DRESDEN, Germany — In a display case at the German Hygiene Museum here is a pretty, blue glass bottle whose daintiness belies its purpose. (In Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel “The Magic Mountain,” residents of a sanitarium nickname this device Blue Heinrich.) Part of this effort to rebrand comes from wanting distance from the German Hygiene Museum’s own dark history of promoting eugenicist conceptions of “racial hygiene” in the Nazi era. The museum has a deep ambivalence toward its own collection that causes it to approach some health topics with caution. But as the coronavirus has given disease prevention a new and lethal urgency, the museum is grappling with how to address the very thing it’s named after.

Source: International New York Times September 01, 2021 09:31 UTC