Imagine a global catastrophe that kills more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years. Imagine an event so deadly it claims more lives in a single year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages did in a century. Now, imagine that for the better part of a century, the world almost completely forgot it ever happened. This isn’t a thought experiment; it’s the story of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, often misnamed the “Spanish Flu.”
The numbers are so staggering they feel abstract: an estimated 500 million people infected, one-third of the world’s population at the time. The death toll ranges from 50 to 100 million people. To put that in perspective, World War I, which had just concluded its brutal four-year slog, killed around 20 million soldiers and civilians. The flu accomplished its devastation in about 18 months, with the deadliest wave lasting only 13 weeks in late 1918. Yet, while WWI generated countless monuments, novels, poems, and a permanent place in our historical consciousness, the great pandemic was met with a profound and lasting silence. Why did we commit this event, arguably the most significant demographic shock of the 20th century, to a “Great Forgetting”?
The Long Shadow of the Great War
One of the primary reasons the flu was so thoroughly overshadowed was that it occurred simultaneously with the end of World War I. The war provided a powerful, dominant narrative that the pandemic simply couldn’t compete with.
Think about the nature of war. It is a human-made conflict with clear antagonists and protagonists. It has heroes and villains, battles won and lost, and causes to rally behind. A soldier’s death, while tragic, could be framed as a noble sacrifice for one’s country. Nations built monuments, held parades for returning veterans, and created rituals like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to give meaning to the immense loss. The war was a story, and humanity is a storytelling species.
The flu, by contrast, had no story. It was an invisible, anonymous killer. There was no glory in succumbing to a virus, only a grim, private misery. It didn’t discriminate between soldiers and civilians, brave men and cowards. Its victims often died undignified deaths, turning blue or black from lack of oxygen (cyanosis) and drowning in their own fluids. As historian John M. Barry wrote in his seminal book The Great Influenza, “It is the story of a world that went mad, of a world that in some ways has not yet recovered. For the pandemic stretched and warped and in some cases shattered every institution and every individual it touched.”
Furthermore, WWI directly contributed to the initial silence. With nations locked in a total war, censors on all sides suppressed news of the spreading illness to maintain public morale and hide any perceived weakness from the enemy. It was only in neutral Spain, where the press was free to report on the epidemic ravaging the country (including the illness of King Alfonso XIII), that the flu gained international attention. This accident of wartime reporting gave the pandemic its misleading name, forever deflecting its true global origins.
The Trauma of A-Narrative Death
Beyond the shadow of the war lies a deeper, psychological reason for the forgetting: the nature of the trauma itself. Unlike the collective experience of war, the pandemic was an intensely personal and isolating horror.
Death from the flu happened not on a distant battlefield, but in the home. It shattered families. Often, the caregivers would become the next victims. Communities dissolved as fear took over; people were terrified of their neighbors, of public spaces, even of their own family members. Basic services collapsed. In many places, there weren’t enough healthy people left to dig graves, and bodies piled up in makeshift morgues or were buried in mass graves.
This experience didn’t foster solidarity; it atomized society. It was a trauma without a redemptive arc. There was no meaning to be found, no lesson to be learned, no “cause” to die for. Survivors were not celebrated as heroes; they were just the lucky ones who were left to pick up the pieces in a world hollowed out by loss. In his memoirs, one American doctor recalled: “The life of the community was paralyzed… It was a dread in the air, a terror that was not seen, but was-felt.”
Faced with such a horrifying, meaningless, and deeply personal loss, the overwhelming psychological response for individuals and societies was to simply not speak of it. To move on. The Roaring Twenties that followed can be seen as a frantic, almost hysterical, attempt to embrace life and suppress the memory of so much recent death from both war and disease.
A Failure of Cultural Memory
This collective impulse to forget was reflected in the culture. While the “Lost Generation” of writers like Hemingway, Remarque, and Sassoon grappled endlessly with the meaning of WWI, very few major literary works emerged from the pandemic. Katherine Anne Porter’s pale, feverish novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider is a stunning exception that proves the rule, capturing the delirious and disorienting experience of falling ill.
Monuments were not built for the nurses who died caring for the sick. No national days of remembrance were declared for the millions of civilian victims. The pandemic left demographic holes in populations and deep, unhealed scars in families, but it failed to leave a significant mark on the public, historical landscape. It was a memory that was actively, if unconsciously, suppressed.
Waking from the Amnesia
For decades, the 1918 pandemic was little more than a footnote in history textbooks. It wasn’t until the work of historians like Alfred Crosby in the 1970s and, more prominently, John M. Barry in the 2000s, that the event was pulled from the depths of our collective amnesia. The looming threats of new pandemics like SARS, Avian Flu, and H1N1 gave their work a new and terrifying relevance.
Today, in the wake of COVID-19, the story of the 1918 flu feels more resonant than ever. Our own experience with an invisible virus, lockdowns, and widespread social disruption has given us a lens through which to understand the “Great Forgetting.” It highlights the profound human tendency to push away traumatic events that lack a clear narrative. But it also serves as a powerful cautionary tale. Forgetting the past doesn’t erase its lessons, and in the case of pandemics, those lessons are a matter of life and death.