Editors’ Preface

Courage, resistance and vulnerability in memory culture: Swedish Museum education and the representation of the Holocaust survivor at the turn of the twenty-first century

“…The neutrality-engagement debate also manifests itself in a recently published book providing an overview of Sweden’s history. Here, the authors emphasise that Sweden was one of the countries rejecting refugees and asylum seekers who fled from the Nazis, and they mention the conclusion of the commission set up by the Swedish government after the end of the war in 1945 to examine Swedish refugee policy (Larsson and Marklund, 2019: 319, my translation from Swedish):The final report showed in concrete examples that refusals and deportations of asylum-seeking Jews had resulted in deaths in the Nazi gas chambers. Therefore, it was the Commission’s assessment that Jewish refugees and other persons fleeing from the Nazi terror were, unfortunately, being admitted into Sweden too late.…”

“… 24. That the question of ‘neutrality’ versus involvement was brought up in debates on Swedish historiography can be seen as linked to a broader societal development concerning Sweden’s successful approach to integration into European cooperation, too. In 1995, Sweden became a member of the European Union (from 2001 part of the Schengen cooperation), but the new European policy was a turning point for Swedish social democracy: in a famous speech to Metallindustriarbetareförbundet (Metal Industry Federation) in 1961, Prime Minister Tage Erlander dismissed any thoughts on Sweden’s accession to the European Economic Community (EEC) using Sweden’s neutrality policy as one of the main arguments, but the political distance from continental Europe, which had been part of Swedish social democratic rhetoric since the 1930s, a politics which also emphasised the peaceful North in opposition to the Europe of conflict, was gradually withdrawn (Larsson and Marklund, 2019: 354). …”