"The Spanish Flu as Seen Through the Lens of a Single Social Sickness Fund: The Allgemeiner Knappschaftsverein and the Case of Ruhr Miners "

This paper contributes to the debate on the course and severity of the Spanish Flu – a debate having been newly revived by the current Covid-19 pandemic. Examined is a hitherto neglected source on the German experience, namely the administrative reports of the Allgemeiner Knappschaftsverein zu Bochum for the years 1913 to 1921. The Allgemeiner Knappschaftsverein insured all miners occupied somewhere in the Ruhr area against sickness (and other life risks such as invalidity) and, by the turn of 1913/14, had about 450,000 active members. The latter fact makes it one of the largest – if not the largest – social sickness insurance fund in the late German Empire offering a consistent measurement framework; the average German social sickness fund had about 2,000 members. The reports offer rich information on the death, sickness, and invalidity spectrum by cause, social stratum (workers vs. civil servants), length of treatment, and location. The data enable, for example, to derive survival functions and to estimate influenza death rates and death rates from other respiratory diseases (like pneumonia) for the biggest cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants as well as for the smallest self-standing municipalities in the Ruhr area counting just a thousand inhabitants. This comes in handy as the Reich statistics go down to the provincial level at best, as regards Prussia. One hypothesis worth testing with the data is whether influenza and pneumonia death rates did actually spread evenly across municipalities, and thus in space, in a very densely populated area.