It’s strange to see Americans still debating the use of masks in public, but that’s where we seem to be now—and, of course, it’s also where we were before. I first learned about the Anti-Mask League in my high school California History class, but I had forgotten enough of the details to be pleasantly surprised, as if remembering a long-ago dream, when I came across recent references to the story: first from Tim Mak on Twitter, then in publications like Mother Jones. (TL;DR: During the second wave of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic, freedom-minded folks in the Bay Area refused to wear masks, worsening the outbreak. They even got together to protest masks at a 2,000-strong town hall, where things got so heated the organizers eventually had to turn out the lights.)
It’s weird to read about America’s anti-mask sentiment from here in the Czech Republic, one of the first countries in Europe to mandate mask usage during the pandemic, starting on March 18. Last week, my old home state of California finally ordered mandatory mask usage in public—a full three months after people were required to wear masks in my adopted country. Now, with its numbers good and getting better, the Czech Republic is already loosening those requirements: As of July 1, you won’t have to wear masks on public transportation or inside buildings in the country’s second city, Brno, in the great brewing city of Pilsen, or many other places. (With a larger population and a higher infection rate, Prague is likely to keep the requirements for a bit longer.) We got to this point by requiring masks—and now we don’t have to wear them as much.
And yet there’s still rigorous debate about mask usage in the U.S., as if we learned nothing from what the rest of the world went through, or even from our own experiences just a hundred years ago. Instead, we’re doomed to repeat things without being able to change much, living a recurring storyline like that of “Groundhog Day,” which is itself an echo of “The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin.” Things repeat, and things repeat.
Which also happens in the world of beer, where ideas even more obviously tumble in and out of fashion. Italian Grape Ale might seem like a new style, but Austrians and Czechs have been making wine-beer hybrids off and on for centuries. (Called Weinbier, the region’s principal grape-based brew was once made only on the occasional order of the Imperial Court in Vienna, though in 1822 one company did receive an exclusive license to produce Weinbier for the next five years.) In the same week I received a PR pitch for flavorful non-alcoholic and low-alcohol beers, Andreas Krennmair wrote about Heinzlein, a traditional, low-alcohol beer from Bamberg being reproduced by Heller-Bräu Trum, which also makes Schlenkerla Rauchbier. Vienna Lager is either trendy again this year, or it will be soon. Taprooms are the future. Or regional breweries. Or neighborhood breweries. Or national breweries. Or taprooms again.
And so things move in and out of focus, as if on a loop: beer, food, music, and politics. I’m watching the George Floyd protests and remembering Los Angeles in 1992. My dad sees the same and thinks of Watts in 1965. For someone else it’s Harlem in 1943. Today, while researching the Anti-Mask League in a newspaper archive, I read that a Black church had been burned down by a mob in Georgia. That story was from 1919, but it could have been from last month, or any point in between.
The strangest part in all of this unending repetition is that I do believe in progress: I truly believe things are getting better. But I’m also sure I’ve seen this movie before, maybe even more than once.
Or as Ivan Osokin puts it at the very start of his story:
“‘There are times when it seems to me that I remember something,’ he says to himself slowly, ‘and others when it seems that I’ve forgotten something very important. I feel as though all this had happened before in the past. But when? I don’t know. How strange!’”
