Auf dem Weg in eine „Katastrophen-Verdrängungsgesellschaft“ und zurück? Formen und Konjunkturen der Erinnerungskulturen an Katastrophen von der Frühen Neuzeit bis heute

Rohr, Christian (2023). Auf dem Weg in eine „Katastrophen-Verdrängungsgesellschaft“ und zurück? Formen und Konjunkturen der Erinnerungskulturen an Katastrophen von der Frühen Neuzeit bis heute. In: Platelle, Fanny; Gomez, Anne-Sophie; Spitzl-Dupic, Friederike; Ettinger, Susanne (eds.) Catastrophes, menaces et risques naturels / Natur und Umwelt. Risiken, Gefahren und Katastrophen (pp. 115-137). Münster: Nodus Verlag

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In 1981, the German medievalist Arno Borst put forward the thesis that today's societies in Europe have largely eliminated the handling of natural disasters from their everyday life and that we have become a “disaster repression society”, so to speak. This is in contrast to pre-modern societies, which integrated the risk of fires, natural disasters or weather anomalies into their everyday life. The article explores the question of to what extent and why pre-modern risk cultures with their specific cultures of memory have been lost. It shows that although the technical disaster protection developed in the nineteenth century was able to prevent minor and moderate events, severe ones took the population even more by surprise. This concept of protection was shaken in many places towards the end of the 20th century. Floods like the one in 2002 in large parts of Central Europe or avalanche events like the one in Galtür (Tyrol) in 1999 partly became a wake-up call for a change in the way people dealt with risks that had often been suppressed for decades.

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