From Smallpox to Covid-19: A Short History of the German Anti-Vaccination Movement since the late 19th Century

The spread of disinformation and its impact on social cohesion is one of the most pressing issues of our time, as demonstrated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Seemingly recent phenomena such as science denial and the use of conspiracy theories need to be understood in a historical context. Using the example of the German-speaking anti-vaccination movement and its close ties to various alternative medical milieus since the late 19th century, Tschiggerl will show recent controversies over health policy and pandemics have historical roots that can go back several centuries.

Vaccination, in particular, is a central reference point in many of today's health policy conspiracy theories. No other health policy measure has been as successful and simultaneously controversial as vaccination. They are a public health intervention that affects everyone, and therefore have been and continue to be widely debated by society as a whole. Vaccination is a perfect case study for analyzing science denial and science skepticism as an intellectual history of disinformation. In this talk, Tschiggerl argues that from the very beginning, opposition to vaccination has been closely linked to the use of conspiracy theories.

About the speaker: Martin Tschiggerl is the 2025 Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota, with research interests in contemporary history of Nazi successor societies, conspiracy theories and anti-science movements, 20th- and 21st-century popular culture, and philosophy of science. He received his PhD from the University of Vienna in 2018. Since 2022 he has been a research associate at the Institute of Culture Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW)

With special thanks to our co-organizer, the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, and our co-sponsor: the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch. 

From Fulbright Austria's Website: Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota is affiliated with the Center for Austrian Studies—an interdisciplinary and interdepartmental research facility for Austrian, Habsburg, and Central European studies established in 1977 as a bicentennial gift of the people and government of Austria to the United States—and the College of Liberal Arts. This collaboration is based on a memorandum of understanding concluded by Fulbright Austria and the College of Liberal Arts in 2001 and renewed in 2010. This visiting professorship was conceived to rotate among departments in the College of Liberal Arts affiliated with the Center for Austrian Studies.