ABSTRACT
The question of the national qualities ascribed to an illness has not been widely addressed in the debates about the social construction of the idea of AIDS.1 Indeed, there has been an assumption that there is a “Western” (read: Christian or read: medical) tradition which has determined the basic structure of the ideas of disease.2 My intent with this study is to illustrate some of the discontinuities in such overreaching models and to show the national variations on such themes. I will be looking at the cultural and social implications of “plague” in German culture under National Socialism and in Germany (both East and West) in the 1980s.
