FREMONT – Ursula Haeussler still remembers the frenzy of that time, more than a century ago.
She had just sat down for breakfast at the kitchen table when the maid started morning chores at her home on a small farm in an idyllic German country town.
Suddenly, as soon as the maid started to straighten her apron, she fell to the floor. Haeussler’s uncle and father took action, trying to revive the unconscious woman before loading her into a cart and taking her to the nearest doctor. The young woman’s mind spun in confusion, wondering what had happened.
A few days later, Haeussler – then just a child – learned that the maid had died of Spanish flu. Weeks later, the disease claimed the lives of Haeussler’s uncle and godparents.
“That’s all I personally know,” she said of the 1918 outbreak, noting that she was too young to remember anything else. “But I know it was awful. At that time there were no vaccines; no one could help it, they just died. “
Today, at 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 killed more than 2 million 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 of fighting the pandemic at that time,” she said of the Spanish flu. “They didn’t have a vaccine and all the medical advances we’ve made. We can be very grateful now. I am certainly grateful for the people who gave us the vaccine and are risking their own lives to do it. “
The most serious pandemic in recent history, the Spanish flu was estimated to have infected around 500 million people during the first outbreaks in 1918 and 1919. The number of deaths from that specific strain of the flu virus was at least 50 million in worldwide, including about 675,000 in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Germany, it is estimated that about 287,000 people died of Spanish flu from 1918 to 1920.
The coronavirus has already infected more than 25 million in the United States, with the number of deaths exceeding 440,000, according to the latest health data.
From his home in Fremont, Haeussler recalled that the first pandemic of his life was only the beginning of 25 tumultuous years to come. And in many ways, she said, these days are so turbulent and similar to those she grew up on – a pandemic, protests, economic anxiety and family conflicts over politics.
She saw it all – the crazy 1920s in the Weimar era, Berlin, the collapse of the world economy, hyperinflation, the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1930s in Dresden and the loss of everything that her family had worked for at the end of the Second World War.
“It was a constant uproar,” said Haeussler of his stay in Berlin in the late 1920s. “We lived on a large street that connected Potsdam to Berlin. There were always people passing by. Brown shirts marching down the street, singing their songs. Then came the communists and anarchists. I was 15 at the time, so I probably didn’t understand what I was seeing ”.
In a warning about the potential far-reaching implications of the coronavirus pandemic, the New York Federal Reserve in 2020 published an article linking the 1918 flu pandemic to the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany and right-wing movements around the world.
In part, it was constant protests and civil unrest stemming from the fervor of the right that caused Haeussler and his family to move to Dresden in 1930, at the beginning of the Nazis’ rise to power.
The social conflicts that arose after the Spanish flu – and the economic anxieties caused by the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I and forced Germany to pay damages for the war – frustrated everyone at the time, she said. Although his 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 – liked the Nazis because they did all kinds of things for young people,” she said. “Young people liked Hitler. Everyone went to the fires at night. They all sang nationalist songs. We were saddened by them not only because we lost them to him, but because we knew he needed them like cannon fodder. “
Traces of the kind of fanaticism that Haeussler witnessed in the 1920s and 1930s have resurfaced in the past four years in America during the administration of former President Donald Trump, she said. For Haeussler, the seizure of the United States Capitol on January 6 was like the fire of the Reichstag in February 1933 – the fire organized by the Nazis in the German legislative building that brought the Nazis to power.
Despite the similarities between her time and ours, Haeussler said the world has learned to better handle events like a pandemic and the ensuing economic collapse.
“I feel very bad that many people lose their business and their assets,” she said. “But today, it is not to the extent that you completely lose everything. At that time, everything you saved, everything you owned was worthless. I hope this time is not like the last time. “
For Haeussler’s daughter Cora Assali, the development of the Pfizer vaccine, in part by the team of Turkish-German husband and wife Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, is proof of how things have changed and the more accepting the world is now.
“I think people now understand the value of working together, of everyone working together,” said Assali.