a blog by Peter Leonard
Ola Larsmo's book Djävulssonaten: ur det svenska hatets historia was just released to bookstores a few days ago, and I picked it up in the local Akademibokhandeln this Saturday. As the title implies (The Devil's Sonata: From the History of Swedish Hate) Larsmo uses an infamous 1939 student meeting in Uppsala as a symbol for the conflicts that wracked Sweden during the run-up to the Second World War. During a marathon session in the University's indoor tennis courts (Bollhus), 1,500 students debated the government's proposal to provide asylum to ten German-Jewish doctors who were desperately trying to escape after Kristallnacht.
No one expected the outcome. In a mix of parliamentary procedure and rhetorical manipulation, groups friendly to Germany (and Nazi political and cultural ambitions) successfully overcame asylum supporters. The Uppsala "studentkår" (student union) voted against admitting the 10 refugees. The result was shot across the bow of Swedish internal politics: any attempts by Social-Democratic parliamentarians to extend help to German Jews would have to overcome this sudden and unexpected reaction from the medical and academic elite at Sweden's top research university.
The right-wing arguments presented were twofold: one, the fear of exacerbating the unemployment situation amongst young Swedish doctors. Jewish medical practitioners as harbingers of immoral practices such as abortion was a subtext. Second, incredibly enough, was the claim that any admission of Jews into Sweden would risk a public outbreak of anti-Semitism. This last argument was couched in a kind of class rhetoric nearly impossible to parse nowadays, but somehow resonant among would-be Brownshirts in the 1930s: Sweden risked creating an "intellectual proletariat" if well-educated Jews were to flow into the country. This surfeit of thinkers and experts would bring the same chaos and ruin to Scandinavia that they had, apparently, inflicted upon Central Europe.
Reading the rightist propaganda of this decade one is struck by the 180° orientation from today's anti-immigration rhetoric, which posits the true danger is from ill-educated working-class laborers within the construction and janitorial markets — something that Föreningen Heimdal and other student organizations in Uppsala in 1939 might have welcomed, because at least they wouldn't be displacing young Swedish doctors.
Ola Larsmo seeks to dig up this "skamfläck" (blot) on Sweden's academic past in order to use the debate at the tennis courts (Bollhusmötet) as a microcosm of inter-war Sweden. He carefully examines he elements at work among Uppsala's (and Sweden's) right-wing and nationalist organizations during the 1930s, and the result of his research is shocking: the embarrassing, scandalous dalliances with fascism and race hygiene by rightist students in Uppsala during the 1930s become cap-feathers, rather than encumbrances, in the careers of these ruling-class youth. Of the chairmen and organizers of the several right-wing and nationalist groups behind the victory at the Tennis Courts, Arvid Fredborg was sent to Berlin by the leading newspaper Svenska Dagbladet as their foreign correspondent. Åke Leissner went on to found Fria moderata studentförbundet, while others landed in various levels of local government.
Most telling is that the rhetoric of the right-wing student groups during the Tennis Court debate shows up nearly verbatim a year later in the famous Den svenska linjen document, which was an attempt by the political right in 1940 to lay out a viable future for Swedish Nationalism after Germany's attack and occupation of Norway and Denmark. This tightrope-walking brochure ("The Swedish Line") was a work of rhetorical acrobatics that mostly succeeded, managing to rescue the intellectual and cultural underpinnings of anti-democratic/crypto-fascist Swedish politics at a time when Germany was occupying ostensibly sovereign Nordic neighbors. (As Larsmo notes, perhaps some of the success of Den svenska linjen was the bizarre and anachronistic hope explicit in the text that Sweden would assume control over Denmark and Norway in the aftermath of Germany's eventual victory in World War II. Stockholm's triumphant return as Queen of the Baltic and regional hegemon in a manner unseen since the decline of 17th century Great Power: the Fate of Empire as fatal imperial nostalgia.)
While the rightist student groups stand out because of their organizational prowess and ideological convictions, those on the progressive side of the fight are harder to map. Notable by its absence in the Tennis Court debate was the main left-wing student group Clarté, whose surviving records show no engagement in the wrenching 1939 fight over asylum for the Jewish refugees. Instead, those opposing Heimdal and the other Swedish nationalist organizations were a motley crew of interests vaguely identified with folkrörelsen, a folk movement involving both state and independent churches, abolitionists and other progressive causes.
Some figures in the story eventually come to their senses. Heimdal, the right-wing student group partially behind the effort to refuse the doctors entry, had by 1942 joined the support action for deported Norwegian Jews. But Heimdal's current chairman Christopher Lagerkvist, as recently as last year (2006), still refused to take responsibility for the behavior of their executive officers, describing Åke Leissner and Arvid Fredborg's 1930s project to "map out Jewish influence at Uppsala University" as a personal, rather than Heimdalian, endeavor. The historian Henrik Lindberg concurs in his volume Föreningen Heimdal och nationalsocialismen 1932—1940, a book that Ola Larsmo regards as a whitewash.
The nationalist Arvid Fredborg eventually went on to write Bakom stålvallen (Behind the Steel Wall) in 1943, a critical look at the Third Reich based on his experiences as a journalist stationed in Berlin. The book was among the first long-format works to cast light upon Nazi genocide. Written by a man who still described himself as "arch-conservative," Fredborg's exposé confronts the reader with the paradox of a reactionary who blew the whistle when many others on the mainstream left kept quiet.
Fredborg's own transparency in his political observation is not, unfortunately, mirrored by his erstwhile student movement: the archives of the Heimdal student organization are now closed to any further academic research.