Social memory and the knowledge politics of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This paper examines a specific form of mass media memory of the 1918 influenza pandemic during the COVID-19 pandemic. The mass media memory of political interventions during the 1918 influenza pandemic functioned as an interpretive framework at the beginning of the pandemic: state measures in the present are justified by proven measures in the past. The selectivity of memory reduces the complexity of a political decision-making process under conditions of epistemic uncertainty. The hypothesis is elaborated using the example of school closures across Germany in March 2020.