How Many Pandemic Memorials Does it Take to Remember a Pandemic?
Recent calls for a memorial to the Covid-19 pandemic bring to mind the fifty-year moratorium Pericles instituted in rebuilding the Athenian Acropolis in the wake of its destruction at the hands of the Persian army in 480 BCE. The ruin was to be a memorial of sorts, a reminder of impermanence that would speak to the healing work of time and confronting tragedy. That Athenians did not wait that long doesn’t spoil the idea. What to make of impatience in the midst of a pandemic? Few people would throatily reject the creation of a national pandemic memorial, even fewer more modest local ones. To memorialize the pandemic seems right, even necessary, to commemorate the collective trauma people have experienced since early 2020, when the Covid-19 virus turned so many American lives upside down. In fact, as a demonstrably global phenomenon, the pandemic has spurred calls for memorials all over the world. The history of memorials should give us pause and help us reflect on how to go about such a thing, or wonder if a memorial is the right medium at all.
First, one might think it unusual to plan a memorial before the event is decisively over. How can we possibly take the measure of the pandemic in a mature way before we know its end game? What if it never ends and becomes a permanent part of our lives? Indeed, most memorials are dedicated to events that are concluded or that people imagine to be. It turns out, however, that memorials are frequently planned before knowing the outcome of an event. During World War II, people on the American homefront debated the merits of different forms of commemoration. Advocates of so called “living memorials”—useful interventions such as civic buildings, parks, and highways—condemned those who favored conventional memorials such as columns, statues, and arches. At least since the Civil War, Americans have debated memorials long before conflicts were decided.
Such preemptive talk of memorials—and in some cases, preemptive intervention—does something other than memorialize in any strict sense. It is about understanding the event in real time by way of an anticipated or invented retrospection. For instance, in November, 2020, a year before Omicron altered the course of the pandemic, The Atlantic Monthly published a piece called “How Will the Future Remember Covid-19?” Such attempts to look at the past through the invented mirror of the future offer the comfort of imagining the world after the disaster. It expedites collective consideration of an event and welcomes the beginning of the grieving process.
The pandemic, however, is unusual in that it is an unfolding disaster. Its twists and turns continue to surprise and it may become endemic: it may never be over in the way an armistice ends a war. How are we to commemorate something without end? Uncertainty about its final act, if there is one, may present conundrums about memorialization, but unresolved events are routinely commemorated. The historian Kurt Piehler argues in Remembering War the American Way (1995) that Americans tend to memorialize unresolved conflicts. To take one example, the national memorial to the Vietnam War was built long before World War II received its memorial on the National Mall, and the latter was only memorialized once it had become the subject of more critical reassessment. In other words, the memorial to World War II only became culturally useful once the war become historically unsettled. This is, in some sense, what memorials do: seek resolution through a concrete and final act that is within our control.
This may be why memorials to mass shootings are created so quickly. These are both local and national events, each one linked to a thicket of complex and unresolved issues about guns, violence, terror, personal freedom and collective responsibility, but spontaneous memorials seem unburdened by all of this. Their role is ostensibly to create an outlet for grief and a place to mourn, as with the memorial at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas (Figure 1). However, the fact that the photograph is authored by the Department of Homeland Security—when we all know a human being with a camera created the image—immediately gives the game away. The memorial entered (and created) much more than a zone of grief.
Figure 1. Spontaneous Memorial at Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, Texas, May, 2022. Photograph by U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Following Piehler’s logic, were guns to disappear and along with them the threat of such violence, such memorials would eventually become obsolete, like the plague columns of the Early Modern Europe: deconsecrated markers of a distant world. On the surface, mass shootings and the pandemic could not be more dissimilar in nature and scale, and to compare them may seem wrong-headed. The first is a burst of violence often linked to extremist ideology or mental illness. It is geographically—and often demographically—specific, temporally rapid and with definite end, horrifically iconic, and stuck in well-worn cycles of news, social outcry, clichéd political response, and inaction. The pandemic, by contrast, comes in waves of authorless violence that attack from within, even if the media, the market, and the state itself can amplify, soften, or alter the perception of that violence, as Sheetal Chhabria has shown. It is geographically ubiquitous, demographically undiscriminating (or nearly so), temporally open-ended, difficult to pin down visually, and, aside from the exhaustion many people feel, it has spurred improvisations from scientists, doctors, politicians, and ordinary people. Yet their formal differences quickly disappear under examination. Mass shootings have been called epidemic, likened to a disease, and, taken as a phenomenon, behave more like the present pandemic than a singular event. These two crises in American culture meet on the common ground of collective trauma and irresolution, foundational parts of commemoration.
Figure 2. Plague Column, Villach, Austria, 1739. Photograph by author in 2019.
The longer history of plague memorials like the one in Villach, Austria, sheds a different light on the issue (Figure 2). As the Swiss historian Arthur Imhof reveals in Lost Worlds, in pre-modern Europe, war, famine, and plague made death unpredictable and ever-present. Roughly half of the population died before the age of seven. Instead of the idea of a lifespan (an invention of the nineteenth century ushered in by modern medicine, hygiene, and relative peace), pre-modern Europeans imagined a short brutal earthly life followed by an eternal paradisical afterlife. The plague columns that are common in European cities, especially in Central Europe, speak to this reality. They were prayers in stone (often first in wood), Christian offerings to God, not least of all for ending the plague and sparing their lives. They frequently took the form of crosses and were bedecked with Christian iconography, all made universally understandable in a predominantly illiterate Christian Europe, where symbols were far more potent. Now, as the plague column in Villach makes clear, they are historical tokens, meeting places, tourist props, and street furniture used to dignify or adorn civic space.
Modern, secular attitudes toward disease and death are radically different. As Arthur Imhof argues, the terms have been reversed: a long, predictable life is now followed (for secular people) by nothingness. With this comes an existential crisis with profound consequences for how modern people think about time and commemoration. Death by plague is now a horribly traumatic break in the order of things; it defies rational comprehension and signals a rupture in the timeline of progress, however mythic that may be. No wonder the Covid-19 pandemic has been met by science denial and an upsurge in Christian nationalism: the pandemic has further undermined Enlightenment faith in reason. Is it happenstance that in this very moment Vladimir Putin disrupted the postwar European peace? Now war, followed closely by famine in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere, has brought this trinity of pre-modern threats back into European consciousness.
What kind of memorial can fathom this turn of events—these new attitudes and unresolved questions? Should we ask a pandemic memorial to do something more modest or should we turn to other cultural forms to help work through, explain, and mark this perplexing pivot in history? If memorials attempt to reconcile the issues that haunt the present, then they have to address their work to a pluralistic, predominantly secular society. Crosses in public squares will no longer do the trick, of course. But neither will conventional memorial interventions, which are geographically fixed, unchanging, iconic, and tied to commemorative practices: in other words, in form they are the opposite of the pandemic. To bring this point home, Early Modern plague columns like the one in Villach, Austria, gave flagellants a place to make public demonstration of their self-mortification: the whipping echoed Christ’s flogging in the Passion and was seen as a form of purification, a way of warding off disease. The contrast to the tourists treating it like a photo op could not be more stark. These columns entered a world of universal Christian worship, where people knew exactly what to do with them and their symbols. The social practices predated the memorial. Put differently, plague memorials grew out of social practices, made all the more vivid by the fact that they pivoted around the inaugural death in Christianity, to comprise a tight nexus of belief, practice, image-making, and authority. The contemporary world has nothing like this, yet it continues to try to use memorials as instruments of resolution.
“What kind of memorial can fathom this turn of events—these new attitudes and unresolved questions? Should we ask a pandemic memorial to do something more modest or should we turn to other cultural forms to help work through, explain, and mark this perplexing pivot in history?”
The HIV/AIDS epidemic and AIDS Memorial Quilt offer an imperfect comparison, but one worth considering. Here is a commemorative offering whose formal qualities closely match the nature of the disease, its community of mourners, history, and social practices. Like the disease, it is unfinished, changeful, and geographically indeterminate. In being crowd-sourced and crafted, the quilt pulls in a wide collective who invest time and creativity into the memorial. It poignantly points to individual loss and in its scale and additive quality tries to compass the monumental toll of the disease. Its fragility and ultimate ephemerality speak to aspirations about the end of HIV/AIDS, while its literal form—a quilt—gestures with pathos to giving comfort to the sick, to bringing them home, one of the most common metaphors for death. At 50,000 panels representing the 700,000 Americans who have died of AIDS, the quilt can also work at the level of data, demographics, and abstraction, the grounds on which social policy is contemplated. The AIDS Quilt has its origins in the mid-1980s, when Cleve Jones and other activists wanted to bring attention to the disease while commemorating their friends. In other words, it unfolded alongside the tragedy and over many years has evolved and grown in scale. Could a Covid-19 memorial take its cue from the AIDS Quilt?
In recent years, the reflex to respond to every trauma with a memorial has gone almost unquestioned. I first noticed this emphatically after September 11, 2001, when hundreds of memorial ideas emerged in the weeks after the World Trade Center buildings were attacked, even as the United States invaded Iraq and then Afghanistan, and erected an anti-terror regime that changed American behavior at home and altered America’s standing in the world. A narrow memorial to the lives lost that day is entirely understandable, and it exists in Lower Manhattan, but it cannot be neatly separated from the larger issues unleashed by the event. As a historian, my instinct is to say that we are still living through 9/11 and until we address the wider world we created in reaction to it, no memorial will do. None of the proposals hatched in the immediate aftermath could address much of this reality, nor should we have expected them to do so. They did what paper architecture—the “unbuilt”—often does: open up vital discussion about what could be. Such proposals hold up memory to that invented mirror of the future and, in mixing tenses in the present, the full range of temporal consciousness is stretched out for everyone to see, at least in theory.
Something less hopeful happens when paper memorials get transformed into permanent ones, for we surely ask too much of memorials. I worry that the way memorials attempt to fix or bring closure to events blocks more mature and wider resolution—or action. Could memorials be an impediment? Increasingly, I admire the Periclean instinct: a moratorium on a national Covid-19 memorial, at least a built one, if not for 50 years, then until the pandemic (and the famine and war directly or indirectly linked to the pandemic) is actually memory.
Citation
Andrew M. Shanken, “How Many Pandemic Memorials Does it Take to Remember a Pandemic?” PLATFORM, August 29, 2022.
