“In the germ car.”
Depicting the close quarters of public transportation during the flu pandemic of 1918. It is worth noting that this may be the only such flu-related image in Simplicissimus that fall. The unusual term “Bazillenkutsch” is sometimes attributed to Robert Koch at the time of the opening of the U-Bahn in working-class Kreuzberg in 1902, perhaps via a 1908 novella by Eduard Goldbeck (not confirmed). Kaiser Wilhelm later gave the term wider notoriety when he visited a new stretch of the U-Bahn and insisted that he would only sit in a brand-new subway car, fearing infection from previous riders. This in turn moved the Berliner Volks-Zeitung to reassure its readers that this perception of germs ran counter to years of medical and scientific efforts to demonstrate otherwise, and the average subway car was not, in fact, the center of an epidemic.
(Simplicissimus no. 33, Munich, 1918)
Sic Transit Pestilentia 