Abstract: The Spanish flu pandemic, which ravaged the globe between 1918 and 1920, claimed approximately fifty million lives, peaking in the autumn of 1918. Occupied Serbia was not spared, with the epidemic intensifying following the breakthrough of the Salonika Front and coinciding with widespread liberation fervor. Despite its devastating toll, for years the pandemic received limited scholarly attention globally, and even less so within Serbian historiography. This paper examines both the broader narrative of the pandemic's development and impact and its neglect in both global and Serbian historiography.

Keywords: еpidemic, pandemic, Spanish flu, neglect, Serbia, World War I

Summary

The Spanish flu spread across the planet in four waves from 1918 to 1920. About fifty million people died, most of them in the fall of 1918, during the second wave of the pandemic. This represented about 3% of the world's population. In underdeveloped countries, mortality rates were the highest, with as much as 5% or more of the population perishing. In contrast, about 1.1% of Europe's population and 0.5% of the population in the USA died. Despite the high mortality rate, the pandemic was quickly forgotten soon after it ended, and historiographical research on it was neglected. This happened because the Spanish flu broke out towards the end of World War I. After years of wartime suffering, people had become accustomed to hardship, lost empathy, and developed a kind of stoicism. The deadly disease was perceived as just one of the horrors of the war, and after the war ended, a sense of general euphoria prevailed, overshadowing any negative emotions. Therefore, only the military and political aspects of the war were put in the foreground of research. Historians' interest in the Spanish flu arose half a century later, with the strengthening of social history and the emergence of the "great fear" caused by the outbreak of the Asian and Hong Kong flu pandemics. Interest further intensified at the beginning of the 21st century, with the spread of new pandemics, and then with the approach of the centenary of the suffering. Despite this, the pandemic continued to be neglected in Serbian historiography. The few existing articles on the subject, along with numerous memoires, went largely unnoticed. The prevailing view was that, unlike the typhus epidemic of 1914/15, the Spanish flu pandemic did not greatly endanger the population of Serbia. Detailed research for different parts of Serbia, which began only in 2020, with the onset of the “great fear” during the COVID-19 pandemic, and was carried out primarily through analyses of death registers, denied this view. They indicated that over 100,000 civilians in Serbia died as a result of the Spanish flu, accounting for approximately 3% of the population—significantly higher than both the European and global averages.These sufferings were no less than those caused by the typhus epidemic, and in a certain way they were even greater. The century-long oblivion and neglect can be attributed, in part, to the same factors that persisted globally until the 1970s, as well as to additional contributing causes.These include, on the one hand: the delayed development of social history in Serbia, but also the absence of the "great fear" of the beginning of the twenty-first century, and on the other hand, the imperative to shed as much light as possible on the military, political and diplomatic developments of the Great War in a country on whose territory very turbulent events took place throughout the war years. In addition, dealing with the typhus epidemic of 1914/15 attracted great attention from researchers, which suppressed all other epidemic disasters.