Rachel Carson Center
"The Monster Swallows You": Disaster Memory and Risk Culture in Western Europe, 1500-
2000
Author(s): Christian Pfister
Source: RCC Perspectives , No. 1, "The Monster Swallows You": Disaster Memory and Risk
Culture in Western Europe, 1500-2000 (2011), pp. 1-23
Published by: Rachel Carson Center
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26240264
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RCC Perspectives
“The Monster Swallows You“
Disaster Memory and Risk Culture in Western Europe, 1500-2000
Christian Pfister
2011 / 1
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2 RCC Perspectives
Christian Pfister is Professor Emeritus in Social, Economic, and Environmental History
at the University of Bern and an Associate of the Oeschger Center for Climate
Research in Bern. Pfister has published widely, in particular on the historical reconstruction
of climate change, on the history of transport and pollution, and on the social
impact of natural disasters. His publications have won him acclaim both in Switzerland
and internationally. Among his most recent awards is an honorary doctorate from
the Universidad Ricardo Palma in Lima (2010). Together with Christof Mauch, he is
co-editor of the volume Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies Toward a
Global Environmental History (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).
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3“The Monster Swallows You“
This essay is based on a talk given by Prof. Dr. Christian Pfister at the Rachel Carson
Center on 2 February 2010.
Memories, Learning, and Adaptation
The memory of natural disaster is, in contrast to the memory of war, markedly shortlived
in a globalized world. As waters return to their pre-flood levels and the last earthquake
victims recover, mass-media interest quickly subsides.1
The victims of disaster
will not forget so easily, but their memories too will fade. If such events have occurred
frequently in the past, they are perceived as “more of the same,” even though their
unpredictable appearance still defines them as discrete events.
And yet memory is crucial for the development of coping strategies. In Franz
Mauelshagen’s words, “all preventive strategies are based on the expectations generated
by repeated experiences. Repetition therefore becomes a key concept in historical
research on learning from disasters.”2
This issue should not be discussed under
the truism “learning from history,” as cultural historian Gerrit Jasper Schenk recently
did. He overlooks the fact that “history” is a blanket term situated on a high level of
abstraction; if we seriously want to tackle the issue of learning from past experience,
we need to break it down into smaller units of analysis that are closer to people’s
experience. Schenk claims that “theoretical and empirical case studies on learning
from disasters have not yet been submitted,”3
disregarding a number of pertinent
case studies from several parts of the globe that are provided together with theoretical
considerations in a recent volume of essays.4
The terms remembering and learning refer primarily to individual processes, but they
also designate collective ones which underlay group-specific behavior. According to
the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, groups are able to envisage common experience,
1 Christof Mauch, “Introduction,” in Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses. Case Studies Toward a Global
Environmental History, eds. Christof Mauch and Christian Pfister (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 3.
2 Franz Mauelshagen, “Disaster and Political Culture in Germany since 1500,” in Natural Disasters, 44;
see also Christian Pfister, “Learning from Nature-induced Disasters. Considerations from Historical Case
Studies in Western Europe;” in Natural Disasters, 17–40.	
3 Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “Katastrophen in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Eine Einführung,” in Katastrophen:
Vom Untergang Pompejis bis zum Klimawandel, ed. Gerrit Jasper Schenk (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke,
2010), 14. This and all subsequent citations not originally written in English are translated by the author.
4 Mauch and Pfister, Natural Disasters. 	
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4 RCC Perspectives
thereby arriving at a “collective memory.” As an example, he mentions family memory,
which draws on everyday oral communication and also includes, of course, the
remembrance of experienced disasters.5
It is “social short term memory,”6
which
tends to be wiped out with the death of the last eyewitness of the event in question.
Memories which go further back need to be underpinned with documents such as
newspaper clippings, chronicles, and photo albums.
The concept of “cultural memory,” introduced by Jan und Aleida Assmann, defines
the “outer dimension of human memory,” which is supported by media and includes
the entirety of knowledge which governs our behavior.7
Here, Aleida Assmann distinguishes
between “functional memory” and “storage memory.” “Functional memory”
is group-oriented, value-connected, future-oriented, and necessarily selective, because
it can only retain a fragment of the knowledge available. This knowledge is contained
in the “storage memory,” which is “a second-order ‘social long-term memory,’
a memory of memories in charge of the historical sciences.” Issues held in storage
memory need to be reprocessed in order to recall them to functional memory.8
Severe disasters need to be permanently remembered in order to safeguard against
the same devastating impact if they recur. The more individuals and groups bear past
events in mind, the greater the risk of their recurrence is perceived to be.9
Natural
hazards are of course retained in memory if they recur frequently, and the more frequently
they occur, the more likely people are to anticipate them and to try to develop
adequate adaptive strategies, which are always the result of learning processes and
which can take different forms. In public policy, at least on the state or national level,
learning from catastrophes takes place within networks that include politicians,
administrators, scientists, and technical experts. At the local level, successful learning
depends to a large extent on the initiative of community leaders and small groups
who, at least in earlier times, tended to leave few if any records of their activities.10
The term “cultures of disaster,” coined by Harry E. Moore,11
designates a bundle of
5 Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris: Presse Universitaire, 1950).
6 Harald Welzer, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis. Eine Theorie der Erinnerung, 2nd ed. (München: 2008), 36.
7 Welzer, Gedächtnis, 36.
8 Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, 2nd ed.
(Munich: C.H. Beck, 2006), 134–35; Welzer, Gedächtnis, 36.
9 Regula Enderlin Cavigelli, Risiko und Konflikt. Fallanalyse in der Kernenergiekontroverse und theoretische
Reflexionen (Bern: Haupt, 1996), 25.
10 Pfister, “Learning from Nature-induced Disasters,” 20.
11 E. Moore, “And the Winds Blew” (Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1964), 14.
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5“The Monster Swallows You“
well-rehearsed practices of risk minimization and ways of coping with extraordinary
situations that people have integrated into their daily lives so as not to be taken by surprise.
The best known case study was presented by Greg Bankoff using the example
of the Philippines.12
Christian Rohr prefers the term “culture of risk,” as disasters have
often been avoided by means of preventive practices.13
Memories of Disaster and Management Strategies
in Traditional Western European Societies
In Europe, we can see these cultures of risk at work in, amongst others, the “hydrographic
societies”14
on the North Sea coast and the “nivographic societies”15
in the Alps.
Avalanches were an annual risk in the Alps and communities tried to minimize damage
by keeping buildings out of the usual path of destruction.16
The loss of life, cattle,
and buildings was only registered when avalanches struck large areas in exceptionally
snowy winters.17
Some villages were shielded by protective forests, which were
themselves protected by the authorities from being felled or utilized in any other way.18
Alpine shelters exposed to avalanches were equipped with wedge-shaped stonewalls
designed to divert the snow masses past both sides of the building.19
A case study
of the culture of risk in the French Alps is provided by René Favier and Anne-Marie
Granet-Abisset.20
The lives of inhabitants of the North Sea communities were shaped by storm tides.
Up until the late eighteenth century, the failure of a dike resulted in the deaths of
12 Greg Bankoff, Cultures of Disaster. Society and Natural Hazard in the Philippines (London: Routledge
Courzon, 2003).
13 Christian Rohr, Extreme Naturereignisse im Ostalpenraum. Naturerfahrung im Spätmittelalter und am
Beginn der Neuzeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007), 59.
14 Mauelshagen, Disaster and Political Culture, 49.
15 Christian Pfister, “Die Katastrophenlücke des 20. Jahrhunderts und der Verlust traditionalen Risikobewusstseins,”
GAIA Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 3, no. 18 (2009): 240.
16 René Favier and Anne-Marie Granet-Abisset, “Society and Natural Risks in France, 1500–2000: Changing
Historical Perspectives,” in Natural Disasters, 123.
17 Martin Laternser and Walter J. Amman,“Der Lawinenwinter 1951 und seine Auswirkungen auf den Lawinenschutz
in der Schweiz,” in Am Tag danach. Zur Bewältigung von Naturkatastrophen in der Schweiz
1500–2000, ed. Christian Pfister (Bern: Haupt, 2002), 153–168.
18 Verena Stöckli, “Der Bannwald. Lebensgrundlage und Kultobjekt,” in Pfister, Bewältigung, 101–12.
19 Philippe Schoeneich, Denyse Raymond, Marie-Claude Busset-Henchoz, Spaltkeil, and Ebenhöch, “
Traditionelle Lawinen-Schutzbauten in den Waadtländer Voralpen,” in Pfister, Bewältigung, 147–52.
20 Favier et al., “Society and Natural Risks.”
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6 RCC Perspectives
thousands of humans and the destruction of livestock, and the salt water rendered the
arable ground unusable for a long time afterwards. Immigrants into the region attracted
by incentives such as fertile land and political privileges developed strategies for
coping with, rather than avoiding, the dangers of the North Sea. Catastrophic storm
tides, which repeatedly forced people to abandon land and settlements, have acted
as a catalyst for technical improvements.21
The development of dike construction has
been depicted as a learning process, in which successive floods led to greater scientific
understanding, which in turn generated new technical skills.22
Installing dikes to
encircle large coastal districts needed to be coordinated and required proper funding.
Institutions such as dike laws, which were orally transmitted up to the early thirteenth
century, established the proper maintenance of dikes. The first written record, found
in Eike von Repgow’s Sachsenspiegel (around 1230), mentions with reference to river
dikes that any landowner unable to maintain the dikes would forfeit his land.23
“No land without dike and no dike without land” was customary law for centuries.24
Periodic inspections were needed to ensure adequate maintenance of dikes by skilled
workers. The number of supervisors with a professional background rose over time.25
The cost of inspection and maintenance was painstakingly documented in town ac-
counts.26
Floods were also a major risk along rivers. Before riverbank protection became efficient
in the nineteenth century, most rivers followed a natural meandering course
that was often altered by severe floods. In order to avoid major losses, low-lying land
along the rivers remained communal space, on which local inhabitants were not allowed
to build.27
Traditional early warning systems were already well developed in
eighteenth-century Upper Engadin (Switzerland): guards were appointed to monitor
the Inn River at night if floods were expected. If the water levels threatened villages,
they alerted the population. A gender-specific division of tasks was rehearsed. Men
21 Mauelshagen, Disaster and Political Culture, 51.
22 Norbert Fischer, Wassersnot und Marschengesellschaft: Zur Geschichte der Deiche in Kehdingen (Stade:
Landschaftsverb. der Ehemaligen Herzogtümer Bremen und Verden, 2003), 45, as cited in Mauelshagen,
Disaster and Political Culture, 71.
23 Hans Joachim Kühn, Die Anfange des Deichbaus in Schleswig-Holstein (Heide: Westholsteinische Verlagsanstalt
Boyens, 1992), 83, as cited in Mauelshagen, Disaster and Political Culture, 71.
24 Mauelshagen, Disaster and Political Culture, 53.
25 Ibid., 54.
26 Adriaan de Kraker, “Reconstruction of Storm Frequency in the North Sea Area of the Preindustrial Period,
1400–1625 and the Connection with Reconstructed Time Series of Temperatures,” History of Meteorology 2
(2005): 51–69.
27 Dirk van Laak, “Infra-Strukturgeschichte,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27, no. 3 (2001): 381.
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7“The Monster Swallows You“
assisted in reinforcing the river embankments whereas women snatched up valuable
belongings and drove the cattle uphill to safe places.28
Bridges were still exposed to
the floods and needed special protection. We have documentary records of another
kind of institutionalized flood prevention in late fifteenth century Basel. In the case of
the Rhine threatening to burst its banks, a squad of men with hooks was called up onto
the bridge, their task being to prevent the bridge from being damaged by fishing out
drifting logs from the flood waters. This preventive strategy was introduced after an
extreme flood in August 1480.29
A further form of institutionalized prevention is known from the Austrian city of Salzburg.
A rockslide from the “Mönchsberg,” a cliff-like hill above the town, overwhelmed
the narrow street beneath it in the early morning of 16 July 1699, causing more than
220 casualties. In order to prevent this kind of disaster from recurring, “mountain
cleaners” were occasionally engaged until 1778. Subsequently, “mountain cleaning”
was performed annually. Since 1976, this task has been funded by Salzburg municipal
council.30
Guido Poliwoda is the first environmental historian who has systematically
documented a process of learning from disaster over several decades, in this case in
the German electorate and later kingdom of Saxony. The regions along the Elbe River
were frequently devastated by ice floods between 1784 and 1845. The recurrence of
such disasters led to the development of coping strategies that were in the end highly
successful, judging by the efficient management of an extremely severe flood in 1845.31
The documentation of disasters, extreme events, and miraculous signs in the “cultural
memory” of a community is a key element of risk cultures.32
In China, this tradition
reaches back over two thousand years.33
Several forms of “memoria” were known in
traditional societies. Communication of risk was one of the chroniclers’ main objectives:
their task involved noting down narratives of extraordinary events memorable
for society, such as extreme weather conditions, natural disasters, fires, and famines.
28 Pfister, “Learning from Nature-Induced Disasters,” 24.
29 Pfister, “Katastrophenlücke,” 241.
30 Karin Hauer, Der plötzliche Tod. Bergstürze in Salzburg und Plurs kulturhistorisch betrachtet
(Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2009).
31 Guido N. Poliwoda, Aus Katastrophen lernen. Sachsen im Kampf gegen die Fluten der Elbe 1784 bis 1845
(Cologne: Böhlau, 2007).
32 Franz Mauelshagen, Wunderkammer auf Papier. Die Wickiana zwischen Reformation und Volksglaube
(Zürich: Studentendruckerei, 2008).
33 Q.-S. Ge, J.-Y. Zheng, Y.-Y. Tian, W.-X Wu, X. Fang, Q. Fang, and W.-C. Wang, “Coherence of Climatic
Reconstruction from Historical Documents in China by Different Studies,” International Journal of Climatology,
28 (2008): 1007–24.
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8 RCC Perspectives
Where possible, chroniclers tried to compare the severity of such events with examples
from the past. In the case of inundations, they often referred to destroyed bridges
or flooded streets.34
In the case of storms, they cited the destruction of spires and brick
houses, or the eradication of large oak trees as evidence of extreme gale force.35
This
information, however, even if it was communicated to the public in some form, was
soon forgotten. Sometimes memories took the form of a distinct genre of vernacular
poetry, as is documented for the severe winter storm Barbara in Portugal (4 December
1739)36
and for the devastating flood of the Drac River in Grenoble (France) on 15
September 1733. The grocer André Blanc dit la Goutte tells the story of the disaster in
a long poem of 560 alexandrines written in the dialect of the Dauphiné entitled Grenoblo
malherou (Unfortunate Grenoble), which was published two months after the
event.37
The following lines are particularly evocative:
The ground vanishes, the mountains descend;
Observably, brooks and rivers rise;
Grenoble and its surroundings are below a real sea; (...)
Everything trembles, the cattle, the birds, and humans; (...)
Grenoble, you are lost. The monster swallows you.38
Memorials in the public sphere were particularly well suited to recall the memory of
historic events, as Pierre Nora has shown in his groundbreaking work on Lieux de
mémoire in France.39
High water marks chiseled on the walls of public or private build-
ings40
were a convenient way to compare the frequency and severity of floods over
time. At the same time, they were used as points of comparison for each subsequent
flood. Rather than being purely communicative, high water marks can be read as
34 Rudolf Brázdil, Zbigniew W. Kundzewicz, and Gerardo Benito, “Historical hydrology for studying flood
risk in Europe,” Hydrological Sciences Journal 51 (2006): 741.
35 Christian Pfister, Emmanuel Garnier, Joao Alcoforado Maria, Dennis Wheeler, Jürg Luterbacher, Fatima
Nuňes, and Joao Paolo Taborda, “The Meteorological Framework and the Cultural Memory of Three Severe
Winter-Storms in Early Eighteenth-Century Europe,” Climatic Change 101, no. 1 (2010): 281–310.
36 Pfister et al., “Winter-Storms in Early Eighteenth-Century Europe.”
37 Gunhild Hoyer and Gaston Tuaillon, “Blanc La Goutte. Poète de Grenoble. Œuvres complètes,” in Le
Monde Alpin et Rhodanien, 4/2002, 16–34, as cited in Denis Cœur, La Maitrise des Inondations dans la
Plaine de Grenoble (XVIIe–XXe) siècle). Enjeux Techniques, Politiques et Urbains. Ph.D. diss., Institut d‘
Urbanisme de Grenoble. Grenoble, Université Pierre Mendès France, 2003, Vol. 1, 85. Part of this thesis
was published without the reference to the poem. Denis Cœur, La plaine de Grenoble face aux inondations:
Genèse d‘une politique publique du XVIIe au XXe siècle (Versailles: Quae éditions, 2008).
38 See Cœur, Maîtrise, 86.
39 Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).
40 Jan Munzar, Matthias Deutsch et al. “Historical Floods in Central Europe and Their Documentation by Means
of Floodmarks and Other Epigraphical Monuments,“ Moravian Geographical Reports 14, no. 3 (2006): 26–44.
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9“The Monster Swallows You“
visual expressions of institutional risk memory in the sense of the insurance industry,
which defines risk as the likelihood that a loss of a certain magnitude will occur.41
One of the most eye-catching assemblages of high water
marks is inscribed on the wall of the “Gartenhaus”
situated on the bank of the Tauber River in Wertheim in
southern Germany (see figure 1). Each of the 24 marks
on the wall of this house tells a story which can be investigated
in contemporary local chronicles. For example,
for the year 1732 we read that the flood on the night of
29–30 September 1732 destroyed 32 houses including
the furniture, the equipment and most of the livestock
therein, as well as the bridge, the church, and part of the
hospital. Only three people were killed. The disaster was
seen by many at the time as “divine retribution.”42
The memorial in the harbor in Tönning on the German
North Sea Coast recalls three severe storm tides in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like the memorials
for the victims of the world wars, storm tide memorials
in the public sphere, such as these, are conceived as
lieux de mémoire (Pierre Nora), except that in this case
the memory concerns the victims of natural disasters
rather than soldiers who died for the fatherland. The
Tönning memorial is exceptional because it explicitly
communicates a warning for the future: “Watch out for
the next flood.”43
Ex-votos are votive offerings to a saint or to the Virgin Mary in fulfillment of a vow;
they represent another form of cultural disaster memory. Quite often, ex-votos were
produced in order to bear witness for posterity to divine intervention which resulted
41 Christian Rohr, “Measuring the Frequency and Intensity of Floods of the Traun River (Upper Austria),
1441–1574,” Hydrological Sciences 51, no. 5 (2007): 835; and Pfister, “Katastrophenlücke,” 242.
42 Susanne Kiermayr-Bühn, Leben mit dem Wetter, Klima, Alltag und Katastrophe in Süddeutschland seit
1600 (Darmstadt: WBG, 2009), 72–73.
43 Michael Kempe, “Memories of Natural Disasters in Northern Germany from the Sixteenth Century to the
Present,” Medieval History Journal 10, nos. 1–2 (2007): 327–54.
Figure 1:
Wertheim.
Photograph by
Rüdiger Glaser
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10 RCC Perspectives
in escape from a situation of individual or collective emergency.44
An ex-voto may be
a painting, medal, or even a football shirt that is exhibited in a public space, often in a
church. Figure 2 shows a painting commissioned in memory of a dramatic flood in the
town of Solothurn (western Switzerland) on 30 November 1651. At that time, the waters
of the Aare River carried a huge amount of driftwood which jammed at the bridge,
damming the water and diverting it into the town. In despair, the frightened citizens
vowed to recognize the help of Virgin Mary if the town was spared. Subsequently, the
bridge collapsed and the water level within the town decreased. Today, this ex-voto is
on display in a local church.45
Likewise, religious buildings may serve as disaster memory in the public domain. In
1606, a small chapel, which can still be seen today, was built near Lake Ruitor in the
Aosta valley, some fifteen kilometers south of the southern entrance of the Mont Blanc
tunnel, above the town of La Thuile (see figure 3, p.11). Its significant human history
is known from a lengthy article by Martino Baretti published in the Bulletin of the
44 Georges Didi-Huberman, Ex-voto: image, organe, temps (Paris: Bayard, 2006).
45 Christian Pfister, “Klima und Naturkatastrophen,” in Berns mächtige Zeit. Das 16. und 17. Jahrhundert
neu entdeckt, ed. André Holenstein (Bern: 2006), xx.
Figure 2:
Painting of
the Flood of
Solothurn 1651.
On display in
the Spitalkirche
zum Heiligen
Geist, Solothurn,
Switzerland.
Photograph by
Erich Weber
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11“The Monster Swallows You“
Italian Alpine Club in 1880.46
At the climax of the second major phase of the Little Ice
Age in the 1590s, the advance of the nearby glacier led to annually recurring floods
which lasted for almost a decade. The imminence of the advancing glacier was first
noticed in 1594, when a wall of water from the lake destroyed houses, barns, forests,
and meadows on its way down to La Thuile. A disaster of similar magnitude occurred
the following year. The recurrence of the flooding upset the political authorities of the
Duchy of Aosta. During the years that followed, they tried to find a technical solution
to the problem by having an “engineer” construct a tunnel to evacuate water from
the lake. However, this project ultimately failed for technical reasons. In 1603, efforts
to prevent the floods by technical means were abandoned. Instead, it was decided to
build a chapel near the lake in order to halt the further advance of the glacier. The
chapel, dedicated to Santa Margherita, became the destination of a procession to the
lake each year on 20 July which contributed to the renewal of the memory of the flood
disasters.47
46 Baretti, Martino, “Il Lago del Rutor (Alpi Graje Settentrionali),” Bollettino del Club Alpino italiano 14, no.
41 (1880): 43–95.
47 Christian Pfister, “Climatic Extremes, Recurrent Crises and Witch Hunts: Strategies of European Societies
in Coping with Exogenous Shocks in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” The Medieval
History Journal 10, nos. 1–2 (2007): 1–41.
Figure 3:
Chapel Lake Ruitor,
built 1606.
Photograph by
Christian Pfister
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12 RCC Perspectives
Hailstorms in history have so far been largely disregarded,
even by disaster historians.48
With the
exception of the well-known hailstorm in June 1788
(the year which preceded the French Revolution),49
the fact that a hailstorm could almost annihilate crops
within a broad area, completely ruining the affected
households and villages, has been overlooked. In
some regions, experiences of hailstorms gave rise to
annual “hail processions” in the early summer, which
were another form of institutionalized disaster memory.
Often they ended near small stone cross memorials
in the fields, where a high mass was celebrated (see
figure 4).50
Deleted, Suppressed, and Lost Memories
What happens when these processes of remembering disaster are not initiated? Like
remembering, forgetting is chiefly an individual process, but there are also interfaces
with collective processes. Some disasters, even severe and large-scale ones, were never
inscribed in the “cultural memory,” as will be shown. In some cases, the collective
memory of certain individuals was intentionally deleted, whereas the memory of an
event tends to be forgotten in the “storage memory” after some time has passed.
Firstly, some words about the deleting of memory: the Latin term damnatio memoriae
refers to expunging all memory of a person from the collective mind for posterity.
48 Rudolf Brázdil, Hubert Valášek, and Zbynek Svitak, “Meteorological and Hydrological Extremes in
the Dietrichstein Domains of Dolni Kounice and Mikulov between 1650 and 1849 according to Official
Economic Records of Natural Disasters,” Geografický časopis 55, no. 4 (2003): 325–53; Rudolf Brázdil,
Hubert Valášek, and Katerina Chromá, “Documentary Evidence of an Economic Character as a Source
for the Study of Meteorological and Hydrological Extremes and their Impacts on Human Activities,”
Geografiska Annaler A 88, no. 2 (2006): 79–86; Franz Mauelshagen, “Sharing the Risk of Hail: Insurance,
Reinsurance, and the Variability of Hailstorms in Switzerland, 1880-1932,” Environment and History 1
(2011); and Eleonora Rohland, Sharing the Risk. Fire, Climate and Disaster. Swiss Re 1864–1906
(Lancaster: Crucible Books, forthcoming).
49 Richard Grove, „The Great El Niño of 1789–93 and its Global Consequences: Reconstructing an Extreme
Climate. Event in World Environmental History,“ The Medieval History Journal 10, no. 75 (2007): 92–93.
50 Krebs, Horst. “Kripper Hagelkreuz,” http://www.geschichte-kripp.de/32.html (2008, accessed May 2010);
Hans Ehlert, “Der Hagelfeiertag im Lande Braunschweig,” Braunschweigische Heimat 1 (1974).
Figure 4:
The “hail
memorial” in the
urban district of
Kripp (in Remagen,
Rhineland-
Palatinate,
Germany).
Photograph by
Horst Krebs.
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13“The Monster Swallows You“
Although the term itself is a neologism, it refers back to actions that were customary
in the Roman Empire, in which the names of detested persons were deleted from the
Annals and their statues destroyed. Merely pronouncing the name of the damned person
was taboo. The felling of monuments is a present-day form of damnatio memoriae,
as with the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in spring 2003. Another
form of this process is documented from the dark period after the end of Nazi rule in
1945, when the only stamps still available in Germany bore the portrait of Adolf Hitler.
Various measures were taken in different postal districts to avoid the memory of
the now hated Führer. Some officials had his portrait garbled with a rubber mark or
with a skull. Others branded it with the overprint “Deutschlands Verderber,” meaning
Germany’s ruin.
The memory of some severe disasters was blurred by obscuring the real causes. The
best known case is the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. It caused damage costing fifty
billon dollars (in modern terms; this was the value estimated in 2008) and is therefore
one of the most expensive natural disasters ever recorded.51
The extraordinarily high
cost of the damage was chiefly the result of leaking gas pipes causing fires that could not
be easily extinguished, and the town was swiftly rebuilt. However, the authorities were
unable to cope with the earthquake and its consequences. Efforts by geologists to introduce
standards for earthquake-proof buildings were disregarded. Instead, the fact of the
earthquake fell victim to a “conspiracy of silence” (Christof Mauch), and the disaster was
officially renamed the “Fire of San Francisco.”52
The underlying message is obvious: fire
is a hazard that humankind can handle, in contrast to earthquakes.53
Moreover, there are cases in which even extraordinarily severe disasters were not
inscribed in the cultural memory at all. One example is the series of violent winter
storms which ravaged western and central Europe between 14-18 January 1739. In
51 The losses amounted to between 350 and 500 million US dollars (estimated value in 1906). The equivalent
value in the year 2009 was estimated using the change in wages for unqualified labour, see MeasuringWorth,
“Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount—1774 to Present,” http://
www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/ (accessed May 2010).
52 Christof Mauch, “Silberstreifen. Naturkatastrophen und Fortschrittsoptimismus in der amerikanischen
Geschichte,” in André Kirchhofer, Daniel Krämer, Christoph Maria Merki, Guido Poliwoda, Martin Stuber,
and Stepanie Summermatter, Nachhaltige Geschichte. Festschrift für Christian Pfister (Zurich: Chronos
2009), 149–67.
53 Christoph Strupp, “‘Nothing Destroyed that Cannot Speedily Be Rebuilt.’ San Francisco und das Erdbeben
von 1906,” in Städte aus Trümmern. Katastrophenbewältigung zwischen Antike und Moderne, eds.
Andreas Ranft and Stephan Selzer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck 2004), 132–71.
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RCC Perspectives14
the main study of this event, the storm series is named Hilaire-Prisca after the saint’s
days of the first and the last day of its occurrence (“Hilaire” on 14 January and “Prisca”
on 18 January), in line with the age-old practice of naming historic storms and
floods on the North Sea coast after the saint’s day on which they occurred.54
On the
continent, the storms persisted for about 100 hours, which is unique within at least
the last 250 years. Given the extensive damage caused to buildings and the uprooting
of forests and orchards, the socio-economic impact of the storms can be described
as war-like. Just in the one tiny Swiss community of Beckenried (Canton Nidwalden),
the local priest recorded the destruction of a thousand fruit trees. In several places
in France and Switzerland, chroniclers mentioned spires destroyed and church roofs
blown away by the gales. Even people were swept off their feet, and waterspouts were
observed on lakes.55
In many cases, people fled outdoors in panic when their homes
were devastated by the high winds. The majority of farms in rural communities lost
their roofs at the harshest time of year. Though these storms were well-chronicled,
they were not retained in the collective memories of France and Switzerland.
The fact that this disaster was effectively lost to memory was a significant factor in the
greenhouse discourse in France in the wake of the winter storm Lothar which devastated
France, Switzerland, and southern Germany on 26 December 1999. In France,
eighty-eight people died, and 400,000 telephone and power supply lines were knocked
out, leaving two million people without electricity, in some cases for weeks. The insured
losses were estimated at 5.5 billion Euros.56
The unexpected vulnerability of
modern society to the forces of nature traumatized the French public. In order to allay
public anxieties, both the media and politicians stressed the exceptional character of
the “storm of the century.” The famous climate historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
declared: “France has never experienced such a disaster! No event of comparable
severity is known in the sources for at least four centuries.”57
Le Roy Ladurie’s claim
contributed to strengthening public acceptance of climate change. If the storms were
really unprecedented, as he suggested, then the most likely explanation must be the
54 Today, the German Weather Services (DWD) name cyclones in alphabetical order, respecting gender
equality by alternating between female and male names; FU-Berlin: Institut für Meteorologie, “Geschichte
der Namensvergabe,” http://www.met.fu-berlin.de/wetterpate/historie/ (accessed July 2009).
55 Daniel Krämer, “Als die Buchen und Tannen ‘wie Vögelein’ flogen. Die Winterstürme ‘Marcellus’ und
‘Prisca’ am 16. und 18. Januar 1739 und ihre Auswirkungen in der Zentralschweiz,” Geschichtsfreund
162 (2009): 143–76.
56 Schweizerische Rückversicherungs-Gesellschaft (ed), Natur- und Man-made-Katastrophen im Jahr 2006
(Zurich: Swiss Re, 2007).
57 Pierre le Hir, “Les historiens stupéfiés par la violence des dernières tempêtes,“ Le Monde, 7 January 2000.
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hitherto disregarded greenhouse effect. For many French, the shock of Lothar was a
wake-up call in this respect,58
though its interpretation turned out to be questionable
later on.
Why was the memory of Hilaire-Prisca not retained, neither in France nor in the Swiss
cantons? One reason might be that the storms did not claim many victims. In England,
the memory of a similar event, the Great Storm of 7-8 December 1703, was
retained because it took the life of about eight thousand mariners and sunk thirteen
Royal Navy vessels at a pivotal time (England was engaged in the War of the Spanish
Succession against France).59
Another reason might be related to the magnitude and
ubiquity of the damage Hilaire-Prisca caused. Only the very poorest households were
assisted in the Swiss cantons. Being more generous in such conditions would not only
have exceeded the resources of the municipal and national treasuries, but even the
capabilities of modern insurance prior to the introduction of a worldwide reinsurance
system. The sheer inability of authorities to provide desperately needed assistance
contravened the principles of paternalism, which was the primary legitimacy of the
ruling aristocracy, and this may be an important reason why this event was not inscribed
in the cultural memory.60
The earthquake in 1556 in Shaanxi, China, seems to
be a similar case. Though it tops the list of the deadliest earthquakes in human history,
scoring eight on the Richter scale and allegedly claiming 830,000 victims, it is only
scantily described in the Chinese historiography. According to Andrea Janku, the imperial
administration was not able to provide disaster relief because it it no longer had
adequate resources, having had huge expenditures for frontier defense in previous
years. Hence, court historians did not have any motive to glorify the generosity of the
regime.61
Finally, in looking at the non-remembrance of disasters, we have to consider the case
of Switzerland, where the sheer lack of severe disasters between 1882 and 1976 led
to a process of unlearning, resulting in a total lack of civilian disaster awareness and
58 Pfister et al., “Winter-Storms in Early Eighteenth-Century Europe.”
59 Historian Trevelyan describes the possible role of the event in history thus: “English naval supremacy was
nearly broken and the war lost by the sudden, brief and unprovoked intervention of a neutral power. The
Great Storm, without rival in the recorded history of our islands.” George Maculay Trevelyan, England
under Queen Anne. Part 1—Blenheim (London: Longmans, 1930), 308.
60 Pfister et al., “Winter-Storms in Early Eighteenth-Century Europe.”
61 Andrea Janku, “‘Drei lebenslange Freunde / In einer Nacht dem Sand anheim gegeben.’ Das Erdbeben
von 1556 in Shaanxi (China) ” in Katastrophen. Vom Untergang Pompejis bis zum Klimawandel, ed. Gerrit
Jasper Schenk (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2010), 81–92.
15“The Monster Swallows You“
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RCC Perspectives16
preparedness. Most flood marks were gradually destroyed and the centennial of severe
events was no longer commemorated. At first sight, this trend seems to be a result of
the introduction of natural hazard insurance, the availability of new technologies for
managing disasters (helicopters, bulldozers, and radio communication), and cultural
change. However, a recent investigation concluded that the impulses necessary for
reviving the “cultural memory” of natural disasters were almost completely absent.
Firstly, in this respect, “severe” disasters needed to be properly distinguished from
less severe ones. It is generally accepted that the severity of a disaster depends on two
parameters, namely the number of victims and the financial cost of damage. While
the number of victims may be compared in space and over time, the financial cost of
damage has to be converted from the currency of the time into present-day monetary
values. This can be calculated as follows. First, a representative table detailing a
mason’s daily wages for the period 1800-2007 was produced. Monetary losses as a
result of historical disasters were then expressed in terms of a number of mason’s
workdays. This number was finally reconverted into contemporary Swiss francs by
multiplying the number of workdays with the daily wage in the respective year.62
Needless to say, this procedure can only give us an approximate figure. The baseline
of a “severe” disaster was set at 300 million francs (at their value in the year 2000), or
fifty victims (figure 5).
The graph only shows the monetary losses caused by natural disasters. Between 1806
and 1881, 650 people were killed by natural disasters in Switzerland, mostly by the two
rockfalls at Goldau (1806) and Elm (1881).63
The average sum of annual losses reached
42 million francs (at their value in the year 2000); most of these losses were the result
of severe floods and the Glarus fire (1861), which was exacerbated by violent Föhn
winds. Between 1882 and 1976, 213 people were killed, most of them by avalanches
in the winter of 1950-51,64
and by the glacier break-up in Mattmark in 1965. Average
monetary losses were four times smaller than in the preceding phase. From 1977 to
2008, the number of disaster victims fell to forty. On the other hand, monetary losses
62 Roman Studer and Pascal Schuppli. “Deflating Swiss Prices over the Past Five Centuries,” Historical
Methods 41, no. 3 (2008): 137–56; Christian Pfister and Roman Studer, “SWISTOVAL—Der Historische
Geldwertrechner für die Schweiz ab 1800,” in Traverse 1 (2010): 272–84.
63 Stephanie Summermatter, “‘Das Thal in Schutt und Grauen.’ Der Bergsturz von Goldau (Schweiz), 2.
September 1806,” in Schenk, Katastrophen, 119–31; Hans-Peter Bläuer, “Der Bergsturz von Elm am 11.
September 1881,” in Pfister, Am Tag danach, 113–30.
64 Laternser and Amman, “Der Lawinenwinter 1951,” 166.
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17“The Monster Swallows You“
skyrocketed to 343 million francs (value in the year 2000), which is thirty-four times
more than in the preceding period. This increase results from a much higher number
of severe cases, rapid urbanization, and a higher value density.
The disaster gap, the rare occurrence of severe hazards during almost a century, is a
significant element in explaining the loss of functional disaster memory. This interpretation
is underlined by the fact that the historically unique increase in the frequency
and severity of disasters over the last thirty years, possibly as a consequence of the
increased greenhouse effect, has contributed to the development of a new kind of risk
culture based on a systematic retrieval of disaster memories from the archives.65
This
knowledge is used to keep local “risk areas” subject to a building ban, something
which should be understood as the legal institutionalization of past disaster memories
for the future.
65 Pfister, “Katastrophenlücke,” 245.
Figure 5:
The “Disaster
Gap” in Switzerland,
1882-1976
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18 RCC Perspectives
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Glaser (Freiburg/Br), Dr. Erich Weber (Solothurn),
and Horst Krebs (Hagen) for permission to reproduce the images in figures one, two,
and four.
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19“The Monster Swallows You“
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