Founded in 2009 by the Centre for Scandinavian Studies at Vilnius University and dedicated to publishing collections of academic articles, study books and translations of Scandinavian literature.
Vilniaus universiteto leidykla / Vilnius University Press
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Navigating Scandinavian Memory Culture in a Shifting World
Litauen I / Lietuva I is a bilingual Danish-Lithuanian publication of the first part of the autobiography by Ebbe Flatau (b. 1938 in Kaunas), the first Danish lecturer at the Scandinavian Department at Vilnius University. This engaging autobiographical account delves into the author’s family history, which is intricately related to interwar Lithuania. Ebbe Flatau was born into a Danish family that operated a farm close to Kaunas: agricultural reforms and political agreements between Denmark and Lithuania during that period attracted a considerable colony of Danes to the country. In this edition, the previously unpublished original text is presented in parallel with its Lithuanian translation and is supplemented with illustrations, commentary, audio excerpts from conversations with Ebbe Flatau, as well as appendices that include archival documents, Danish and Lithuanian interwar press articles, and documentaries. Šis dvikalbis, danų ir lietuvių kalbomis parengtas leidinys – tai pirmojo Vilniaus universiteto Skandinavistikos katedros danų kalbos lektoriaus Ebbes Flatau (g. 1938 m. Kaune) autobiografijos dalies, pavadintos Litauen I, publikacija. Įtraukiantis autobiografinis pasakojimas pristato su tarpukario Lietuva susijusią autoriaus šeimos istoriją. To laikotarpio žemės ūkio reformos bei politiniai Danijos ir Lietuvos susitarimai į Lietuvą pritraukė nemažą danų koloniją ir Ebbe Flatau gimė viename iš Lietuvoje įsteigtų daniškų ūkių. Ebbes Flatau autobiografijos tekstas čia publikuojamas pagrečiui su vertimu į lietuvių kalbą ir papildytas iliustracijomis, komentarais, pokalbių su autoriumi įrašų ištraukomis bei priedais – archyviniais dokumentais, danų ir lietuvių tarpukario spaudos straipsneliais, dokumentiniais filmais. Sudarymas, vertimas iš danų kalbos, komentarai, priedai, iliustracijos / Editing, translation from Danish, comments, appendices, and illustrations by Loreta Vaicekauskienė Komentarai, priedai, iliustracijos / Comments, appendices, and illustrations by Norbertas Černiauskas Vertimas į danų kalbą, priedai, iliustracijos / Translation into Danish, appendices, and illustrations by Dixie Simonsen
Copyright (c) 2023 Authors https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
En svensk röst från Kaunas och Vilnius1939–1940: Lennart Kjellbergs brev
In this article, I intend to publish a series of letters by Lennart Kjellberg (1913–2004) who had worked as a Swedish lecturer in Lithuania at the University in Kaunas and Vilnius before World War II, in 1939–1940. I met Lennart Kjellberg several times in the early 90s when I, a young scholar after completing Swedish and Nordic studies and a doctorate in historical linguistics, came to Vilnius and started teaching at the University of Vilnius and set up the Department for Scandinavian Studies. We met several times in Uppsala, and Lennart Kjellberg gave me a bundle of copies of his letters, mainly to his bride Ann-Mari Stridbeck written in 1939, encouraging me to publish them. Kjellberg’s letters are an incredibly exciting source of information and insight for those interested in the cultural and political life of Lithuania during that time and in its perception by a young Swedish intellectual. For me, meeting Lennart Kjellberg, besides everything else, was an unexpected collision with the past which had been cut away by Soviet oppression. For those who grew up during the Soviet era, the period before and during the Soviet presence was sort of divided into then and now (before and after World War II). The loss of continuity in Lithuania’s history is perhaps one of its greatest traumas caused by the Soviet period. For this reason, Kjellberg’s letters, most of which are being published here for the first time, not only give us a lively picture of pre-war Lithuania but also contribute to our better understanding of our past and of ourselves.
Skandinavien som imago i det ungarske litterære tidsskrift Nyugat (1907/1908–1941): En kritisk læsning af nogle nationale stereotyper og deres efterliv
My study focuses on how national stereotypes characterized the interpretation of Scandinavian literature in the first half of the 20th century in Hungary. In these decades, translation from Danish, Norwegian and Swedish became increasingly intensive, and, thanks to a handful of enthusiastic translators, authors associated with the Modern Breakthrough movement and other late 19th-century tendencies achieved widespread popularity in Hungary. In the analysis I take a closer look at several reviews, translations and essays published in the literary journal Nyugat (1907/1908–1941) where a lot of later prominent Hungarian authors and translators of the period started their career. The imago of Scandinavia created by these authors consists of climatic, anthropological, geographical, political and aesthetic elements. This mythical, distorted and stereotypical image of the Nordic countries exists even today, side by side with a critical reevaluation which actively shapes the academic milieu and the public cultural sphere.
Trauma og minne i Jon Fosses Stengd gitar
Jon Fosse’s writing is characterized by a constant return to turmoil that is often associated with traumatic events in the past. His literary figures seem to be trapped in their painful memories. The very cause or starting point of their trauma often remains hidden or unsaid. The novel Closed Guitar from 1985 is about Liv, a young single mother who locks herself out of her apartment where her one-year-old son is. In the novel, we follow the thoughts of a lonely person who is closed as much inside as outside. The main character in the novel undergoes a mental journey into the past and is tossed back and forth between her autobiographical memories and hallucinations. Since the novel was published in 1985, memory research has undergone a revolution and researchers have pointed out that our memories and visions of the future are closely linked. In Fosse’s novel, bad and good memories are piled on top of one another, and thoughts about the future create an intense encounter between the outer and the inner reality. I discuss at how Liv’s dissociative tendency and her movements in the autobiographical memories form a self-narrative that, despite its fragmented character, creates a relevant context for her. The reader, on the other hand, struggles to interpret her narrative, because it is apparently shaped by false memories and several different variations of the same event. Liv’s story as fiction brings us closer to understanding how our autobiographical narratives are structured.
Hjemstavn som erindring i migrantlitteratur
This article focusses on the representation of homeland in two Scandinavian novels: Amal Aden’s Min drøm om frihet (2009) and Jonas Suchanek’s Do danska (2014). Both novels can be considered migrant literature, i.e., literature written by authors who have themselves experienced migration. Another thing that these novels have in common is that their authors construct the image of their original homeland through their own memories. Typically, the idealizing memories are reinforced as the characters are confronted with negative experiences in the new country, where they do not feel assimilated, as we can see it in Aden’s novel. In Suchanek’s novel, nostalgia plays an important role, namely the historical fact that his homeland has actually disappeared (the protagonist emigrated from the communist Czechoslovakia and returns to a completely new post-revolutionary country). Both novels demonstrate the concept of homeland not only as a geographical place, but also in terms of the cultural aspects associated with it, be it friends or food. At the same time, the concept of polygamy of place, which is often mentioned in the context of globalization, does not seem to work very well. Especially in Aden’s novel, the protagonist’s relationship with her original homeland and the new homeland oscillates between topophilia and topophobia. Essential to the memories of the homeland, then, are the triggers that take the characters in both novels back to a time before their migration, creating a sense of discomfort and nostalgia.
Från nationalhjälte till rikstyrann: Karl XII i det svenska 1800-talets litterära minneskultur
The overall aim of the article is to investigate the structure and dynamics of the Swedish cultural memory in the nineteenth century. According to the micrological methodology, recommended by leading theorists of cultural memory, the article focuses on five representative texts: three Romantic poems written to the 1818 centenary of Charles XII’s death (Bernhard von Beskow’s “Carl den Tolfte,” Erik Gustaf Geijer’s “Ord till Karl XII:s marsch vid Narva,” and Esaias Tegnér’s “Carl XII”), and two short stories, written in the last decade of the nineteenth century, both depicting the events immediately after the death of Charles XII and thus thematising the cultural memory of the king as communicative memory (Verner von Heidenstam’s “En hjältes likfärd” and August Strindberg’s “Vid Likvakan i Tistedalen”). Analysing the three poems, the article makes an attempt to reconstruct the degree zero structure of the Swedish cultural memory in the nineteenth century. It is argued that the poems’ cultural memory has an eclectic character and requires a kind of archaeological approach. In the first step, the article identifies a tissue of elements, belonging to the pre-industrial cultural memory: cult of the death, burial scenery, relic, fame, ritualization, militarization. The poems subordinate this archaic memory system to the structures which are the products of the nineteenth century and originate from one single social process: industrialization. In the second step, the main part of the article, these industrial components of the poems’ cultural memory are analysed: subjectification, temporalization, historicization, productivization, nationalization, and finally mythicization – the final component is investigated using both Barthesian and Jungian conceptual apparatus. In the third and last step, the article studies the development of this degree zero memory structure during the nineteenth century. Two main evolutionary trends, rooted in two different modifications of the Kantian notion of the Self, are distinguished. The first trend, exemplified by the short story of Heidenstam, implies an existential psychologization of the industrial cultural memory. The second trend, represented by the short story of Strindberg, is based on a naturalistic correction of the Kantian Self and executes a subversive demythicization of the Romantic Charles XII-myth.
Writing Sámi Memory and Trauma into Swedish History: Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan. Epos (2018) and Elin Anna Labba’s Herrarna Satte Oss Hit. Om Tvångsförflyttningar i Sverige (2020)
After Sweden and Norway signed the reindeer grazing convention agreement in 1919, reindeer-herding Sámi families selected by the Swedish authorities were forced to migrate from the Karesuando area in Norway to more southern regions within the reindeer husbandry area in Sweden. These relocations at the beginning of the twentieth century are the source of memory and trauma in both Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan. Epos (2018; Ædnan. An Epic) and Elin Anna Labba’s Herrarna satte oss hit. Om tvångsförflyttningar i Sverige (2020; The Masters Put Us Here. On Forced Relocations in Sweden). Furthermore, the two works contain paratextual fragments that express the desire to make the silenced past of the Sámi audible in Swedish history. Each text transmits memories and traumas from different genre perspectives: those of poetry and partly autobiographical non-fiction. The texts reveal processes of colonization and oppression within national borders, with scientific racism as an underlying ideology. In this contribution also a methodological issue will be discussed. How should we study texts that deal with writing about trauma and memory of a minority people such as the Sámi? An indigenous methodology, as presented by authors such as Jelena Porsanger in “An Essay about Indigenous Methodology” (2004), should be an important guide, as it concerns a respectful approach to the study of indigenous minority people. “
Lidelse og frigjøring: TV som minneaktør i 70- og 75-årsmarkeringene av den siste krigsvinteren i Nord-Norge
In this article, I compare two tv-programs about the ending of WWII in northern Norway, aired by the Norwegian Public Broadcaster (NRK). The first one was sent from Tromsø October 31st 2014, with the title, “The Autumn they lost everything,” and marked the 70 years anniversary of the forced evacuation of the people, as almost all houses in Finnmark and Northern Troms were burnt down when the Nazis retreated from the area after being defeated by the Red Army. The second was aired from Kirkenes five years later, in 2019, marking the 75 years anniversary. The title was “Saved by the Russians,” as the celebration of the heroism of the soldiers and the relationship between Russia and Norway were the main topics. The structure of the analysis concentrates on three aspects of the programs. First, I look at the ways tv-resources are being used in each of them, focusing on the host style and the aesthetics of the live studio. Secondly, I show how the programs express a northern identity by addressing critical perspectives on the main national story of WWII and the lack of support from Norwegian authorities for the people in the north during the autumn and winter of 1944/45. The third aspect concerns the ways memories of the war are being connected to contemporary issues. In 2014 this is the refugee situation in Europe, whereas the program in 2019 discusses the value of memory culture in relation to political controversies about Norway’s defence strategy in the north vis á vis Russia. By following these three aspects of the tv-programs, the analysis sheds light on their functions as memory agents situated in a particular media context, in which the regional perspective on WWII is being negotiated within the framework of national public television.
«Å utsette den andre døden»: Snublesteiner i norsk litteratur
The trauma of the Second World War and the Holocaust has been a broadly explored topic in Norwegian culture in the last ten–fifteen years. This, in turn, resulted in a massive popularity of both fiction and non-fiction literature where the topic is prominent, as well as a growing interest in postmemory studies among literary scholars. This paper discusses the motif of Stolpersteine in three Norwegian literary texts, published between the years 2016 and 2019: two novels, No, a Hundred Times No by Nina Lykke, Keep Saying Their Names by Simon Stranger and one essay, “Snublesteinene i Oslo” [“Stoplersteine in Oslo”] by Ole Robert Sunde, published in an anthology entitled The Homeland & Other Stories. Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”) are commemorative brass plaques in the pavement in front of the last address of victims of National Socialism. This remembrance project was started by the German artist Gunter Demnig in the 1990s and there are now tens of thousands of “stones” placed in over a thousand locations in Europe, also in Norway. The aim of this paper is to answer two questions: firstly, what formal function the motif plays in the three chosen texts and, secondly, how can Stolpersteinene become bearers of memory and postmemory, according to the theoretical framework developed around the topic of war and trauma.
Listening to the Enemy: Challenging The National Narrative of World War II in Contemporary Norwegian Fiction
This article analyses five Norwegian novels that all incorporate German soldiers’ experiences as an important part of the Norwegian story of World War II. Abandoning the strong focus on antagonistic relationships of previous narratives, the five novels analysed in this article represent a new approach to the history of the war that aims to view the enemy through what Bull and Hansen (2016) have called agonistic memory, which includes the perspective of the perpetrator to understand conflicts. Previously, when Norwegian authors included German soldiers in narratives about World War II, it was part of a general portrait of the enemy. The individual soldier has few distinct features and no independent identity. These portraits followed the hegemonic Norwegian narrative of the occupation: The good Norwegians, who were part of the home front, versus the Germans and the morally inferior Norwegians who supported them. However, in the last ten years, several novels have revisited the war narrative through representations of previously neglected groups, one of which is the German soldier. The five novels have quite different approaches, but they all question the traditional Norwegian war narrative through complex representations of the enemy. My analysis of the five texts will identify how the texts challenge the conventional history of the occupation through an agonistic perspective that aims to revisit how the war is remembered. These representations of the German soldiers are a central part of the new examination of the long shadows cast by the memories of war in Norway.
Hva kan arves? Om skyld, vold og seksualitet i to nordiske krigsminneromaner
During the last two decades, an increasing focus on perpetrators has emerged in Scandinavian literature. This so called perpetrator fiction, with an explicit intention of understanding evil, has portrayed the Nazis and their henchmen in detail. These are frequently described in familial relationships, and their stories are told from a second or third generational point of view. Interestingly, the perpetrators are regularly depicted as perverse persons and their deviant sexuality as part of the problem. In this article, I discuss two Scandinavian novels with the family as a narrative structure and the perpetrator as its main character. The novels Jeg har arvet en mørk skog (2012) by Morten Borgersen and Stormen. En berättelse (2016) by Steve Sem-Sandberg deal with wartime events seen from a present-day I-narrator’s point of view. Both novels incorporate mythology and perverse sexuality, and they ask provocative questions about the causes of wartime violence.
violence and sexuality in Nordic war novels
As the official historian of the International Association for Scandinavian Studies, and one of the two authors of The History of the International Association of Scandinavian Studies 1956–2006, I have been asked to tell the story of the almost 70 years of our association’s existence. The whole thing began in Cambridge in July 1956, as an informal meeting of 65 academics, most of them from the Nordic countries or the United Kingdom; on that occasion there was a grand total of 13 lectures. Since that time there has been a conference every other summer – until the summer of 2020, when it had to be postponed for a year due to the pandemic. It was agreed from the very earliest days that the meetings would be held in a Nordic country and a non-Nordic country alternately, although it was not until 1962, in Aarhus, that IASS was given its official name, and supplied with a constitution and a committee (president, secretary, treasurer etc.) For the early conferences the theme was exclusively literary, but in more recent times it has been expanded to take in other disciplines, such as history, sociology, film studies etc. In 1986 Elias Bredsdorff published a slim volume about the first thirty years of IASS, which I supplemented in 2006 with an account of the following twenty years. I have attended every single conference since 1970, so my talk will provide an extremely personal account of how IASS has become a part of my own history.
History of the International Association of Scandinavian Studies
Writing a Letter to One’s Muse: Genre Memory and Epistolography in Carl August Thielo’s Enveloppens eller Saloppens forunderlige Hændelser (1763)
Epistolary texts are often incorporated into 18th-century prose literature, but only rarely do they self-referentially discuss intertextuality as the mimesis of memory (Neumann 2005; 2008). Carl August Thielo’s “comic novel” uses a letter to the Muse to juxtapose a writer’s reliance on literary memoria and the demand for innovation. Drawing on Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s (1984) term “genre memory,” this paper examines the relationship between memory, generic hybridity and epistolography. Genre memory describes how, through the process of “novelization,” genres are incorporated and contemporised by the novel. Creative genre memory drives innovation by giving the most archaic generic elements a voice in narration and by establishing a ground for their hybrid interplay, thus producing a semantic surplus. By connecting this approach to epistolography, generic hybridity is illustrated as a product of material and narrative practices. In lieu of a preface to the reader, Thielo’s text begins with a Muse letter asking for assistance with the poetic work. This opens a discussion of generic differences and similarities, as well as the workings of intertextuality. At the same time, the engagement of texts with literary history is visualised via addresses to a mythical being belonging to literature’s memoria. Hence, the Muse letter depicts how poetical inventio builds on intertextuality to spark inspiration, thereby materialising the otherwise invisible, but crucial stage of writing before writing. This article serves to elaborate a first understanding of novelised epistolography and its potential for literary memory studies, which emphasises material and paratextual aspects over purely linguistic elements.
Minnets mönster och former: Minne och identitet i Linnea Axelssons epos Ædnan
The article addresses the problem of memory and its role in shaping ethnic identity as shown in the epic poem Ædnan (2018) by Linnea Axelsson. I approach the poem from the postcolonial perspective focusing on Swedish policy towards the Sámi people, who were deprived of their land, culture, and identity. Various patterns of memory are embodied by the complex time structure of the poem. Its three parts follow three generations of the Sámi people. The first lost their cultural identity as a result of the colonisation of Northern Sweden and the hegemonic discourse against nomadic people. They became the Other for the dominant culture, and an object for disciplinary power. Next generation, which was supposed to assimilate with the Swedish society, felt rootless because their tradition had disappeared from collective memory. The third generation started struggling for their rights as an ethnic group constructing post-memory based on material traces and oral testimonies of the Sámi tradition. Last but not least, the choice of genre is significant, as it refers to the Western archive as a paradigm for memory culture. Thus, I regard the poem as an attempt to establish and explore an archive of the Sámi, which recognises the ethnic identity of the Sámi people on other grounds than the Western tradition does.
Pre-Modern Nordic Memories in their Literary Contexts
The study of memory has become a central field in saga scholarship in recent years. The present article deals with a number of remarkable mnemonic phenomena in Old Norse-Icelandic narratives. It contextualizes them in biblical, classical, and more modern examples of memory culture. These serve as texts of reference for the Norse narratives that are in the focus of this article. Some of the analyses are inspired by the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s work on how myth has always already transgressed to memory (reception) and the art historian Aby Warburg’s concept of pathos formulae that produce emotional impacts and mnemonic tropes. Aspects that are treated are for instance acts of commemoration as social and cultural activities, eddic mytho-narratives as stories to remember, the importance of the body and the senses in terms of memory studies, the interrelationship of remembrance and oblivion, and finally pre-modern mediologies. Central texts discussed in the article are eddic poems such as Völuspá (The Seeress’s Prophecy), skaldic poetry and its mnemonic pictorality, Icelandic sagas and historical writings (Icelandic Book of Settlement), examples of folklore. Some outstanding features are stellar memories, the question whether the place of memory is in the human breast or brain, or the importance of avian imagery in narratives about birds as preeminent media of remembering and forgetting. The article has a comparative approach. It attempts to show how Old Norse-Icelandic literature is closely contextualized within a web of Scandinavian and non-Scandinavian narratives and thoroughly shaped by features of cultural memory, shifting constructions of and dealings with ever changing imaginations of pasts.
Minnenas magiska lykta: Om Ingmar Bergmans berättelse Laterna magica
Laterna magica (1987) is the first book Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) published whose content was not intended to be developed into film or theater. This autobiographical book has often been used in research as a reference in various contexts concerning Bergman’s life and art. From a research point of view, however, it is difficult to use the memory book as evidence for facts or truths, as there are many examples of it simply being fiction. It is therefore interesting today to read Laterna magica as a work of art in its own right and thus perhaps find a different “truth” than the one about Ingmar Bergman’s life. For his story of himself, Bergman has very consciously chosen a literary form that structures personal memories interspersed with more contemporary events. What memories then does his literary laterna magica show and what do they mean? Why are memories and events structured in a certain way? Is there any unity in the total of more than a hundred memory images in various forms that the book consists of? My reading of Laterna magica takes a point of departure in Adriana Cavarero’s (2000) theory of the “narrative self.” In Laterna magica the narrative self creates an identity through the story that consists of the merged memory images. It then becomes a story where Bergman’s narrative self is looking for answers to the question “who am I?” The reading of the “autobiography” also assumes that it is a literary work. Thus, the story of the magical lantern of memories can be analyzed as a literary composition where staging and truth-seeking are two important concepts.
Memories for the Future? An Ecocritical Reading of Andri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water. A History of Our Future (2019)
Andri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water. A History of Our Future, categorized as a novel when nominated for the Nordic Literary Prize in 2020, is a unique contribution to cli-fi literature and the understanding of climate change. A generic hybrid of autobiography, stories, myths, family- and Icelandic history and culture interwoven with references to international cultures, scientific discussions and evidence-based material, the novel spans times and places and addresses the future. Applying theories from ecocriticism and memory studies, the article explores how the compositional complexity of the book, including its mental time travels, contributes to the production of images of the future.
The Faroese Cultural Archive: The Archive as a Source and Theme in Local Historical Writing
The cultural Faroese archive consists mostly of local historical writing. This article focuses on works of local history and claims that the local historical part of the archive constitutes the most extensive part of Faroese writing conventions. In publications on local history, the archive progresses into book form without undergoing any significant interpretation. This phenomenon is examined here as an expression of the archive as active and as an element of access, but one that is still used in a traditional cultural-historical context. However, what does “archive” really mean in this context? As a central writing convention, the cultural Faroese archive transcends common notions of the archive as collection, registration and unpublished source material. The article examines the cultural Faroese archive as both source and theme. In other words, it distinguishes between 1) the original archives as sources, which are kept in museums and libraries without being published, and 2) the use of archival sources as topics and cultural resources within published works. Through employing an elastic conception, the article understands the archive as a metaphor in Faroese writing conventions. On this basis, it argues that Aleida Assmann’s distinction between the archive as a source and subject cannot be maintained in a Faroese context because the sources per se are treated as a cultural-historical subject. Finally, it contends that the active and totalizing dimension in the cultural Faroese archive transcends abstract notions of the archive among leading archival theorists, who potentially disregard the cultural archive. Their view is countered by a study of the archive as a felt, experienced and interpreted cultural reality related to the Faroe Islands as a specific, ultraminor, geographical entity. By making geography an independent explanatory factor – and not only as a metaphor for a powerful centre and a powerless periphery, as in classical postcolonialism – it is possible to see connections between size and structure. In the case of the Faroese archive, the (colonial) order of things cannot be understood fully without acknowledging the relations between size and structure. The size of the Faroese cultural archive is associated with a lack of capacity, which in turn contributes to an understanding of Faroese uses of it. This power of action in ultraminor cultures is treated as a willingness to compensate for their shortcomings. Thus, what seems to be deprivation only turns out to be cultural capital.
Photoliterary Memoryscape of Tomas Espedal: Mitt privatliv (2014) – a Starting Point in a Journey to One’s Past
Photography is inextricably coupled with temporal conditions. It is rooted in the past while concurrently referring to the recipient’s present and future. This article sheds light on the connection between photography, literature, and memory in Tomas Espedal’s photo book Mitt privatliv (2014; My private life). The central perspective of this paper is devoted to the link between the lyrical subject’s autobiographical memory and the individual memory of the reader. My goal is to analyze how the reader finds their point of view while confronted with the lyrical subject’s memoryscape from aesthetic, anthropological, and cognitive perspectives. Firstly, I discuss the form of Espedal’s Mitt privatliv and the book’s potential liberatic character. Secondly, in reference to François Soulages and John Berger, I show how the correlation between texts and photography affects memory functioning in a photobook. Finally, I ocus on the mechanisms of autobiographical memory, or, more precisely, how the subject’s and recipient’s memories relate to the book’s physicality, structure, and the interplay between the word and photography. Looking through the lenses of Paul Ricoeur, Aleida Assmann, and the social-communicative functions of memory, it turns out that Mitt privatliv is not just a created and closed story of a single subject; it is a story that stimulates the reader’s memory and thus impacts their understanding and constitution of their “self” in both individual and collective contexts.
Skandinaviske studier og geopolitik: IASS og den kolde krig
The foundation stone for the creation of IASS was laid at the First International Conference on Scandinavian Studies which took place at the University of Cambridge, England, in July 1956. Few months later, the world woke up to the news of the Soviet invasion in Budapest on November 4th, a defining moment in the history of the Cold War, which sent political shock waves and a flow of nearly a quarter-million Hungarian refugees to Western Europe. But how did this tense political situation affect the emerging field of international Scandinavian studies? Drawing on the vast literature of published proceedings from IASS conferences and personal interviews with members of the organization, this article examines how the Cold War geopolitical conflict between the communist East and the capitalist West left its imprint on the activities of IASS in the period from 1956 until the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989/1991.
“Den ensomme helt mod magtens og storpolitikkens skamfulde forsømmelser”: Den individuelle projektion af en nations kamp i FN-embedsmand Povl Bang-Jensens minde
The Hungarian political and social discourse of the last decades often makes use of a national myth based on Hungarian history that focuses on a constant struggle for survival. The myth is built around the concept of the heroic Hungarians, who from time to time fight against a political and / or military preponderance. A narrative characteristic for the countries of East-Central and Eastern Europe has been created, which in its distinction between itself and the other concentrates on self-defence and victimhood, but at the same time emphasizes the nation’s superiority over the others. The image of the nation characterized by the uninterrupted struggle for survival becomes a schematic but effective tool in the political discourse. It is not a new narrative, but the actualization of the well-known, that finds appropriate events and personalities to disseminate the existing, traditional self-image. The paper attempts to demonstrate how the Danish United Nations official Povl Bang-Jensen and the role he played in the international politics after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 has been used to convey this image. Based on memories, books and documentaries my goal is to discuss how individual recall of experienced events contributed to the (re)construction of Bang-Jensen’s personality. Furthermore, I try to shed light on how intertwining memories about a historical event, scientific research and history writing points to a changed perception of the scientific facts that are no longer considered objective and independent of human consciousness or actions. They describe a reality, which is influenced by consciousness and interpreted through textual formulations. The article argues that the subjective perspective constituted in the memories about Bang-Jensen creates an almost mythologized interpretation of the Danish diplomat as a symbol of freedom and morality, as well. The article was among others inspired by works of Maurice Halbwachs, Sabine Mollers, Annette Warrings and Bernard Eric Jensen on memory, historical awareness and the use of history.
Kaj Munk’s “De Faldne” – Memorial Poem and Monument Inscription
On 29 August 1943, the Danish government resigned. The German Wehrmacht was to take immediate control of the Danish Army and Navy. Under widespread fighting against this “takeover,” 23 Danish soldiers and two civilians were killed, and a further 53 were wounded. Munk promptly wrote the poem “De Faldne” in memory of the soldiers killed in the assault on the Danish Army and Navy. In Munk’s wartime oeuvre, some dramas, poems and memoir work, implying a subtle, indirect appeal to resistance, have proved to be viable. His “direct” resistance poetry appears to be more time-bound. “De Faldne,” however, is a special case. It is one of his best “direct,” activist poems. As an inscription on memorials, it is sometimes referred to in ceremonial speeches, but it has remained untreated in the few serious recent readings of Munk’s resistance literature. It is therefore an aim of the present article to fill in a gap. When Munk wrote this memorial poem, he had already – through the open, resolute will to confront the occupiers which he had advocated at every possible occasion after 9 April 1940 – achieved a unique status as a national resistance icon. This status was further cemented when he himself joined the ranks of “De Faldne.” During the night of 4 January 1944, he was arrested and killed. His funeral became a national event, and the brutal murder indeed strengthened rather than weakened the will to resistance. “De Faldne” began to exert a strong and lasting influence on the construction of the collective memory of World War II and the Occupation when, after the Liberation, the first stanza was carved as an inscription in two places at the central memorial site for those killed in the freedom struggle, Mindelunden in Ryvangen. This first stanza was moreover used on a considerable number of memorial stones erected on local initiative throughout the country. The present article offers an analysis of its important role in the memory culture of the Occupation, both through its concrete presence on numerous monuments and as part of a wider memorial culture with ceremonial anniversaries and commemoration days like 9 April (the Occupation, 1940), 4–5 May (the Liberation, 1945), and 29 August (the end of the politics of cooperation, 1943). This commemorative culture has retained its public appeal, perhaps even growing more important in recent years due to the shift toward a more activist Danish foreign policy since the 1990s. Quite recently, several of the monuments with Munk’s words as an inscription have been revitalised and enhanced by musical and visual dimensions transmitted by new, digital forms of communication. Through the modification of this cultural heritage, Munk’s words, as well as his fate, have become audible and visible in new ways.
Kroppsminne och kollektiv erfarenhet: Objektiveringens betydelse för produktionen av arbetarlitteraritet
Literature is the memory of a culture: whether included in the canon or not, it testifies to conceptions, mentalities, and conditions in its time. Working-class literature is a young literary type, that for long was excluded from the canon and recognized literary tradition, and therefore has a special relationship to memory, experience, and culture. The first Swedish working-class writers were self-taught, without access to the bourgeois cultural heritage. They were workers, writing about workers, for workers and addressing the class collective. But they were also individuals, who started from their own memories and experiences. How did they go about making their own thing a matter for the whole class? How did they integrate the personal into a collective memory culture? That is the main issue in my article. The task is to shed light on the relationship between individual experience and collective memory in the first generation of Swedish working-class prose around 1910. I will dive into this subject matter by employing the notion of literary objectification, understood as creating vivid images, scenes, and situations from personal memories and experiences serving as an objective correlate (T.S. Eliot). The function of this correlate is to evoke recognition at a distance in the implied reader: an alienated recognition (Viktor Shklovsky), or a kind of sustained Verfremdung (Bertolt Brecht), which also includes contemplation and reflection. A working objective correlate, as I understand it here, must be based on some form of collective memory. I want to develop this idea with the support of memory studies, specifically, works by cultural researcher Jan Assmann and phenomenologist Thomas Fuchs. The reasoning will then be tested on some text examples from the working-class authors Dan Andersson (1888–1920), Maria Sandel (1870–1927), and Karl Östman (1876–1953). In particular, I will dwell on depictions of physical labour, the body memories that are objectified, and the extent to which such objectification produces a special proletarian literariness.
The aim of this article is to analyse the attitudes to history and memory expressed in the working-class poetry of Stig Sjödin (1917–1993) – both in Sotfratgment (Fragments of Soot) from 1949, which marked his breakthrough as a poet, and in the poetry he wrote for the labour movement (mainly poems published in tradeunion membership magazines or read at meetings and congresses) – and to discuss how he and his poetry are today viewed as reminders of political ideals and experiences threatened by oblivion. There are certain differences between how memory and remembering is treated in Sotfragment and in Sjödin’s labour-movement poetry respectively. In Sotfragment, focus is more often on individual memories and existential problems, whereas in the labour-movement poetry, Sjödin is sometimes more explicitly political and writes about collective memories from a proletarian perspective. These differences are conditioned by differences between the spheres to which the poems belong: that of literature and that of the labour movement. In connection with the rise of left-wing radicalism in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s, Sjödin argued that older working-class literature contained important political experiences and perspectives. This is also how his works are sometimes viewed today, both by working-class writers and by political commentators. Thereby, it is emphasized that literature is not a passive medium for the preservation of memories, but that it can also transform them and make them politically relevant.
Presenting Norwegian Literature in Czechoslovakia: Norwegian Literature in Czech Translations 1945–1968
Translations contribute to spreading but also shaping of cultural memory. While the choice of titles which get to be translated is contingent on many factors which the publishers take into consideration, decision-making in totalitarian countries is fettered. In communist Czechoslovakia, the final selection of books, and therefore memories, had to meet yet another criterion which deformed the natural literary development – censorship. The article focuses on Norwegian literature which was introduced into Czech between 1945 and 1968. Norwegian literature had already had a strong position on the Czechoslovak literary market since the end of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century thanks to several publishing houses, translators, and the introduction of the Nobel Prize in literature. This tradition was first interrupted by the WWII and shortly after again by the communist coup in 1948. Although the restrictions began loosening later, the Soviet intervention in 1968 installed the restrictions again. The object is to present and examine the image of Norwegian literature in Czech literary memory as it was shaped by the cultural policies of totalitarian Czechoslovakia; and to show and explain which type of literature could enter Czech bookshops and libraries. The focus often shifted to a specific literary genre, republishing the earlier works of the Norwegian canon, or works by authors whose work was translated into Czech although they were marginalized in Norway and did not make it into the Norwegian national canon. An important part of such a perception is not only remembering but also forgetting. The article therefore also maps the active suppressing of memories by black-listing particular authors or works. Lastly, the article is also concerned with peritexts of translation, namely introductions and afterwords, as these often contributed to mediation of the transfer.
The Feminist Potential of Beatrice Helen Barmby’s Gísli Súrsson: A Drama
The late Victorian Britain was fascinated with the ancient North. British literary authors of the second half of the nineteenth century sought inspiration for their novels, poems, and plays in medieval Icelandic imagery. One of these authors was Beatrice Helen Barmby, author of Gísli Súrsson: A Drama. Since her authorship has largely been forgotten, this paper is an attempt to reintroduce her as one of the Victorian enthusiasts of Old Norse literature. Gísli Súrsson: A Drama (1900) is a play based on the medieval Gísla saga Súrssonar. Notably, the adaptation centres around the relationships between the main characters rather than the existential drama of the outlaw Gísli. I argue that the play can be interpreted as an invitation to consider women’s rights, or the Woman Question, a topic which excited heated debates in late nineteenth-century Britain. The play’s depiction of marriage is especially close to the early liberal feminist critique of the inferior role of women as harmful for both women and men. On the other hand, the play portrays Gísli’s wife Aud as a universally stoic and moral character, a domestically emancipated free woman. This paper thus analyses Gísli Súrsson: A Drama as a Victorian work on Old Norse-inspired themes with activist potential.
Victorian reception of Old Norse literature