FREMONT – Ursula Haeussler remembers the frenzy of that day more than a century ago.
She had just gone to breakfast at the kitchen table while the maid started the morning chores at their home on a small farm in a rural, idyllic German town.
Suddenly, just as the maid started to fasten her apron, she slumped to the floor. Haeussler’s uncle and father took action and tried to revive the unconscious woman before carrying her on a cart and taking her to the nearest doctor. The girl’s thoughts swirled with confusion, wondering what had just happened.
Just days later, Haeussler – only a toddler at the time – learned that the girl had died of the Spanish flu. Weeks later, the disease claimed the lives of Haeussler’s uncle and godparents.
“That’s all I know personally,” she said of the 1918 outbreak, noting that she was too young to remember anything else. ‘But I know it was miserable. At the time there were no vaccines yet; no one could do anything about it, they just passed away. “
Now, at the age of 105, she sees the parallels between the Spanish flu that changed her life and infected a third of the world’s population and the coronavirus pandemic that has already killed more than 2 million people worldwide.
But this time there is a difference. In a small room at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fremont, Haeussler received the first dose of the coronavirus vaccine. For the first time in a long time, she felt relief.
“We had no way to fight the pandemic at the time,” she said of the Spanish flu. ‘They didn’t have a vaccine and all the medical advancements we’ve made. We can be so grateful now. I am certainly grateful to the people who gave us the vaccine and risk their own lives for it. “
The most serious pandemic in recent history, the Spanish flu, was estimated to have infected about 500 million people during the first outbreaks in 1918 and 1919. The number of deaths from that particular strain of influenza virus was at least 50 million worldwide, including about 675,000 in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Germany, it is estimated that between 1918 and 1920, about 287,000 people died from the Spanish flu.
According to the latest health statistics, the coronavirus has infected more than 25 million in the US, with more than 440,000 deaths.
From her home in Fremont, Haeussler recalled that the first pandemic of her life was just the beginning of a tumultuous 25 years to come. And in many ways, she said, these days are just as turbulent and similar to those she grew up in – a pandemic, protests, economic anxiety and family struggles over politics.
She saw it all – the Roaring Twenties in Weimar-era Berlin, the collapse of the world economy, hyperinflation, the rise of the Nazi Party in Dresden in the 1930s and the loss of everything her family had worked for at the end of the world. War II.
“It was a constant commotion,” Haeussler said of her time in Berlin in the late 1920s. “We lived on a large street connecting Potsdam to Berlin. People were always passing by. Brown shirts march down the street, singing their songs. Then came the communists and the anarchists. I was 15 years old at the time, so I probably didn’t understand what I was seeing. “
In a warning of the possible far-reaching consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, the New York Federal Reserve published a paper in 2020 linking the 1918 flu pandemic to the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany and right-wing movements around the world.
It was in part the ongoing protests and civil unrest that grew out of that right-wing zeal that moved Haeussler and her family to Dresden in 1930, at the beginning of the rise of the Nazis.
The social strife that followed the Spanish flu – and the economic worries caused by the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I and forced Germany to pay reparations for the war – then frustrated everyone, she said. Although her father did not support the Nazis, there was still a lot of social pressure to follow Adolf Hitler and his movement.
For example, my brother, who is six years younger than me, loved the Nazis because they did everything for young people, ”she said. “Young people loved Hitler. They all went to the bonfires at night. They all sang nationalistic songs. We were sad for them, not just because we lost them to him, but because we knew he needed them for cannon fodder. “
Remnants of the kind of fanaticism that Haeussler witnessed in the 1920s and 1930s have resurfaced in America over the past four years during the administration of former President Donald Trump, she said. For Haeussler, the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6 was like the Reichstag fire in February 1933 – the Nazi-organized burning of Germany’s legislative building that brought the Nazis to power.
Despite the similarities between her time and ours, Haeussler said the world has learned to better cope with events such as a pandemic and the economic collapse that followed.
“I hate that a lot of people are losing their businesses and assets,” she said. “But today it is not the case that you completely lose everything. At that point, everything you saved, all your belongings became worthless. I hope this time will not be like last time. “
For Haeussler’s daughter Cora Assali, the development of the Pfizer vaccine, in part by the Turkish-German husband-and-wife team of Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, is testament to how much things have changed and how much more the world has changed. is accepted. is now.
“I think people now understand the value of working together, of everyone who works together,” Assali said.