Das Gesundheitsamt und die Pandemie

For a long time, public health departments were inconspicuous offices off the radar. Since the Covid 19 virus in spring 2020, they have taken on a key role in combating and managing the pandemic locally and have thus gained new political, media and social attention.
They act as an interface between the state and the population, and so the relevant question arises as to how they deal with this newly assigned task of pandemic management and control. For while society expects them, as a public office, to communicate regulatory measures and concrete instructions for action to concerned citizens, the internal challenges to the authority tend to go unnoticed.
This social and cultural anthropological work draws attention to a 'blind spot' in our society and enables this internal perspective through several months of ethnographic research in the Berlin health department Reinickensdorf.