«… mest inngripende i fredstid»: Krigstid som minne og analogi under pandemien

Sammendrag

On 12 March 2020, Prime Minister Erna Solberg presented the government’s measures against the spread of the Covid-19 virus, calling these measures “the strongest and most intrusive in peacetime.” With these words, she invoked the memory of another time – wartime. In interviews, diaries, and questionnaire responses collected by Norsk Folkemuseum during the pandemic, references to war and wartime also appear. This article examines how the memory of the Second World War became relevant to people’s interpretations of the pandemic’s ongoing, unpredictable here-and-now. The article shows how fluid the relationship between war as memory, as metaphor, and as an imagined future can be in processes of meaning-making. The concept of wartime encompasses different temporalities – past, present, and possible futures. Despite this temporal fluidity, references to wartime were used to express a particular type of experience: that of living in a different and exceptional present. In the material collected by Norsk Folkemuseum, war represents a particular type of time that sets society into a distinct mode regarding moods, social norms, and morality. That is why the memory of the Second World War could serve to synchronize people’s perceptions of pandemic times.