what are the consequences of Fake News have spread – at that time not on Social Media, but from mouth to mouth: “the poison, it was said, was known to sprinkle in all of the foods in the vegetable markets, in the case of the bakers, the butchers, the wine merchants,” writes Heine. “The more wonderful were the stories, the more eager they were picked up by the people.” With fatal consequences: The Mob, two people on the open road, wearing a simple white powder – and assassinates a harmless means of protection against Cholera.
Heinrich Heine, “I’m talking about the Cholera – a report from Paris of 1832”, Hoffmann and Campe
