Sweden after Nazism: Politics and Culture in the Wake of the Second World War, by Johan Östling

Since 1988, when Professor Alf W. Johansson, Sweden’s senior historian of the wartime period, first published his comments on the post-war distancing of Sweden from its historic cultural mentor, Germany, and the projection of Swedish national identity as a modernising society in ‘The Nazi Challenge’ (Den nazistiska utmaning), there has been a glaring gap in the scholarship covering the Swedish post-war response to that challenge. Johan Östling’s original and timely book more than fills that gap in a fluent translation by Peter Graves.

This is no tired recitation of the impact of the horrors of the Holocaust on Swedish society, nor is it revisionist nit-picking over contentious issues about the conduct of wartime Sweden. Rather, it is a nuanced and carefully argued investigation into the changes that Nazi ideology wrought on post-war Sweden and the intellectual and political drivers for these changes. Östling draws not only on relevant historiography and personalities to support his arguments; he also utilises an impressive array of intellectual concepts to anchor his conclusions in the broader field of the history of ideas. Most readers will find this highly rewarding, although some may balk at the sheer range of sources that Östling cites in the text.

The book begins by helping the reader to grasp the slippery and shifting concepts that comprise Nazi ideology without historicising them. Instead, he uses contextualisation, comparison, hermeneutics, argumentation and humanistic values for the analysis that follows. Östling builds on historian Reinhart Koselleck’s idea of ‘experiences’ in order to discuss historical contexts and changes, and create his own concept of the ‘historic lesson’. He deploys this concept to contextualise Nazism and changes in post-war Sweden. There follows an excellent précis of the historiography of the origins and interpretation of Nazism.

Östling next turns to several personalities to exemplify the post-war ‘stigmatisation’ of those suspected of fellow-travelling or harbouring Nazi ideas. There were no show-trials; rather, individuals were isolated and expected to keep a low profile. When they did not, the media wrath of Swedish bien pensants silenced them. This stigmatisation applied equally to the distinguished Swedish Academy member and Nazi sympathiser Professor Fredrik Böök, as to Goebbels’s favourite song-and-dance star Zarah Leander (ten mentions in his 1939–41 diaries alone). The curious case of rejected Jewish academic Erich Wittenberg also features. A German refugee from the Nazis, Wittenberg nevertheless was felt by his academic critics to espouse many of the origins of Nazism; idealism, romanticism, nationalism. The fear of the potential impact of Nazi ideology still stalked post-war Sweden’s young democracy.

The move to quarantine potential carriers of the Nazi bacillus was one response. Östling describes another, which was to radically re-direct the objectives of the Swedish school system. A succession of education commissions in the 1940s moved the goalposts of education from 1940’s ‘character formation’ through 1944’s ‘School in the service of society’ to 1946’s ‘social education, democratic, and anti-authoritarian … a critical attitude …’. As Östling writes, ‘Freedom of opinion formation, critical minds and democratic convictions would ensure that the future would not have to experience a repetition of the past.’ The Nazi experience had shifted Swedish educational goals towards citizenship.

Swedish wartime jurists are portrayed by Östling as passively impartial to the judicial legitimisation (through legal enactment) of the Nazi outrages. Only after 1945 do the concepts of natural law begin to shift the debate away from technical legal considerations—a toxic legacy of philosophical jurist Axel Hägerström’s theory of ‘value nihilism’. The book then moves to the fading out of the ‘cultural idealists’ from the arena of Swedish intellectual debate and the filling of that space by the rational and modernist ‘ideas of 1945’ and the people who championed them; the ‘culture radicals’. Now Sweden turned away from the south and towards the United States for inspiration.

Östling makes clear that reorientation away from Germany preceded the Nazi era. The First World War polarised Swedes for or against the Western Allies or the Central Powers. This trend was accelerated by the Nazi experience and a stream of unsympathetic Swedish reporting from the defeated Third Reich focusing on German self-pity and indifference towards national guilt for the crimes of the Nazis. The country that previously ingested German culture could now only tolerate Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Goethe.

Despite the notable failure of home-grown Nazis to gain traction at the ballot-box before and during the Second World War (a feature in common with Denmark and Norway), Östling notes that the consequences of Nazism also included the rejection and elimination of an equally ‘dystopian ideology’, Communism, as a meaningful political force—as well as the weakening of Christian conservatism. ‘Anti-fascism contributed to the discrediting of the right-wing concepts of the conservatives … whereas anti-communism reinforced the liberal elements in social democracy and prevented it moving in the direction of socialism.’ After 1945, this shift in the political landscape would benefit the Social Democrats, who for the next thirty-one years were in government.

Östling finally draws on the generational thinking of sociologist Karl Mannheim to focus on the particular contribution of ‘the generation of 1945’, which, he argues, took on board the Nazi historical experience to form a rationalist, cultural radical ‘political generation’. Luminaries included polemicists Herbert Tingsten and Ingemar Hedenius as well as writers such as Karl Vennberg and Vilhelm Moberg and politically connected personalities, including the formidable Myrdals and Ernst Wigforss. That cohort squeezed out the conservatives from post-war opinion-forming and, as Östling remarks, ‘became the bearers of the historical lesson of Nazism’.

This important work will reward those readers prepared to invest in taking on board what are, at times, new concepts, combined with detailed scrutiny of perhaps unfamiliar aspects of Swedish history and personalities—in order to harvest an abundance of perceptive insights and critical assessments. This book challenges more pedestrian treatments of the Nazi phenomenon and its effects on other countries with sound, first-class, wide-ranging scholarship.