Tod in Hamburg: Stadt, Gesellschaft und Politik in den Cholera-Jahren 1830 - 1910

by Richard J. Evans

Sie überfiel ihre Opfer jäh und ohne Vorwarnung, die Symptome erregten allgemeines Entsetzen, das Ende kam schnell und unter Qualen: 1892 wütete eine Cholera-Epidemie in Hamburg, 10.000 Menschen starben binnen 6 Wochen. In seinem scharfsinnigen Werk zeichnet Richard J. Evans ein lebendiges Bild der Stadt und ihrer Menschen im Griff der Seuche und untersucht die Gründe, warum Hamburg als einzige große europäische Stadt Schauplatz dieser Tragödie wurde. Er zeigt, dass es eine Verknüpfung politischer, ökonomischer, sozialer und medizinischer Bedingungen war, die einer eigentlich schon ausgerotteten Krankheit noch einmal Tür und Tor öffneten. Mit einem aktuellen Vorwort des Autors, das den Vergleich zwischen der damaligen Epidemie und der heutigen Situation mit SARS-CoV-2 zieht.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, European History, Germany, History Of Medicine, Medicine, Disease

928 pages, Paperback

First published December 10, 1987

About the author

Richard J. Evans is one of the world's leading historians of modern Germany. He was born in London in 1947. From 2008 to 2014 he was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, and from 2020 to 2017 President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He served as Provost of Gresham College in the City of London from 2014 to 2020. In 1994 he was awarded the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city, and in 2015 received the British Academy Leverhulme Medal, awarded every three years for a significant contribution to the Humanities or Social Sciences. In 2000 he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust Denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial. His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson History Prize), In Defence of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. His book The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe, was published in 2016. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019) and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (2020). In 2012 he was knighted for services to scholarship.

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

Rather like Death in Venice except with less homosexual obsession over aristocratic Polish boys, much less hair dye, and highly unlikely to be made into a feature film by an Italian director with a Mahler soundtrack, however city state politics and cholera are to be found in both.

Seven hundred and fifty-two pages on nineteenth century German city state politics and cholera might seem like seven hundred and fifty one and a half too many in this time pressed world in which every sentence must be relevant to at least three burning issues of the day and I probably can't convince you otherwise. It is April, the sun might be shining, in the northern hemisphere winter is mostly over, time perhaps to shake out the picnic blanket, rather than read of people dying of cholera.

Yet it's oddly worthwhile sometimes to step into obscurer territory, maybe one can't see a bigger picture, but even seeing a familiar picture from a different angle might reveal something unfamiliar.

Hamburg for most of the nineteenth century was an independent city state, bordered to the north mostly by Denmark and the the south by other places, until eventually and with many misgivings and some special treatment it was swallowed in to the unified Imperial German state after 1871, it was an awkward arrangement. The city had a Republican constitution and strongly Liberal sentiments, ie the franchise was linked to wealth and the wealthy were generally in business, mostly import and export. And this was reflected in how the city was administered in a very neat illustration of The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

By Liberal then let me make clear I don't mean liberal, I mean Liberal with a capital L, classical Liberalism, free trade, free contract, limited (if any) government, all of which was all well and good in its way and if you didn't like it you could always go a few paces down the road to Altona, which was in Denmark now it is in Hamburg which in terms of municipal government is more convenient for a contiguous urban area. Then, since this was the nineteenth century, cholera struck and lots of people died horribly.

As it happened in the early part of the nineteenth century, the dominant theory of disease was miasma theory, you'd get these foul miasmas and if you happened to of your own free will to live in an area where these miasmas accumulated you were likely to suffer from various sicknesses and probably die horribly. Miasmas just seemed to be, you could save yourself by going elsewhere - a change of air will do you good. Mysteriously miasmas tended to occur in poorer areas or around polluting factories and particularly where there was no sewage or adequate waste removal - in pre-sewer days, one's personal waste went (hopefully) into a cess pit where it remained until removed. But anyway they just happened and if of your own free will you choose to live in such an area, well in a free society that prided itself on its freedom and traditional Republican constitution - you were free to do so. Hamburg wasn't Prussia after all, God forbid. The city did feel that it was responsible for the emptying of cess-pits. And because the consuls and chamber of elected members were overwhelmingly from the business community their view was that the emptying needed to be put out to competitive tender and ought to generate a profit for the city administration - human waste is a useful resource, rich in nutrients it was sold to farmers and used to manure fields, where there's muck, there's brass as they say across the north sea. When Doctors began to get funny ideas and think that human waste might be best carried out of the city in sewers and dumped, and perhaps that clean water could be piped in to people's homes with the initial infrastructure investment carried by the city government, political support was underwhelming. In the mean time people died in periodic waves of cholera. Eventually support was built up to bring in piped water, but it was felt that filtering the water was an extravagant expense and a frippery that hard working families wouldn't want to pay for in their taxes. According to urban legend, elvers pumped up with the water from the river Elbe ended up in the water storage tanks in blocks flats and grew to be full sized eels, presumably disturbing the sleep of citizens when they thrashed about.

Eventually more cholera, Russian Jews fleeing Russia for a better life in the USA, or Wales, or anywhere without cossacks, Robert Koch and the prestige of German Science (with capital letters), public health data sets, Imperial politics with a Reichstag elected by universal manhood suffrage combine to bring about change, filtered piped water and sewers whether people like them or not, providing in the process a nice portrait of the interaction of social attitudes and policy with the impact of infectious disease in 19th century Hamburg, its story of a political system dominated by the wealthy holding off on raising money to spend on public health preferring to stress the need for self discipline on the part of the poor instead continues to seem oddly contemporary, can't think why.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am writing this review to encourage the GoodReads members to tackle this outstanding book and fight their way through the many passages where the going is tough either because of a bombardment of statistical tables or through the author's rather tortured efforts at political philosophy.
Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830-1910 has many important things to say about the politics of public health in Europe in the nineteenth century. In addition, it provides insight into the process through which the many free cities and principalities were gradually integrated into the German Empire created in 1871 by the Hohenzollern dynasty.
The two great progressive causes of the nineteenth century were emancipation (of Catholics, Jews, blacks, women, native Americans, etc.) and public hygiene. The literature on the various emancipation movements is more extensive but the effort required to create healthy systems for water distribution, sewage, waste disposal, food handling and sanitary inspection was just as great. Moreover, it merits the attention of those interested in the history of our societies.
As the cover blurb, indicates Death in Hamburg is a story of an enormous tragedy caused by a massive mismanagement on the part of the governing authorities of the city of Hamburg. In 1892, over ten thousand people died of Cholera in Hamburg when no other cities in Europe experienced cholera epidemics.
The city of Hamburg had retained the right to govern itself when incorporated into the German Empire. Hamburg was ruled by a senate composed of merchants and lawyers closely related to the great merchant houses. The first priority of the senators was to promote trade and shipping. In their actions they revealed callous indifference to the poor, greed and finally incompetence. Funds were quickly found for harbour infrastructures but not for a filtration system for the city's drinking water despite the fact that there had two previous cholera epidemics in the city.
Construction had finally begun on the water filtration system but completion was several years away when the epidemic hit in 1892. Having taken too long to approve the project that would have averted the epidemic, the city then proceeded to mismanage every aspect of the operation to contain the spread of the disease, care for the sick and bury the dead. Despite have clear evidence than epidemic had broken out, the city denied its existence for ten days. Ships with migrants infected with cholera were allowed to depart for American. No steps were taken to disinfect, to build temporary hospitals or to organize ambulance services.
Evans fills his book with tables to show that the poor, the elderly, women and children suffered disproportionately during the epidemic. Although such statistical analysis can be tedious for some readers, it adds great authority to Evans' conclusions. In my view, the extremely high quality of this stands as vindication of quantitative research.
Where Evans gets bogged down is in his efforts at political philosophy. The Hamburg Cholera Epidemic of 1892 is clearly a case where the wealthy failed to govern for the common good. The problem is that Evans attempts to make a more refined class analysis rather than to stop at a presentation of the facts which do indeed speak in favour of our modern social democrat states which do generally look after the poor and manage public health better than did the laissez-faire liberal regimes of the first half of the nineteenth century.

[Hectaizani · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book took me forever to read, not only was I in the process of moving so had way to much to do and couldn't just sit down and read, but it's very densely packed with facts, details, bar graphs and other weighty matters. The author broke down this sociological study of a smallish but major port city in Germany (Hamburg) into twelve thematic sections that each deal with a different conditioning factor that resulted in the cholera epidemic that devastated Hamburg in 1892 but left most of the rest of Europe relatively untouched in comparison. Beginning with politics, we learn that the senators were elected for life, and to become a senator one had to be a citizen, which one could only do if very rich, which is invariably a recipe for disaster. The senators were not interested in change, unless it benefited them the ruling citizens, so when water treatment plants and the like were suggested to prevent the spread of disease, these line items were usually voted down. After all, cholera and typhoid and such were diseases of the poor.

All in all, some pretty fascinating stuff here especially if like me you have an interest in medical history. The political side was interesting as well, but isn't really my usual cup of tea.

[Buchdoktor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Die Geschichte der Seuchen und Pandemien hatte ich bisher stets für ein medizinhistorisches Thema gehalten. Laut Richard Evans handelt es sich jedoch um ein sozialhistorisches Thema, das von den Lebensbedingungen und vom politischen System nicht zu trennen ist. Hamburgs Cholera-Ausbrüche wären kein Zufall, sondern ein Produkt u. a. menschlichen Handelns, gesellschaftlicher Ungleichheit und politischer Unruhe, …“ (S.819). Ignoranz und Geiz der Stadtregierung, persönliche Schwächen Einzelner und katastrophale Wohnbedingungen boten dem Cholera-Erreger eine ideale Brutstätte. Wer am Fluss lebte und arbeitete, musste sich zwangsläufig infizieren, wenn die Toilettenabflüsse direkt in Fleete und in den Fluss führten, aus dem Trink- und Brauchwasser entnommen wurde. Wer mit 8 Personen und einem Untermieter in 2 Räumen lebte, infizierte sich ebenso leicht, wie die, die Kranke pflegten, transportierten oder Tote begruben. Dass die bestimmenden alten Herren Kanalisation und städtische Wasserversorgung nicht finanzieren wollten, wirkt mehr als zynisch, wenn sie selbst nicht unter diesen Bedingungen lebten und genug Dienstpersonal hatten, um Trinkwasser vom Wasserwagen heranzuschleppen oder Leitungswasser auf dem Kohleherd abzukochen. Wer als Stadtregierung nicht aus früheren Epidemien lernt und den erneuten Cholera-Ausbruch vertuscht, muss sich nicht wundern über Zulauf für Arbeiter-Bewegung und Sozialdemokratie.

Schon in der Einleitung drängte sich mir hier ein Vergleich zwischen Hamburg im 19. Jahrhundert und der Welt während der Corona-Pandemie ab 2020 auf. Erstaunlich, wie viel die Hansestadt mit ihrem uneffektiven Zwei-Kammern-System 1892 aus ihren Fehlern hätte gelernt haben können - und tragisch, wie sich ihre Fehler bis heute wiederholen.

Anhand ungewöhnlich umfangreicher Quellen und Statistiken zur letzten Hamburger Cholera-Welle 1892 zeigt Evans, wie hanseatischer Überlegenheitsmythos, eine überforderte, rein merkantil handelnde Stadtregierung, die Nachtwächterstaat-Ideologie, krasse Standesunterschiede und Knausern am falschen Ende Hamburg 1892 ein Haushaltsdefizit von 6,2 Millionen Mark bescherten. Warum Hamburg als einzige Stadt noch 1892 einen Cholera-Ausbruch erlebte und warum die Stadt weder mit Berlin als Großstadt noch mit Bremen als Hafenstadt vergleichbar ist und daher ein ideales Studienobjekt für Evans war, werden Sie hier erfahren.

Finanziert wurde in Hamburg nur, was Handel und Hafen nützte. Eine Universität, Krankenhäuser, Pflegepersonal, Fuhrwerke zum Krankentransport, Wasserwerke oder ein Schlachthof hatten vor 1892 nicht dazu gehört. Als ebenso fatal sollte sich erweisen, dass ein staatliches Gesundheitswesen samt Berufsbeamtentum nach langem Zögern erst mit der Einstellung auswärtiger Ärzte möglich wurde, die an preußischen oder bayrischen Universitäten studiert hatten und für Hamburger Verhältnisse aufrührerische Ansichten mitbrachten. Die Auseinandersetzung zwischen von Pettenkofers hartnäckig vorgetragener Miasmen-Theorie und Kochs Stäbchenbakterien zeugt in tragikomischer Weise, wohin mangelnde Bildung einer Stadtregierung führt. Nach der Methode Leugnen, Tricksen, Knausern erklärten die Hamburger z. B. ganze Züge mit russischen Auswanderern für gesund, brachten die bereits infizierten Menschen auf Auswandererschiffe und hatten vor, sie den USA unterzujubeln, um nicht für sie aufkommen zu müssen.

Die offensichtliche Schwäche einer Stadtregierung, die mit Kaufleuten, Reedern und Juristen der Stadt verwandt und verschwägert war, jedoch von nur 10% der Bevölkerung gewählt war (das Wahlrecht war an Grundbesitz und Vermögen geknüpft), lässt die kommende Katastrophe ahnen.

Aus der Perspektive dieses Jahrhunderts mag Hamburger Politik des 19. Jahrhunderts eine trockene Thematik sein, aber die weiteren Kapitel über Lebensbedingungen in verschiedenen Hamburger Stadtteilen, über Hafenarbeiter, Dienstmädchen, die Lebenschancen von Kindern, die Rolle der Sozialdemokratie uvm. machen den theoretischen Einstieg mehr als wett. Allerdings hätte mich noch brennend interessiert, warum 1892 eine cholerakranke Frau, die in ein Krankenhaus eingeliefert wurde, so viel schlechtere Überlebenschancen hatte als ein Mann in vergleichbarem Zustand. Geschlechtergerechte Medizin war 1987 leider noch kein Thema …

Evans kann zwischen Zahlen und Diagrammen Geschichte erstaunlich spannend in Persönlichkeiten und Einzelschicksalen erzählen. Er nimmt deutlich Partei für die kleinen Leute und kann schwer verbergen, dass er kein Freund des Großbürgertums ist. Nicht nur seine brillante Studie beeindruckt, sondern die Menge an Statistiken, Zeitungsartikeln, persönlichen Aufzeichnungen und Fotos, die er auswerten konnte.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ll confess I really didn’t need this level of detail. Cholera is barely mentioned until page 226. But the book is an astounding feat of social history.

[Sdugre · Rating 5 out of 5]

This guy can write history. Can't wait for the release of "The Third Reich at War".

[db · Rating 4 out of 5]

History of a pandemic - many similarities to today.