Sweden

[mrissa]

One of you asked about Sweden, other than Lucia Day. I've only been there once, but we have family there (past and current), and friends, and I read a fair amount of stuff about Sweden as a matter of course. I'm currently reading a book about Swedish cryptography in WWII, as a matter of fact. So this is by no means definitive about Sweden, but it's what I know and can think of.

I spent my tenth birthday in Sweden. I haven't been back since, but I would go in a heartbeat, and stay with Johan and Ulla and get to know my little Swedish relations, who are now all bigger than I am. (Little Lars, the first baby I really got attached to, is now 18. Meep.) We landed in Norway on that trip, spent some time in Norway first and then went on to Sweden. (Then Finland, then back to Sweden, then Denmark, and then back to Norway. But that's not vital to this story.) And we were just off the train in Stockholm for the first time, having dinner at Johan and Ulla's apartment, and Mom and Grandma were on and on about Norway, how wonderful it was, how it was the most beautiful country they'd ever seen. Well, I didn't know Johan all that well then, and it just did not seem like a good idea to me to be praising a neighboring country to the high heavens while sitting at his dinner table. So after Grandma repeated, "Norway is the most beautiful country I've ever seen!" for about the third time, I smiled as winningly as I could at Johan and Ulla, and I said, "Of course, we haven't seen much of Sweden yet."

Johan, being Johan, laughed and said, "You have brought me a little Swedish diplomat." Well...yah. I don't have a great reputation for tact, but that's generally deliberate. It's like a gentleman not accidentally giving offense: I do that. From what I've seen, Swedes pride themselves on that. It's something of a general Scandinavian self-perception (this is one of the reasons why "Finlandia" resonates with me), that they are now a region that fixes problems with talk and deliberation. The other bit of it is that they are sometimes so darned obvious about it -- like me, at 9 -- that it makes me laugh. And when they think something is important, they're willing to be bulldogs about it, even when it would no longer be considered socially inappropriate in a lot of American circles, and I found that fascinating and appealing as a kid.

When I was 9-turning-10, my impression of Sweden was that the people were a good deal more closed-off than Norwegians, more inward. Now I'm not sure that what I saw wasn't the difference between a big city and a mid-sized city. Stockholm's population is something like three times Oslo's, and I've seen the difference that can make with myself and the Bay Area vs. Minneapolis. There are ways in which I can keep open body language and eye contact here that I just couldn't in the Bay Area, and I'm sure some of that is local culture, but I don't think local culture is independent of population.

We spent a fair amount of our time in Sweden on family farms and estates, and they were lovely, and they felt very familiar. They felt very much like my family's farms here, but some of the history had gotten stuck in the place -- it wasn't really just in people the way it is here.

I guess the main thing that's coming out about Sweden when I write about it (in fiction, I mean) is that it's very much in the middle, and for the most part it always has been. The obvious bits are Germany and Russia, and that balance has shaped Sweden for sure. But I also think that being between the Saami and mainland Europe is a bigger factor than is immediately obvious. Even now, even in the 21st century, some of Sweden is populated by nomadic reindeer herders. That can't really help but affect how your country sees itself.

I was raised on tales of stubborn, heroic Norway, and when I got older I found the stories of brave little Finland myself. It's fairly easy for Sweden to fall between the cracks in family lore: going along to get along is not the sort of stance we enshrine in story and song. But individual Swedes have done a great deal more than that, and Raoul Wallenberg did not arise out of nothing. One of my family's dear friends in Sweden, Liesel, is not ethnically Swedish. Ethnically she's Austrian Jewish. She was 10 years old when they brought her across in the hold of a fishing boat. I'm not sure that Sweden as a nation could have done anything truly substantial to save her original parents from the death camps. Not selling iron to the Nazis might have been a start. But I do know that thousands of Swedes very quietly said, no, not this child, not on my watch, and while their government let German troops use the railways and the communications lines in their invasion of Norway, they made room in their families for kids who otherwise -- no melodrama, just fact -- would have been dead. And that makes a country, too. Certainly it made Liesel a loyal Swede.

That last paragraph assumes something that probably isn't true for most of you: a childhood spent listening to an endless discussion of whether Sweden should have fought, whether anything would have been better if they had. My family's personal ties are stronger to Sweden. Ideologically, though, it's Norway all the way. History is extremely personal for my family -- I've said, haven't I? that when I was small and people talked about the bad word you were not to repeat, I was confident that I knew that word, and that it was Quisling. The arguments about Sweden always ended with, "Well, it might have been better or it might have been worse, but this way we have Liesel." I think that kind of ambivalence, that kind of conflict, is good. It's real. It's...better world-building, is I guess what I want to say, and I already told you it'd be a personal skew on the subject.

One more thing: my great-grandpa absolutely did not want to go back to Sweden. Would not have gone if you'd paid him. He told my dad that the only way to get him back to Sweden would be hogtied and thrown in a sack. We never did find out why.

Comments

[zalena.livejournal.com]

This is a great post! There's lots of interesting ideas and bits of identity here.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I've been to Sweden once. What I remember is seeing why Swedes had gone to North America to farm.

I'm from a rural area (about 100 miles north of NYC) which has a lot of stone fences. The fences weren't stone because stone looks pretty; people had to do something with the stones which turned up every spring. Land which produces stone fences is not prime farmland.

I saw stone fences in Sweden, enclosing fields which had been abandoned. The fields were a lot smaller than in New York. And, if I recall correctly, this was in what had been a major farming area.

Small and big

[aet.livejournal.com]

It amuses me to see our big neighbour Finland being called little.

Re: Small and big

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"Brave little Finland" was a stock phrase of the English-speaking press when they were fighting the Winter War. It was often a comparison to "the great Russian bear."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure: all of my Swedish ancestors, like half of my Norwegian ancestors, came here because they were starving. (The other half of the Norwegians came because they were starving and religio-politically stubborn.) But there's nothing for making Sweden look like great farmland like seeing western Norway immediately before.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I loved Stockholm. Oh the loving Stockholm.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

In a heartbeat, I tell you.

[loup_noir]

My mother came from the far north, almost at Lappland. She's seventy-seven now and has told me the story of the trains many times. The trains heading north were full of bright-haired soldiers who would lean out the windows, waving and calling to the Swedish farm girls like my mother. The same trains headed south were silent, full of the dead and the wounded.

When I was twelve, we visited her home. For a twelve-year-old city kid, it was hell. Clumps of managed woodland and flat fields with a little lake. I'd like to see now, with adult eyes, and see its charms, but she and her surviving sister sold it a few years ago. The taxes were just too much.

In '73, Sweden was a weird and wild place for an American kid. Sexual revolution hadn't hit the US and the Swedes were and are quite blase about nudity and sex. I remember walking through Stockholm and turning a corner to see a poster of about twenty penises. I'd never seen one at that time. Sex on one of the two government-controlled channels at dinner time. It was a place of tiny, fast cars and tall apartment complexes, boiled potatoes, knichtebrotte (misspelled horribly), limpa, pickled everything (yum) and coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.

Norway, according to my mother, is still almost a Swedish possession. That's nice, mom. Here, have another cup of coffee and some coffeebread.

Re: Small and big

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

That's why Ariadne Oliver made her detective a Finn! (And similar to why her creator Agatha Christie made hers a Belgian.)

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

We have a new housemate coming this weekend who is swedish.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Thank you for hitting me over the head with the obvious. No, not really - your words were gentle. It was the Obvious Stick that hit me hard, because of a fairly apparent fact I had overlooked for a very long time. Ever since reading Lois Lowry's Number the Stars and visiting the Holocaust Museum in DC, I've been blown away with the Danes' heroic rescue of almost all their country's Jews from the Nazis.

And what did the Danes do to save those Jews? Why, they sent them over to neutral Sweden. You'd think that at some point it would have occurred to me that there must have been some heroism on the receiving end too, that assimilating a large numbers of refugees into your country - specifically ones that are being refused by most other countries at the time, too - isn't exactly an easy thing. So duh, I'm stupid, and thanks for helping me unstupid a little more. Every bit helps.

Re: Small and big

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ariadne Oliver? Is this good stuff I should know about?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Not only did the kids (and some of the grown-ups) go to neutral Sweden, they went to co-belligerent Finland. Finland was very firm that it was not allied with Germany, it was co-belligerent against Russia. Took in a fair number of refugees considering its size.

One of my favorite Continuation War Fun Facts is that the German government attempted to give several Finnish army officers (who had been Jewish Germans, Austrians, etc.) the Iron Cross. They really didn't get why the officers declined such an honor.

To be fair, some of the Danish Jews were also hidden in the population. "This is my nephew Hans. Of course he's a Lutheran! I was there at his baptism!" But a lot of the people in question and their descendents are naturalized Swedes now.

Lise Meitner went to Sweden -- poor dear. It was a pretty miserable time to be a Jewish foreigner woman scientist in Sweden. Still, better than the alternative by a longshot.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My Swedish and Norwegian relatives still have differences of opinion on this last subject.

I make a mean limpa, if you want to know.

Re: Small and big

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Ariadne Oliver was a friend of Hercule Poirot's in some of Agatha Christie's books about him. She's more or less a caricature of Christie herself, most people seem to think. She likes to talk about how she hates her Finnish detective, and there are no more Finn-isms in her books, it's implied, than Belgian-ism in the Poirot books themselves. But when Christie first wrote Poirot, WWI was just over so Belgium was more or less trendy, or at least in the news.

Re: Small and big

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I see. Well, I don't need to read Agatha Christie writing about someone writing about a Finn who isn't particularly Finnish. That'll be fine.