Downplaying and Taboo

Intellectual contemporaries have often criticized the satirical magazine Die Bombe for the superficial nature of its jokes. Here, the magazine shows a prostitute asking a colleague if their friend Ella has the "Spanish disease".  Her colleague doesn't think so, because Ella has only French suitors. Thereby, it compares the onset of the “Spanish” influenza with syphilis, also known as the “French malaise” or “French itch”. Prostitution and sexual violence by soldiers during the First World War was followed by a wave of syphilis infections. This comparison draws attention to an extremely well-established social taboo around 1918: one did not speak about sexually transmitted diseases or admit to having sex out of wedlock, so the risk of infection could not be spoken about either. The comparison also shows how national terms such as “French” or “Spanish” were used pejoratively: the French were portrayed as sexually unfaithful, and the Spanish as unhygienic.

Click on this link for the entire issue of Die Bombe, July 20, 1918