Author: Cheryl Benard

Being half-Austrian, I have studied, worked and lived in Vienna off and on for most of my life. When friends from other countries come to visit, I always take them on a tour of the First District, the oldest and most historic part of the city. Besides St. Stephen’s cathedral, the coffeehouses, and the imperial residences, we also always stroll across the “Graben.”

The Graben is basically an enormous “piazza,” a huge square lined with elegant commercial and residential buildings with expensive boutiques on the ground floor. There are cafes and ice cream shops, and in good weather the square is packed with tourists.

It wasn’t always this glamorous; actually, it started out as a trench around a Roman encampment (the word “Graben” means ditch in permanent reflection of its origins). Later it was a major roadway, until at some point it was encircled with buildings and became a fruit and vegetable market. Today it is home to Vienna’s most exclusive (and expensive) real estate.

When I traverse it with my visitors, they always come to a stop in front of an oddly constructed monument, a very tall bizarre kind of tower made out of golden – for lack of a more artistic term – blobs. It’s definitely unusual, an asymmetrical Baroque monstrosity. The Viennese of course are accustomed to it and walk by without taking notice, but visitors always find its appearance surprising. And it is indeed quite unique. You can find similar monuments in a few other Austrian towns, and in Bavaria, but nowhere else.

So: this is the Pestsäule, the Plague Pillar. It was built by Emperor Leopold in 1693 to commemorate the end of the pestilence – or what he and his contemporaries believed and hoped was the end of the horrific disease that ravaged Europe in repeated waves across the centuries, in some places killing as much as half the population. The “blobs” are strongly reminiscent of the characteristic boils associated with this illness, although some interpretations describe them as clouds.

I confess that whenever I stood there explaining the monument’s history to my friends, I confidently thought I was showing them something from the remote past that had happened to people very different from us, about an event that was well behind us and could never come again.

But now, April 2020, there are no tourists clustering around the bizarrely asymmetric golden monument – they are gone, and the flights that used to bring them are canceled and the hotels that used to host them are empty. Now, the Viennese are coming here instead, on little individual pilgrimages. They leave notes, candles, drawings. They seem to feel a need to connect, across the centuries, with the fears and the hopes and the ordeal of their ancestors. From whom, as it turns out, we are not nearly as distant as we previously assumed.

In apology for my arrogance, I started to do some research. And what I am finding has truly shocked me. Because we have not come very far at all, since those days.

Here’s the conventional wisdom: when the plague rolled in, those poor superstitious medieval dullards had no clue what they were dealing with. They thought the Black Death was black magic, so they killed all the cats, believing them to be agents of the witches, which of course only made things worse, because in fact the plague was spread by rats, who in the absence of their feline predators could now multiply unchecked. And their so-called doctors were as clueless as everyone else and dressed up in strange magical costumes and ran about clutching bunches of herbs to their noses to cover the stench of the dead. Poor them. Clever us.

But a closer look reveals that they were far smarter and more knowledgeable than we have given them credit for, while we in all our amazing modernity have progressed far less than we would like to believe.

The three principle containment strategies to which our ancestors resorted were: quarantine, isolation, and enhanced hygiene.

Then as now, the rich people fled to their country estates – so did Emperor Leopold by the way, who vowed to erect a plague monument as he speedily rode out of Vienna with his entourage to escape the infection.

Then as now, the speed of death was overwhelming, and the victims had to be buried in haste and without ceremony. Except they didn’t have drones to film the digging of mass graves on

New York’s Hart Island, or bulldozers to do it faster.

Then as now, uncertainty compounded the atmosphere of dread. The causes and methods of transmission were unclear. No one knew when and how it would end. There were various theories in regard to remedies, all of them controversial. Hydrochloroquine, anyone? In a few hundred years, will people shake their heads in wonderment at us, who seriously contemplated dosing ourselves with Ivermectin, an anti-parasitic (i.e. a de-worming) drug designed for horses?

As for the “exotic outfits” of the plague doctors: those were face masks. Ours are less ornamental, but theirs may actually have been a smarter design. They had a strange sort of beak in front, but for two good reasons. First, turns out they already understood the concept of airborne transmission and knew that the pneumonic plague was a respiratory disease. They knew that particles emitted from the cough, sneezing or breath of infected persons (they called it “miasma”) could hover in the air for a period of time. The shape of the mask’s nose, curving downward, was meant to create an impediment against directly inhaling the infectious “bad air.” It was, you could say, the precursor of the N95 version. Furthermore, the overlarge nose of the mask was stuffed with wormwood, a plant that as we now know, has antibacterial (the plague was bacterial) properties. And by the way, antiviral properties as well. It was, basically, a medicated filter. We could do worse than infuse our modern masks with wormwood.

Now to the cats. According to the CDC, cats are “highly susceptible to the plague” and are able to spread the plague to humans, through airborne particles but also by biting or scratching them. [1] In veterinary posts as recent as 2020, we can find warnings that the plague “transmits very easily” from cats to humans and that being breathed on by the cat is sufficient. To be clear, I am not endorsing the killing of cats. I’m just saying it was probably not based on irrational superstition, but more likely – given the horrific fatality rates – on despair.

As with our ancestors, our anxiety too is compounded by uncertainties. We also don’t know when this pandemic will end; whether it will be seasonal and return; whether it will become more or less virulent over time; whether having contracted it once means that one has acquired an immunity or not. The sense that things will not fully go back to normal very soon, if ever, is widespread. In the case of the Middle Ages, the plague brought significant social transformations: but not all of them were bad. So let me conclude by predicting one likely analogous change.

The monumental social change that resulted from the plague was the upgrading in the status and treatment of peasants, laborers and serfs, followed eventually by the elimination of serfdom.

Before, labor had been plentiful and the landed aristocracy was able to treat and mistreat workers as they pleased. Serfs – who made up around 60% of the population – were tied to the land in de facto slavery on whatever estate or domain they had been born on. Peasants were a step higher in status but were hardly better off, obligated to perform free labor and give a portion of their harvest to the overlord. But with the demographic consequences of the plague, labor was suddenly in short supply and workers were in a position to make demands. And with the overall upheaval, serfs and peasants were able to simply ignore the rules against mobility. Suddenly, their work had value.

I can imagine a similar dynamic following from the corona pandemic. The frontline role of formerly disregarded workers – supermarket cashiers, stock room employees, food packers, janitors – probably will and should, lead to a recalibration of their status, remuneration and rights. (Although in our modern case, we will need to see how this is counterbalanced by a move towards automation.)

In the meantime, it can’t hurt to light a candle and hope that our plague, like that of Emperor Leopold, will pass.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/plague/healthcare/veterinarians.html