On Forgetting and Rediscovering the Holocaust in Scandinavia: introduction to the special issue on the histories and memories of the Holocaust in Scandinavia²

2 When we write about Scandinavia, we do it with the aim and scope of this journal in mind, and therefore Finland is also included in the concept. We would also like to express our regret that we were unable to find an article on Iceland which could fit into this special issue.

Abstract

The interest in the Holocaust – Nazi Germany's concentrated attempt to exterminate European Jewry – has become increasingly noticeable in the Scandinavian countries during the last decades, with a growing number not only of dissertations, monographs and other publications, but also public debates and controversies relating to this event. This new upsurge of interest in the Holocaust reflects the dynamics and the contested nature of collective memories of wartime Scandinavia more broadly. This article highlights, broadly speaking, the development of Holocaust historiography in Scandinavia; the changing perspectives, interpretations, debates and focus from the immediate post-war years to the present day. It argues that, despite the fact that the Holocaust was truly a European-wide phenomenon transcending national borders, Holocaust studies have mainly been produced as nation-centred histories. Only with the end of the Cold War and with a paradigmatic shift from ‘the event’ to ‘the memory’ has a new form of Holocaust remembrance begun, ‘the cosmopolitanization of Holocaust remembrance’, which transcends borders and makes memory cultures coincide. In Scandinavian historical cultures and historiography, then, the 1990s marks the starting point of a process by which Holocaust remembrance has become officially embedded into European memory.

Keywords:

• Holocaust
• Scandinavia
• memory culture
• historiography

Notes

1 The guest editors would like to offer their sincere thanks to the editor-in-chief, Guðmundur Hálfdanarson, who encouraged, helped, and participated in the process. Thanks should also go to May-Brith Ohman Nielsen, the member of the editorial board overseeing this special issue, and Jari Ojala, who first supported the idea of the special issue while he was the editor-in-chief of the Scandinavian Journal of History.

2 When we write about Scandinavia, we do it with the aim and scope of this journal in mind, and therefore Finland is also included in the concept. We would also like to express our regret that we were unable to find an article on Iceland which could fit into this special issue.

3 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 157–8.

4 An important scholarly work which sought to explicate the problem of representation is Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation.

5 A book that is an example of this, but also uses the moral perspective as a useful tool to analyse and re-interpret the history of the Holocaust in Sweden, is Andersson and Tydén, Sverige och Nazityskland.

6 Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews.

7 Jarausch, ‘Nightmares or Daydreams?’, 320.

8 Stenius, Österberg, and Östling, ‘Nordic Narratives of the Second World War’, 11.

9 For the purpose of this article, we understand the Holocaust as the genocide of the Jews while we recognize the fact that many other population groups, notably Europe's Romany (Gypsy) population, were also the victims of the genocide.

10 Tegen and Tegen, De Dödsdömda Vittna. We would also like to mention Pia-Kristina Garde's book De dödsdömda vittnar – 60 år senare, in which she has traced almost all of the survivors interviewed by the Tegens to find out what happened to them after 1945, see Garde, De dödsdömda vittnar.

11 Lappi-Seppälä, Haudat Dnjeprin varrella.

12 Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry.

13 Ibid., 394.

14 Wyman, The World Reacts to the Holocaust.

15 Lindberg, Svensk flyktingpolitik under internationellt tryck. See also Levine, From Indifference to Activism, 32.

16 Banke, ‘Remembering Europe's Heart of Darkness’, 164.

17 Suominen, Kuoleman laiva S/S Hohenhörn. For a closer discussion on the NBC TV-miniseries’ impact in Finland and Suominen's book, see Holmila, ‘Varieties of Silence’. For a comparison of the reception of the TV-miniseries in Denmark and Sweden, see Zander, ‘Holocaust at the Limits’, 252–92.

18 Schoenberner, Jødestjernen.

19 Kjelstadli, Hjemmestyrkene. For more details, see Bruland and Tangestuen's article in this issue.

20 Johansen, Oss selv nærmest.

21 A similar case can be found in Sweden, with the reception of journalist Maria-Pia Boëthius book Heder och samvete, which dealt with the Swedish actions during World War II and the Holocaust; see Boëthius, Heder och samvete.

22 Mendelsohn, Jødenes historie i Norge.

23 Koblik, Om vi teg, skulle stenarna ropa; Koblik, The Stones Cry Out.

24 In fairness to new research, we must point out that there are some recent comparative works. See for example, Dahl and others, Danske tilstander, norske tilstander; Holmila, Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press.

25 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews.

26 For a sound assessment of the debates surrounding the decision-making process, see Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, especially chapter 2, ‘The Decision-Making Process in Context’, 64–112.

27 Levine, From Indifference to Activisim, 56. Emphasis in the original.

28 Levine, ‘Swedish Neutrality during the Second World War’, 327.

29 Rautkallio, Finland and the Holocaust, 170–1.

30 Jokisipilä, Aseveljiä vai liittolaisia?, 40.

31 Mogensen, ‘October 1943’, 36.

32 Judt, Postwar, citations are from pages 5 and 8.

33 Bartov, Crimes of War, xvii–xviii.

34 Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory.

35 Folke Bernadotte, Slutet: Mina humanitära förhandlingar i Tyskland våren 1945 och deras politiska följder.

36 Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane, ‘Jøder fra Danmark i Theresienstadt’, 149.

37 For example, the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 and the so-call Frankfurt Auschwitz trials between 1963 and 1965 brought the Holocaust, at least to some extent, back to the public sphere, especially in Germany.

38 See, for example, Corell, ‘The Solidity of a National Narrative’, 101–26.

39 See, for instance, Henning Poulsen's book Besættelsesmagten og de danske nazister (1970), Aage Trommer's Jernbanesabotage i Danmark under den anden verdenskrig (1973), and Hans Kirchhoff's Augustoprøret 1943. Samarbejdspolitikkens fald (1979).

40 Bundgård Christensen, Poulsen, and Scharff Smith, Under hagekors og Dannebrog.

41 From 1998 to 2003 the state-funded project ‘Suomen sotasurmat 1914–22’ (‘the war dead between 1914 and 1922’) was running with the aim to uncover all the deaths from that tumultuous period, and to deconstruct the national trauma, still visible in the society.

42 Stenius, Österberg, and Östling, Nordic Narratives of the Second World War is the most recent examination of the changing World War II narratives in Scandinavia.

43 See also Meinander, ‘A Separate Story’, 55–78.

44 Persson, ‘Vi åker till Sverige’.

45 See Kirchhoff, Et menneske uden pas; Rünitz, Af hensyn til konsekvenserne; Banke, Demokratiets skyggeside; and Kirchhoff and Rünitz, Udsendt til Tyskland.

46 Bryld and Warring, Besættelsestiden som kollektiv erindring.

47 Sana, Luovutetut – Suomen ihmisluovutukset Gestapolle [Överlämnade – Finlands människoöverlämningar till Gestapo].

48 For one of the reports of this project, see Westerlund, Prisoners of War.

49 Silvennoinen, Geheime Waffenbrüderschaft.

50 Reichelt, Politik mit der Erinnerung.

51 See, for instance, Karlsson and Zander, Echoes of the Holocaust; Karlsson and Zander, Holocaust Heritage; and Karlsson and Zander, The Holocaust – Post-War Battlefields.

52 Zander, ‘Holocaust at the Limits’.