CHAPTER 7
The call of the blood
Scandinavia and the First World War as a clash of races
Is it not of real importance that the 11 million Scandinavian Teutons have found one another and decided to stand together as one in the great global struggle between Slavs, Romans, Anglo-Saxon Teutons, and Germanic Teutons?1
In scholarly and popular historiography the First World War is often pictured as a clash of nations. Nationalism, ideas of national sovereignty, and the right to self-determination are seen as the rationale of the conflict in terms of both origins and outcome. Conversely, Stephan Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker argue that to better understand the meaning of the war to its contemporaries, we should see it as a perceived war of civilization(s), an absolute, binary ‘crusade’ of eschatological dimensions.2 Daniel Pick likewise claims that it is hard to underestimate the notion of ‘civilization’ as a cultural key to the war.3 To him, ‘The First World War was justified and rationalized as a fundamental conflict, a historically and anthropologically inevitable struggle between two inalienably different forces’.4 Aggression on the part of the enemy was seen as innate and due to racial instincts. On a deep level, the defensive war of civilization was thus imagined as a clash of races: of Teuton and Slav, of Teuton and Latin/Celtic, of European (white) and non-European (yellow/black), and finally of the European elite and the racially inferior lower classes. These seemingly different conceptions of race intersected in a complicated web of meaning. According to Frank Füredi, the First World War was represented as both an internal and an external racial battle. To contemporaries, the racial factor was also to count for the war’s extreme and unexpected brutality. In the general understanding of history as a racial struggle, conflict was pictured as a zero-sum game, and success for one race must thus mean the total subjection or even annihilation of the other.5
For a century prior to the outbreak of war in 1914, race had been a central social motif for the Western world. The Europeans expressed their world in the language of race. The domination of the world by the West was seen as a proof of white racial superiority. Race was a significant element in the composition of Western identity, and shaped the definition of Western culture. At the turn of the twentieth century, race was believed to explain the character of individuals, the structure of social communities, and the fate of human societies. The sense of race was central to the prevailing Social Darwinist outlook and biological explanations of social phenomena. Typologies of race, class, and gender were virtually interchangeable in the discussion of social inferiority, often linked to ideas of a special national destiny. In racial thinking, the revulsion at the ‘inferior’ European classes and at non-European races could not be told apart.6 In a similar way, the category of race was virtually inseparable from and intimately interrelated to images and ideas of gender. For example, ‘inferior’ races and classes were feminized and equated to Western women.7
Scandinavia was no exception, as witnessed by the quotation above about a special Nordic or Scandinavian racial solidarity, taken from the Swedish weekly magazine Hvar 8 dag in 1915. Culturally speaking, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark belonged to the Western hemisphere, to a common European community where ideas of a civilizing mission, white racial superiority, and colonial domination were taken for granted. Even if Sweden and Norway did not have much of an imperialist record, colonial and racist discourses were prevalent in all three countries. Within the European community, Sweden and Denmark both had a history of a strong cultural affinity with Germany, even if the Danish defeat and territorial losses of 1864 had made Danish–German relations more strained. Norway, on the other hand, was generally more oriented towards Great Britain.
These different affinities were both emphasized and challenged by the First World War. At the outbreak of war in August 1914, the three Scandinavian countries issued similar declarations of neutrality and they all managed to stay out of the conflict. But the emotional and discursive battles were nevertheless intense and often infused with ideas of race. For example, Sweden’s so-called aktivister (activists), who pressed for Sweden to enter the war to help its Germanic counterpart fight the Russians, saw the conflict as a racial contest, a struggle for the survival of Western civilization against the threatening, barbaric Asiatic East.8 It would be a mistake, however, to consign ideas of a racial war to the militarist, conservative, and pro-German wing alone. Rather, a racialized interpretation of all things national was part of a much wider Scandinavian discourse—after all, eugenic and racist ideas and practices had struck a popular chord in all Scandinavian countries by the time of war. The existence of a racial hierarchy topped by a biological and culturally defined Nordic (or Germanic) ‘master race’ with its contemporary core in Scandinavia was widely taken for granted.9 Racial thinking bridged the Left–Right divide as well as the pacifist–militarist divide in both Sweden and Norway, and was commonplace in the pro-Entente and pro-German camps alike.10
The aim of this chapter is thus twofold. The first part is an attempt to examine and locate the meaning of race and racial war within the historical context of the First World War by discussing the international historiography of the war as a race war. The second part is a case study in which I analyse the themes of the war as a clash of races and ‘the sense of race’ from a Scandinavian—and primarily Swedish—perspective by surveying the Swedish popular press of 1914 to 1919.
The meaning of race
Today—in sharp contrast to the period considered here—biological explanations of race are no longer valid, and the common scholarly position is to view race as a social construct. Seen as a social category, race is a complex and amorphous concept that has been repeatedly recast and reformulated in different contexts over a long period of time. As Kenan Malik points out, race cannot be reduced to a single property or relationship, but is better understood as a ‘medium’ through which the changing relationship between humanity, society, and Nature has been socially and historically constructed.11 To analyse the Scandinavian meanings of race in the historical context of the First World War, it is necessary to broaden the understanding beyond both the narrow Nazi ambit and its contemporaneous association with colour. It is essential to acknowledge that the modern discourse of race also partly developed through the racialization of social differences within Europe. Racial theories accounted for these social inequalities by attributing them to nature. According to Malik, the construction of non-Europeans as inferior races was but an extension of already existing views on the lower classes at home. In this he diverges from the post-colonial and Orientalist tradition associated with Edward W. Said, where the origins of race and racism are intimately connected to imperialism, European conquest, and the construction of the colonial Other.12 Perhaps more accurately, Pick speaks of a dialectical, interconnected process where the European elites proclaimed their racial superiority to non-European peoples and simultaneously revealed the inferiority of the masses within their own nations: ‘The ‘other’ was outside and inside.’13 At the turn of the century, race gradually became more associated with colour, and at same time racial thinking became part of popular culture, as evident from the burgeoning mass press and entertainment industry.14
Thus on the eve of the First World War the concept of race could and did refer to many different social categories. Distinctions between perceived social, biological, and cultural entities were constantly blurred. Differences between individuals and groups were naturalized and racially encoded. Not only were the colonial peoples categorized and differentiated according to racial hierarchies and evolutionary standards, so were the Europeans. This did of course become more evident during the Second World War, when the Nazis—to whom Europe was a racial rather than a geographical entity—tried to recast the entire Continent as a new racial order, with terrible results.15 But the same kinds of ideas—that some European nationalities, ethnicities, or races were superior and civilized and others inferior and barbaric—also permeated the conflict of 1914– 18 and its aftermath.16 In conflict, racial awareness was heightened, as was the focus on physical and cultural borders, defining the ‘insider’ and the ‘outsider’. For example, Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius has convincingly shown how German images and conceptions of the East and its peoples were increasingly radicalized and racialized under the impact of the war experience: the occupied lands and peoples of the East were mentally transformed into alien races and strange spaces, which the Germans had to colonize and civilize.17
The First World War as a race war
The war generally reinforced pre-existing racial sentiment. Pick shows how race formed a language of war with which the atrocities and violence could be negotiated and explained. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker talk of a ‘war culture’ in which the general desire to exterminate the enemy and his culture stemmed from the overwhelming conviction of belonging to a superior civilization. Social Darwinism and racism underpinned popular representations of the conflict. It also permeated wartime propaganda and rhetoric on both sides. The Allies frequently paralleled German atrocities in Belgium and northern France to the Armenian Genocide of 1915, referring to ‘Muslim methods’, and thus implicitly likening the Germans to barbarians and non-Christians. In French propaganda, ideas of special racial traits such as particular bodily odours or hairiness dehumanized the enemy and shaped the image of the war as a crusade against barbarous or even animalistic Germans.18
Differences between the French and the Germans were drawn from a biological standpoint, as race was identified with nation. In France, German culture was said to be at the same level as halfsavage tribes in Congo. The German race was degenerate to begin with, and during the war it had regressed to the level of ‘inferior people’. French writers and scholars deemed the German civilizing process to be superficial. The war had revealed the ancestral barbarism in the German race and unleashed its racial hatred. Atrocities were interpreted as signs of barbarity and the instincts of race. Underneath their veneer of civilization and modernization, the Germans had remained biologically different—an inferior race. The enemy was thus hereditary and permanent; he could not change or amend, but must be punished and kept in place forever.19
British propaganda also stressed the degeneration and deterioration of the Germans, but more frequently blamed the Prussian influence. The Prussians were deemed the betrayers of the ‘real’ Germany, an alien race of Slavic origin within the German nation. The brutality and ruthlessness of the Germans were down to their Slavic blood, to an Eastern, even Asiatic, atavism and barbarity, best captured in the common concept of ‘the Hun’.20
The German propaganda, on the other hand, frequently accused Great Britain of treacherous miscegenation by forging alliances with the black and yellow races, polluting the purity of the Continent, and blurring the lines of division between European and non-European. The Germans protested about prisoners being held in French colonies in Africa, arguing that it was inhuman and degrading to be guarded by ‘negroes’ and fanatic Arabs debasing Christians. But above all, the Germans focused on the deployment of colonial troops on European battlefields. The African and Asian soldiers were a recurring focal point in wartime German polemics on barbarism, civilization, culture, and race. In October 1914, German scholars addressed an ‘Aufruf an die Kulturwelt’ (‘Appeal to the civilized world’)—with the neutral parties especially in mind—where they turned the accusations of barbarism against the Allies. Using racial arguments they pictured the conflict as a fratricidal war, a European civil war. The troops of colour were seen as a cause of depravity in war, and they were accused of especially cruel and barbarous warfare, even cannibalism.21
A related German argument was to accuse the British of blurring the line between superior and inferior Europe by their unholy alliance with barbarous Russia, instead of forming a true Anglo-Saxon union. The Anglo-Russian alliance was especially demeaning to the Germans, since in the German imagination the war was primarily seen as a defensive struggle against the East, a great racial conflict between Teutonic and Slavic. The racial argument—especially ideas of a superior Nordic ‘master race’ and white supremacy—was central in the German propaganda that attacked the neutrals, particularly the US. As Pick notices, the perception of the inferiority and separateness of the Slavs was shared by the British, Americans, and Germans alike.22 In imagination at least, they were all fighting on the Eastern Front, trying to define the outer borders of Europe and Western civilization and debasing the enemy to non-Europeans.
Pick, Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, and others demonstrate how widespread and common racial arguments were in all the main Western belligerent countries during the war—by no means was ‘race’ a marginal or exclusively German concept—and illustrate how notions of race and civilization were applied to both Europe and its colonies, and were discursively woven together in the construction of the self and the Other. Since all underline the importance of wartime violence and propaganda for spurring on this racist, binary thinking, the question is how their findings correspond to the Scandinavian context of neutrality and non-participation.
In wartime, the cultural meanings and implications of neutrality and its relation to national and racial identities became vital.23 In the Social Darwinist thinking of the day, war was the antidote to decadence, unfitness, and degeneracy; a cure for both national and individual lethargy and degeneration. It was to alter the physical and moral emasculation produced by modernization and ‘overcivilization’. War was a test of racial virility and ‘the right to live’. It was an illustration of the natural selection of ‘the survival of the fittest’. Peace and neutrality were subsequently associated with cultural castration, national sterility, and feminine passivity. But under the impact of the mass slaughter of the First World War, it became more common to speak of the relation between war and racial fitness and survival in negative terms. There was a racial dimension to the famous trope of the ‘Lost Generation’. In interwar racial thinking, war was increasingly seen as a racial catastrophe, killing off the nation’s noblest, manliest specimens, while the racially unfit and degenerate—the chronically ill, handicapped, criminals, neurasthenics, deserters, and the like—survived and were left to breed uncontrollably.24
Race, war, and neutrality – the Swedish popular press 1914–19
Most international literature on race and the First World War focuses on either the intellectual and academic discourse or on state-sanctioned propaganda. When it comes to the Swedish historiography of race there is still a lack of research on popular racial discourses.25 Regarding Sweden’s First World War experience, Claes Ahlund has examined popular conceptions of different ethnicities and nationalities in the war novels by Radscha (Iwan Aminoff), a prolific Swedish writer of popular literature. Evidently, ethnicity was an important element in portraying the different parties. The colonial soldiers in particular were repeatedly pictured according to very crude racist stereotypes.26 According to Sofi Qvarnström, racist images and ideas were also prevalent in the Swedish anti-war literature and press.27
To discuss some illustrative examples of how race was articulated and imagined in relation to the war in the case of neutral Sweden, I will turn to another popular context: the contemporary popular press, notably the weekly magazines Allers Familj-Journal (Allers), Hvar 8 dag (H8D), Idun, and Vecko-Journalen (VJ) for the years 1914–19.28 The mass-circulation popular press’s extensive war coverage offers a window on how race and racial war were imagined and represented on a more everyday basis in wartime Sweden.29 Unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity to examine similar weekly magazines in Denmark and Norway, but when possible I will compare my findings from the Swedish sources with literature on the other Scandinavian countries. My intention here is to tentatively point to some trends that might stimulate further discussions and research on the subject. I will analyse the problematic of race from different angles, further testifying to the ambivalence and ambiguity of the concept in this period.
Troops of colour and the yellow peril
In the popular press, the existence of distinct human races and racial differences was taken for granted. So was the idea of a racial hierarchy between European and non-European on the one hand, and between North European (Nordic) and East/South European on the other, based on notions of evolutionary progress and standards of civilization. Notable, though, is the fact that ‘the Jew’ did not figure prominently in the racial imagination of the Swedish popular press considered here.30
As noted earlier, the Allies’ deployment of troops of colour on European soil heightened racial awareness and fears in the belligerent countries. In the Swedish popular press, meanwhile, the colonial troops were considered more a curiosity or an amusement than a racial threat. Several picture reports of these ‘picturesque troops’ were published, usually focusing on their exotic uniforms or weapons. The descriptions stick to well-established racist and colonial stereotypes. Indigenous Canadian soldiers are thus presented as ‘a couple of redskins’ with feathers in their hair, and Indian soldiers were captured riding camels.31 A half-naked, African soldier is labelled a ‘man-eater’ and a ‘nigger’ in a short notice about German accusations of him belonging to a cannibal tribe.32 Even if the magazine dismissed the cannibal story as propagandistic and possibly fake, at the same time it still fed on and entrenched widespread popular atrocity stories about the inhuman battlefield behaviour of colonial soldiers.33
The colonial soldiers were commonly referred to as ‘barbaric ‘, ‘primitive’, ‘savage’ and ‘wild’. The Indians are cruel and display a special ‘Asian savagery’, to quote Allers in 1915.34 They were also infantilized, as the magazines stated they do not really understand what they are fighting for. But in contrast to the Africans, the ‘higher-standing’ Indians were at the same time considered beautiful, brave, and excellent soldiers.35 Time and again, big losses on the colonial front were said to be expendable, since there was enough ‘human material’ in Africa and Asia anyway.36 This might be seen as a reflection of the common idea of the higher fertility of the coloured races and the subsequently declining white race. It also implies that colonial lives counted for less than European ones.
At other times, the trope of the noble savage is used, as in a review in Idun where the death of an African soldier serves to highlight the breakdown of the European order: ‘Of the sketches from the prisoner-of-war camp, easily the best is the dying Negro, whose helpless alienation and silent heroism the author captures in a couple of pages … You do not forget this sharp but completely unbiased picture of the supposed barbarian, with all his true inner culture, against the backdrop of the barbaric civilization of the rich, the bankruptcy of European humanity.’37 This perceived breakdown of Western civilization and the war’s blurring of lines between civilized and barbarian, European and non-European, was a general theme frequently elaborated on in the popular press.38 Fears of racial decline and a changing global balance in favour of the (Far) East were also found in the contemporary Swedish war discourse, as the rising power of Japan and ‘the new yellow peril’ gained attention.39 In 1918, Vecko-Journalen warned that the war had exposed the weakness of the West and enabled other races to ‘cut their teeth’.40 While the white man was about to exterminate himself, the yellow man lurked in the shadows, supplying him with weapons for his own extinction, Allers cautioned in 1916: ‘How the Jap must feel his heart swell with pride and secret joy as he watches his born rival play into his hands’.41 Once Europe was totally devastated by the war, the peoples of East Asia would take over their leading role.42 Like Füredi, I would say the war shattered European racial confidence and heightened the sense of a threat from without. In contrast to the Swedish press reports from the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, there were no positive images of the Japanese expansion to be found in the First World War material.43 The fear of an expanding Japan and the threat of the advancing ‘yellow race’ were also frequent themes in Danish war literature.44
The Teutons struggle for existence
Like the belligerent countries, the Swedish press represented the conflict as a clash of races and civilizations, a Social Darwinist struggle for existence of gigantic and sometimes apocalyptic magnitude. As Vecko-Journalen solemnly stated at the outbreak of war: ‘The first of August was to be the doomsday of Europe when … the Teutons’ struggle for existence began.’45 Another example, cited at the very beginning of this chapter, was when Hvar 8 dag discussed the mutual Scandinavian interest of neutrality in terms of a ‘Nordic’ racial community in ‘the great global struggle’.46 In an additional war column, the same magazine called the war a ‘release of tensions of historical dimensions’ between two incompatible opponents and hereditarily predestined adversaries, Russia and Germany.47
When constructing a Swedish identity in racial terms, the Swedes were firmly placed in the Germanic ‘family’. Metaphors of kin were frequent: the Germans were ‘our admirable kinsmen’, ‘noble kinsfolk’, or ‘this host of a million heroes … that … dams up the flood of real barbarians, who are eager to launch themselves on Europe and its culture … and thus secure for all us Teutons space to live in according to our innermost nature and essence’.48 In a short story entitled ‘A dream about the war’, Sweden (or rather, the gendered national symbol of Mother Svea) is figured as the pet of the Germanic family, the favourite daughter of the ancestress Germania ‘since she is the most fair-haired of them all’.49
This Germanic sense of race was elaborated upon in an essay by Carl Larsson i By, dated August 1914. The writer vividly describes his own experiences of ‘the call of the blood’ as an irrational passion, a commanding instinct that makes man forget his morale, his will and his independence:
I saw an endless row of fiery hosts pass by like dark shadows on a lemon-yellow sky. … And I was no longer myself; I was barely Swedish; I was a Teuton. It was the Teutons marching to the border. It was the blue-eyed, unconquerable Teutons I saw before me. Did they march to their last battle? … the war! I could feel my hands clenching and unclenching as if they were hungering for a weapon. The Teutons marching to war.’50
Deep down in his heart Larsson i By is bound by blood to the greater Germanic community and cause. This is his primordial identity, stronger and more genuine than the articulated, civilized Swedish one. And even if Larsson i By condemns both his own instinctive reactions and the war itself, the imagined connection between the ancient Teutons and contemporary Germany is made explicit. The same goes for the age-old bond between the Swedes and the German(ic)s, further stressed by the writer’s thoughts on his German friend in battle and his final benison on the two nations. Other contemporary articles underline in the same way that the Swedes and the Germans are united by race, by a common history, and, last but not least, by an ancient struggle for civilization and Kultur.51
In sum, Germany and the Germans are represented in terms of family and kin, as blood relations. In the construction of Swedish identity, they are the positive counterparts, the manly ideal. The Swedes and the Germans—‘us Teutons’—are bound by blood and destiny to a common cause. On the opposite, negative side of this identity construction we find the inherent Other: the Russians. The Russians are generally represented as different and inferior in relation to the Swedes and Germans, often in a racialized, evolutionary vocabulary. The Russian enemy embodies the barbaric, un-civilized, dirty and backward East.52
The call of the blood
As we have seen, racial and national belonging was associated with blood, genealogy, and biology, and imagined as natural and predetermined. In this section, I will further expand on this topic by discussing constructions of race in three short stories that were published in the magazine Hvar 8 dag in 1915. They all confirm yet somehow complicate the emphasis on blood as the basis for identity and sympathy. In ‘The heart and the blood’ the protagonist is a German soldier, Rogen. In the first scene he is left injured on the battlefield together with a young Frenchman. At first, they try to kill each other, since ‘even unto death national hatred is stronger than the pain’. But then Rogen is filled with a sudden compassion for his enemy, who soon dies in his arms. Just before dying with the name of his beloved Marianne on his lips, he gives Rogen a photograph and asks him to tell his fiancée. When later recovered, Rogen goes to the occupied French town where Marianne serves in a pub. To his surprise, he finds her laughing and flirting with the German soldiers. Once told of her fiancé’s fate, she just jeers and stamps on the photograph. When the agitated Rogen asks why, she says the answer lies ‘in the blood’. Marianne was born German, and the war has made her despise her former lover and everything French: ‘the blood—the blood is stronger than anything else. … the blood made me hate him.’ The moral of the story is that blood—race—is thicker than the water of romantic love. Marianne is thus described as a woman ‘who became unfaithful to her heart, but stayed true to her blood and put Germany above all’. In the final scene, Marianne stands proudly crying in the middle of the German crowd, singing Deutschland, Deutschland über alles. Her eyes are described as glowing with a fire that comes from the blood, not from the heart. Overwhelmed by Marianne’s deceit, the treachery of women in general, and the insignificance of romantic love compared to patriotism ‘now, at the time of the great reckoning’, Rogen faints. ‘No one paid heed to him, for the national anthem grew and grew—the blood sang and the heart remained silent’. In sum, the story holds racial belonging to be the strongest of all bonds, an ineluctable community of blood and birth. The passion for the nation runs much deeper than individual, romantic love. But race is also figured as something deeply irrational and perhaps even dangerous, on the verge of a mass hysteria, and consequently positioned as primarily belonging to the home front and the female sphere. For the fighting men, having shared a baptism of fire in battle, the racial differences are obviously not as crucial.53
The second case is ‘The Orchestra’, a short story about a family orchestra touring Europe in the summer of 1914. Here national belonging and identity are also racialized and described in biological terms. Race is imagined as something inescapable, irrational, passionate, and uncontrollable. The main character is a German woman. Interestingly, her name and appearance do not fit the Germanic stereotype: Juanita, star of the orchestra, is a blackhaired girl with heavy eyelids. Yet to her and her wandering, darkcomplexioned family, Germany is everything: ‘Oh, home, home? Yes, she longs for her own race, her own people, her own language.’ The news of the outbreak of war is described—‘Germany was at war. Have you ever received a telegram saying your father or mother was dying? Then you know how they felt.’—and the nation likened to a parent, a living organism. ‘The Orchestra’ also ends with the band playing a patriotic hymn (Die Wacht am Rhein), ‘the song from their own Volksgeist’, with Juanita weeping for her beloved nation. The sense of race is represented as something immortal yet primeval, a sort of ‘terrible and eternal power’ that reason and rationality cannot count for; an emotional chain that links the musicians to earlier generations of Germans in a community of kin outside time but firmly wedded to one territory.54
The final example, ‘Beyond good and evil’, is the story of a Swedish doctor volunteering in a German war hospital in occupied Belgium, who is caught in a moral dilemma when asked to report a suspected spy. The doctor cannot fully convince himself that the suspect should be considered a traitor and not a patriot. He is subsequently dismissed and sent home. Recalling a conversation with his superior at the hospital, a German professor, his moral doubts are considered neither ethical nor political, but due to a lack of racial instincts. The Swedish doctor is simply not German enough, despite a German mother and wife, many years spent in Germany, and his choice to volunteer and fight for Germany. In the words of the professor: ‘Yes, you see, there is a difference between us. I am certain you love Germany. … But the war takes us far, far beyond good and evil. And it is then the goats will be separated from the sheep, the friends of the nation from the children of the nation.’55 In wartime, pro patria is all that counts. To be a friend is not enough; you have to be ‘a child of the nation’, bound by blood. The half-blood doctor stands out as a particularly treacherous and dangerous figure, whose true loyalties are always disputable and divided. In a racist discourse, where national identity is absolute and exclusive, he is an anomaly. This is racial thinking in its most essentialist form.
Scandinavian supremacy – the purest race of all?
For numerous writers in the contemporaneous popular press, neutrality was a complicated issue, especially in relation to ideas of national virility and racial fitness. To many, the permanent peace after 1814 and Sweden’s decision to stay neutral in the First World War were signs of national degeneration and decay. In the contemporary European discourse, the Germanic race was represented as a warrior race, a particularly manly nation of conquerors. Here, the discursive intersection of race and gender became painfully clear. Fears were raised of Swedish emasculation on both the national and the individual level due to the lack of war experience.56 In Denmark, the loud and firm neutral stand of the internationally renowned writer Georg Brandes was feminized and ridiculed in cartoons picturing him as a terrified woman.57
But in other cases, the racial argument was used as a reason to stay out of war. As Helge Pedersen has shown in his study of the Norwegian anthropologist Jon Alfred Mjøen, the total war of 1914– 18 confirmed his pre-war theories on the anti-selective and racially damaging nature of modern, industrialized war.58 In a Swedish context, the shared experience of wartime neutrality also meant a reorientation towards things Scandinavian and a Scandinavian (racial) identity. In the popular press, ‘Swedish’, ‘Scandinavian’, and ‘Nordic’ were often used interchangeably. To the Swedish author K. G. Ossiannilsson writing in Vecko-Journalen, the Swedes were bound by blood to both belligerent parties, although the German blood was definitely the thicker; yet the racially mixed German nation, with its influx of Slavic and Jewish blood, was no longer as pure as it once was: ‘we Scandinavians’ now represented the purest, most ‘unpolluted’ and ‘untainted’ Teutons, and therefore had the highest standing of all Germanic races. This was also a reason why Sweden should remain neutral and totally independent to best protect its unique racial purity and pursue its own ‘national destiny’.59 To avoid becoming but a province of ‘Greater Germania’, the Scandinavian nations should ‘secure ourselves with both military and cultural ramparts against any aggressor’.60 The same argument was put in one of Hvar 8 dag’s weekly war columns, denying that any bloodlines between the Swedes and the Russian emperors remain, but acknowledging that it was very hard to tell whether the Anglo-Saxon Germanic or the Teuton Germanic race was closest to the Scandinavian heart. While accusing the prime defenders of Western civilization, France and Great Britain, for their seemingly ‘unnatural’ alliance with ‘Eastern despotism’, the article is also critical of ‘the politics of iron and blood on the Spree’ that actually places Germany east of Europe, on the other side of the border, in ‘half-Asia’. Hence, ‘we Scandinavians’ did not wish to take sides in ‘the giant struggle’, but defended their independence and absolute right ‘to be true to us’, Hvar 8 dag goes on. Instead of the greater Germanic community, the smaller Scandinavian family with its unique ‘distinctive character’ is invoked, the kinship of the neutral ‘sibling kingdoms’ and ‘people of the cross-banners’, who as never before feel that they ultimately belong only to one another, and even ‘stand and fall’ together and are ‘doomed to live and die together’.61
As the war dragged on, the racial benefits of peace became even more prominent. In a series of articles in Vecko-Journalen of 1916, the war was said to have given the neutrals ‘a big step ahead’ in the global struggle for the survival of the fittest, and the already noble Swedish race could—in contrast to the belligerents—look forward to a prosperous future. That there was no race like the Swedish race was even considered ‘statistically verified’. To protect the future virility and purity of Swedish stock, the nation should stand firm in its splendid isolation.62 Such racial images of ‘the Nordic lead’ fitted into a broader contemporary media narrative of war and neutrality, in which Sweden, and to some extent Scandinavia, was constructed as a moral great power. Within this discourse the Scandinavians were figured as a chosen (spared) people with a common destiny; as superior, civilized, peaceful, and forward-looking, in stark contrast to the barbaric belligerents.63 Similar images and ideas of the culturally superior, progressive, and more ‘clear-sighted’ neutrals were also prevalent in wartime Denmark and Norway.64
At the twilight of the white race
The image of war as an evolutionary breakdown of biblical dimensions took on a new aspect at the end of the war. Neutral Scandinavia might have survived, but what about European civilization as a whole? In the face of total war and revolution, metaphors of ‘European suicide’ and ‘civil war’ became more widely used in Scandinavia to convey the war’s meaning.65 Danish intellectuals turned to these terms to bewail the fact that their ‘natural racial allies’ were meaninglessly fighting one another instead of the ‘racially alien’ and expansive Japan.66 And in Sweden at the beginning of 1919, the fervently pro-German Annie Åkerhielm expressed a deep sense of pessimism and disillusion regarding the survival of Western civilization. In Idun, under the headline ‘At dusk’, she paralleled the ruin of contemporary Europe to the fall of the Roman Empire. The situation was actually worse, she claimed, since there was no source of renewal, ‘no race, young and unspoilt as once the Germanic race’ to take the lead and build up a new civilization. This time, Europe, and with it civilized Man, was inevitably doomed. To Åkerhielm, the main threat came from barbaric, racially inferior Russia, with bolshevism as its latest incarnation: ‘We do not any longer … have to ask ourselves from whence the new barbarians will come. We see them take form right in front of us, the fusion of darkest Asia and darkest Europe, as real and evident as the Huns in their day, but advancing in far greater numbers.’67 Here, the external and internal racial threat merge into the Bolshevik—the modern Hun—an amalgamation of the worst of Asia and Europe.
In a response, the Finland-Swedish author and literary historian Henrik Hildén tried to prove Åkerhielm wrong. To him, the world war was not the end of Western civilization, but only the righteous fall of the Industrial Age and its inherent horrors. The revolting working classes were in fact only destroying themselves and their way of life. Once this inferior race was erased from history, the true heir to the ancient Germanic conquerors, the Farmer, would step forward. The Farmer had survived the war, and he would outlive the Bolshevist mob. Under his rule, Europe will be rebuilt and renewed as an agricultural, aristocratic civilization.68 The debate is a Swedish example of how the lower classes were seen through the prism of race, as argued by Malik and Pick. The use of colonial tropes such as an internal European (or Swedish) mission civilisatrice also testifies to the adaptable and inter-discursive application of the race concept. For Åkerhielm and Hildén, the barbarian hordes of Asia were inevitably connected to hoi polloi of the European homeland. This symbolic connection was also indicated in articles dealing with the Red violence of the Finnish Civil War of 1918 and the perceived Swedish civilizing mission in Finland.69
This sense of the decline of the white race was part of a more general post-war crisis of confidence about the future of the Western civilization, articulated in works such as Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. According to Füredi, the experience of the First World War resulted in a radical change in the dynamic between Western identity and racial thinking, from racial confidence to racial fear. The conflict was seen as a sign of Western weakness, white feebleness, and the demise of racial solidarity. It seriously undermined the presumed moral superiority and authority of the West. By now, the war was also frequently represented as a ‘civil war’ between white nations—a fratricidal war at the heart of European civilization.70
In the long run, the war was also a serious blow to the eugenics movement, and not least to the cherished idea of the Nordic ‘master race’.71 At the same time, it was not until after the war that these racial ideas were institutionalized and put into practice in Scandinavia. Sweden was a pioneer with the establishment of the world’s very first eugenic institute in 1922 and extensive sterilization laws and policies from the early 1930s onwards. Denmark and Norway followed suit. In the interwar years, huge anthropological censuses were undertaken of the Swedish and Norwegian populations as a whole, as well as particular groups such as conscripts and the indigenous Sámi minority. The results were published internationally, for example in The Racial Character of the Swedish people in 1927, and also spread and popularized nationwide through schools and a stream of educational lectures, pamphlets, films, and books.72 As Tommy Gustafsson has shown, state-sanctioned racism was mirrored in Swedish popular films of the 1920s, where constructions of white supremacy, black subordination, and the superior manly Germanic/Nordic race versus the infantile, feminine, Eastern/Southern species prevailed.73 In the 1930s, the concept of race became increasingly politicized with the spread of Nazi ideology.74
Blood and belonging in wartime
Notions of race were thus widespread in the war narratives of the Swedish popular press during the First World War. It was commonplace in neutral Sweden to imagine the war as a great war for civilization, fought between opposing races struggling for survival and supremacy. Concepts of blood, race, people, nation, civilization, evolution, and barbarity permeated the language of war in the intense ‘discursive battle’ that took place in non-belligerent Scandinavia as elsewhere. Race was considered a biological fact, and national belonging was comprehended in terms of blood and breeding, not of will or consent. But there was also a certain ambiguity about the concept: it was considered irrational and primordial, a potentially destructive passion. It was also evident how notions of the inferior, colonial, and ‘coloured’ Other were interwoven, interrelated to, perhaps inseparable from, ideas about a racial threat from within and below, and both undermining European civilization. The imagined racial borders of the mental map of Europe did not necessarily correspond to the geographical or political ones. Here Swedish war narratives were very much part of a wider, Western, colonial and racist discourse on civilization. Within the overarching European community, the Scandinavians were considered to belong to the German(ic) camp, as opposed to the Eastern Russians, who were constructed as racially different and distant. Although the self-positioning as ‘Germania’s favourite daughter’ or allusions to ‘we Teutons’ did not always reflect bellicosity—since ideas of racial superiority could also serve as a foundation for Scandinavian solidarity and isolationism—this ‘racial affinity’ should nevertheless be regarded an important strand in the cognitive web that made neutral Sweden ‘a cultural ally’ of Germany in the First World War.
It is not within the scope of this chapter to make a more systematic comparison between the Scandinavian countries. In the belligerents’ eyes they were often considered a single unit—as small neutral states on the European periphery with a long, common history and a large number of cultural and societal similarities. My findings show that at least from a Swedish point of view, Scandinavia was also considered a racial entity, a biological and cultural family of 11 million Nordic Teutons. Suffice to say, ideas of ‘white supremacy’ and a ‘Nordic master race’ went more or less unquestioned in Scandinavia. But given the countries’ different political positions during the First World War—for example, Norway’s alignment as ‘a neutral ally’ of Great Britain, or Denmark’s fears of being engulfed by the ‘German(ic) big brother’—it would also be interesting to trace if racial images, identities, and arguments differed from one Scandinavian nation to another, and how the preexisting concepts of blood and belonging were complicated and reformulated under the impact of this devastating war.
Notes
1 ‘Ledarne af Nordens utrikespolitik’, Hvar 8 dag (H8D), 1915/14, ‘Hvad betyder dock icke detta, att de 11 millionerna nordgermaner funnit hvarandra och beslutit bilda en grupp för sig i den stora världskampen mellan slaver, romaner, anglosaxgermaner och tyskgermaner?’ All translations from the Swedish are mine.
2 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau & Annette Becker, 14–18. Understanding the Great War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2003), 9, 92–171, 228, 236–7; see Daniel Pick, War Machine. The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 140–1, 148–51; Svante Nordin, Filosofernas krig. Den europeiska filosofin under första världskriget (Nora: Nya Doxa, 1998), 214–17, 227–40.
3 Pick 1993, 153.
4 Ibid. 141.
5 Frank Füredi, The Silent War. Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 60–2. See also Pick 1993, 153; Audoin-Rouzeau & Becker 2003,154; Ian Ousby, The Road to Verdun. France, Nationalism and the First World War (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 22–5; Jon Røyne Kyllingstad, Kortskaller og langskaller. Fysisk antropologi i Norge og striden om det nordiske herremensket (Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press/Spartacus Forlag, 2004), 25–6, 92–111.
6 Füredi 1998, 1, 64–6; Ousby 2002, 142–50; Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race. Race, History and Culture in Western Society (New York: NYUP, 1996), 1–2, 39; Barbara Caine & Glenda Sluga, Gendering European History 1780–1920 (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), 87–142.
7 See Caine & Sluga 2000; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995).
8 Nils-Olof Franzén, Undan stormen. I Sverige under första världskriget (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1986), 119–59; Ulf Zander, Fornstora dagar, moderna tider. Bruk av och debatter om svensk historia från sekelskifte till sekelskifte (diss.; Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2001), 137–44; Claes Ahlund, Underhållning och propaganda. Radschas (Iwan Aminoffs) romaner om första världskriget 1914–1915 (Skrifter utgivna av Avdelningen för litteratursociologi vid Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen i Uppsala, 61; Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2010), 44–53, 62, 81, 157–64.
9 Kyllingstad 2004, 10–11, 90–1; Helge Pedersen, ‘Gud har skapat svarta och vita mäniskor, djävulen derimot halfnegeren’. En komparativ analyse av Jon Alfred Mjöen og Herman Lundborgs rasehygieniske ideer i Norge og Sverige ca 1900–1935 (diss., Oslo University, 2003), 2, 41–2, 69–75 (available at <http://www3.hf.uio.no/1905/publikasjon18.php>, accessed 28 May 2012); Håkan Blomqvist, Nation, ras och civilisation i svensk arbetarrörelse före nazismen (diss.; Stockholm: Carlssons förlag, 2006), 326–7; Gunnar Broberg & Nils Roll-Hansen (eds.), Eugenics and the Welfare State. Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan University Press, 1996); Lene Koch, Racehygiejne i Danmark 1920–56 (Copenhagen: Informations Forlag, 2010); Maja Hagerman, Det rena landet. Om konsten att uppfinna sina förfäder (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2011).
10 Blomqvist 2006; Patrik Hall, Den svenskaste historien. Nationalism i Sverige under sex sekler (Stockholm: Carlssons förlag, 2000); Sofi Qvarnström, Motståndets berättelser. Elin Wägner, Anna Lenah Elgström, Marika Stiernstedt och första världskriget (diss.; Hedemora: Gidlunds förlag, 2009), 313–5, 327–30; Kyllingstad 2004, 11; Pedersen 2003, 2.
11 Malik 1996, 39, 71, 265; see Mark Mazower, Dark Continent. Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 102.
12 See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage Books, 1994).
13 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration. A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), 39. See Malik 1996, 8, 70, 81, 91, 99, 115–19, 225; Pick 1989, 20–1, 37–42; Ousby 2002, 136–93; Mazower 1998, 77–105; George M. Fredrickson, Racism. A Short History (Princeton: PUP, 2002); Ivan Hannaford, Race. The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996); Imanuel Geiss, Geschichte des Rassismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988).
14 Malik 1996, 91, 115–19.
15 Mazower 1998, 161–84.
16 Fredrickson 2002, 105–106, 114–20, 158–65; Ousby 2002, 136–93.
17 Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity and the German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: CUP, 2000); Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East. 1800 to the Present (Oxford: OUP, 2009), 130–70.
18 Audoin-Rouzeau & Becker 2003, 48–49, 68, 103–104, 154; see also Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: OUP, 1975), 77–8.
19 Audoin-Rouzeau & Becker 2003, 108, 154–5.
20 Pick 1993,146–8, 153–7. See Ousby 2002, 156–9, 181–2.
21 Audoin-Rouzeau & Becker 2003, 88–9, 148–58, 131; Christian Koller, ‘Feindbilder, Rassen- und Geschlechterstereotype in der Kolonialtruppendiskussion Deutschlands und Frankreaich, 1914–1923’, in Karin Hagemann & Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds.), Heimat–Front. Militär und Geschlechterverhältnisse im Zeitalder der Weltkriege (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002); see Ahlund 2010, 57, 72, 180–1.
22 Pick 1993, 152, 157; Audoin-Rouzeau & Becker 2003, 258; Kyllingstad 2004; Bjarne S. Bendtsen, ‘Colour-blind or Clear-Sighted Neutrality? Georg Brandes and the First World War’, in Johan den Hertog & Samuël Kruizinga (eds.), Caught in the Middle. Neutrals, Neutrality and the First World War (Amsterdam: Aksant/AUP, 2011), 26.
23 See Lina Sturfelt, ‘From Parasite to Angel. Narratives of Neutrality in the Swedish Popular Press during the First World War’, in den Hertog & Kruizinga 2011, 105–20.
24 Pick 1993, 2–3, 30, 203–204; Mazower 1998, 92–3; Sturfelt 2011; Bendtsen 2011, 130; Ainur Elmgren, Den allrakäraste fienden. Svenska stereotyper i finländsk press 1918–1939 (diss.; Lund: Sekel bokförlag, 2008), 201–216.
25 See Björn Furuhagen, Den svenska rasbiologins idéhistoriska rötter, en inventering av forskningen (Forum för Levande Historia, 2007), 40–1, available at <http://www.levandehistoria.se/files/rasbiologi_inventering.pdf>, accessed 22 December 2011; regarding Swedish popular anti-Semitism during this period, see Lars M Andersson, En jude är en jude är en jude… Representationer av ‘juden’ i svensk skämtpress omkring 1900–1930 (diss.; Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2000).
26 Ahlund 2010, 68–95, 156–7, 161–2, 164, 180–1.
27 Qvarnström 2009, 313–15, 327–30.
28 I have examined the general war narratives of these magazines more thoroughly in Lina Sturfelt, Eldens återsken. Första världskriget i svensk föreställningsvärld (diss.; Lund: Sekel, 2008).
29 As already seen, racial solidarity was used as a propaganda tool. It is worth noting that the German influence on the Swedish press was quite extensive, especially in the early war years (see Ahlund 2010, 44–53).
30 The term ‘Aryan’ is also largely absent, in contrast to ‘Germanic’, ‘Teuton’ and ‘Nordic’ (see Andersson 2000).
31 ‘Frankrikes svarta armé’, H8D 1914/48; ‘Englands måleriska trupper’, H8D 1914/8, ‘ett antal rödskinn’; ‘måleriska trupper’; ‘Fred, hurra!’, Vecko-Journalen (VJ), 1918/48.
32 ‘En människoätare på “ärans fält”’, VJ 1915/7, ‘människoätare’, ‘nigger’.
33 Variations on such stories figured in Swedish popular literature; see Ahlund 2010, 57, 72, 180–1.
34 ‘Asiens folk på Europas slagfält’, Allers Familj-Journal (Allers), 1915/40, ‘barbarisk’, ‘primitiv’, ‘vilda’, ‘asiatisk vildhet’; see ‘Frankrikes svarta armé’, H8D 1914/48; see Ahlund 2010, 52, 57, 180–1.
35 ‘Himalajas folk på Europas slagfält’, Allers 1914/44; ‘Asiens folk på Europas slagfält’, Allers 1915/40.
36 ‘Asiens folk på Europas slagfält’, Allers 1915/40, ‘människomaterial’; ‘De svarta soldaternas fana’, Allers 1919/28.
37 E. Norling, ‘En läsvärd krigsbok’, Idun, 1918/29, ‘Bland skisserna från fånglägren tas utan tvifvel priset af den döende negern, hvars hjälplösa främlingskap och stumma heroism författaren fått fram på ett par tre sidor … Man glömmer icke denna skarpa men alldeles tendenslöst hållna bild af den förmente barbaren med all sin äkta inre kultur mot bakgrunden af de rikas barbariska civilisation, den europeiska humanitetens bankrutt.’ See ‘Den sårade negern’, VJ 1915/7; see Qvarnström 2009, 75.
38 Sturfelt 2008, 176–7.
39 See Torsten Burgman, Svensk opinion och diplomati under rysk-japanska kriget 1904–1905 (diss.; Stockholm: Norstedts, 1965), 43–54; Malik 1996, 118–19, 123.
40 ‘Vad väntar ni av 1918?’, VJ praktupplagan 1918/2, ‘blodad tand’.
41 ‘Då mikadon blef krönt’, Allers 1916/5, ‘Hvad japanen måtte känna sitt hjärta svälla af stolthet och hemlig glädje öfver att se sina födda motståndare arbeta honom i händerna’.
42 ‘Den nya gula faran’, Allers 1916/1.
43 See Burgman 1965. Even if this difference might partly be explained by the fact that Japan in 1905 defeated the Swedish ‘arch-enemy’, the change is still notable.
44 Bendtsen 2011, 130, 133.
45 ‘Lördagen den 1 augusti blev Europas ödesdag’, VJ 1914/32, ‘Lördagen den 1 augusti blev Europas ödesdag då … germanernas livskamp började.’
46 ‘Ledarne af Nordens utrikespolitik’, H8D 1915/14, ‘den stora världskampen’; see Mathilde Serao, ‘Civiliserade och barbarer’, Idun, 1919/18.
47 ‘Världskriget’, H8D 1914/45, ‘en utlösning af spänningar mellan världshistoriska tendenser’.
48 Annie Åkerhielm, ‘Krigssommar’, Idun 1915/23, ‘beundransvärda stamfränder’; E. Norling, ‘Svensk lifsglädje’, Idun, 1915/14, ‘det ädla frändefolket’; Annie Åkerhielm, ‘Soldater bakom fronten’, Idun, 1916/38, ‘hela denna här af miljoner hjältar … som … dämma tillbaka den flodvåg af verkliga barbarer, som vill störta sig in öfver Europa och dess kultur … de skaffa oss alla germaner rum att lefva i världen efter vårt innersta väsen och egenart.’
49 Hilding Barkman, ‘En dröm om kriget’, Idun 1914/34, ‘ty hon är ju den mest ljuslockiga’.
50 Carl Larsson i By, ‘Ut i kriget’, Idun 1914/34, ‘Jag såg en ändlös rad af lågande härar draga förbi som svarta skuggor mot en citrongul himmel. … Och jag var inte längre mig själf, jag var knappt längre svensk, jag var german. Det var germanerna, som tågade mot gränsen. Det var de blåögda, okufliga germanerna, som jag såg i synen. Tågade de mot sin sista strid? … kriget! Jag kände mina händer öppnas och knytas som om de hungrat efter ett vapen. Germanerna tåga till strid.’ See K. G. Ossiannilsson, ‘Mitt läger i kostallet och en sömnlös natts fantasier’, VJ 1914/39, where the author feels his ‘Germanic blood speak’ (‘Å andra sidan talar det germanska blodet’).
51 ‘På Gustaf Adolfs-dagen 1914’, Idun, 1914/45. See Sebart, ‘Hjälteminnets makt’, Idun, 1914/45; ‘Lützen den 6 november’, Idun, 1914/48; ‘Lützen den 6 november’, H8D 1914/8; cf. Zander 2001, 142.
52 Sturfelt 2008, 55–156, 209–18. See Ahlund 2010, 81–6; Blomqvist 2006, 308–30; Liulevicius 2009, 137.
53 John Hellman, ‘Hjärtat och blodet’, H8D 1915/25, ‘in i döden kände nationalhatet starkare än smärtan’, ‘blodet – blodet är starkare än allt annat … Då gjorde blodet att jag hatade honom’, ‘som blef otrogen mot sitt hjärta, men förblef trogen mot sitt blod och satte Tyskland öfver allting’, ‘nu i den stora uppgörelsens tid’, ‘Ingen brydde sig om honom, ty nationalhymnen växte och växte – blodet sjöng och hjärtat teg.’ Another example with a similar metaphor and message is Ulla Linder, ‘Monsieur Pellegrins mörkrum’, H8D 1916/14.
54 Signe Lagerlöw, ‘Musikkapellet’, H8D 1915/49, ‘O hemlandet, hemlandet? Ja, dit längtar hon, till sin egen ras, sitt eget folk, sitt eget språk’, ‘Tyskland stod i krig. Har du fått ett telegram någon gång, hvari stått att far eller mor varit döende? Då förstår du hvad de kände’, ‘sången ur deras egen folksjäl’, ‘det aldrig utreddas fruktansvärda och evinnerliga makt’.
55 Hjalmar Bergman, ‘Bortom godt och ondt’, H8D 1915/13, ‘Ja, ser du, det finns en skillnad oss emellan. Jag är säker om, att du älskar Tyskland … Men kriget för oss långt, betydligt långt bortom godt och ondt. Och det är där getterna skola skiljas från fåren, landets vänner från landets egna barn.’
56 Sturfelt 2011; Sturfelt 2008, 185–248; Caine & Sluga 2000, 121–2, 143–59; Pick 1993, 204; Audoin-Rouzeau & Becker 2003, 120–1, 139; Ousby 2002, 67, 189–93; Louis Clerc, ‘The Hottest Places in Hell? Finnish and Nordic Neutrality from the Perspective of French Foreign Policy, 1900–1940’, in den Hertog & Kruizinga 2011, 139–153 (above, n. 22).
57 Bendsten 2011, 130.
58 Pedersen 2003, 44–5.
59 K. G. Ossiannilsson, ‘Söner av ett folk som blött…’, VJ 1914/40, ‘vi skandinaver’; for Ossiannilsson and the war, see Claes Ahlund, Diktare i krig. K. G. Ossiannilsson, Bertil Malmberg och Ture Nerman från debuten till 1920 (Hedemora: Gidlunds förlag, 2007).
60 K. G. Ossiannilsson, ‘Mitt läger i kostallet och en sömnlös natts fantasier’, VJ 1914/39, ‘befästa oss med både militära och kulturella vallar mot varje angripare’.
61 ‘Världskriget’, H8D 1914/45, ‘onaturligt’, ‘österländsk despotism’, ‘järn- och blodspolitiken vid Spree’, ‘half-Asien’, ‘jättarnes kamp’, ‘vi skandinaver’, ‘att få vara och förblifva oss själfva i vår svenska, danska och norska egenart’, ‘syskonrikena’, ‘korsfanornas folk’, ‘står och faller’, ‘dömda att lefva och dö med hvarandra’. See K. G. Ossiannilsson, ‘Klockorna kalla’, VJ 1914/35; see Sturfelt 2008, 203–205.
62 Gunnar Frostell, ‘Svenska folkstammens kraft’, VJ praktupplagan 1916/45, ‘ett verkligt försteg’; Gunnar Frostell, ‘Svensken söker sin like’ VJ praktupplagan 1916/47, ‘statistiskt säkerställt’.
63 Sturfelt 2011.
64 Monika Janfelt, Stormakter i människokärlek. Svensk och dansk krigsbarnshjälp 1917–1924 (Åbo: Åbo Akademis Förlag, 1998); Monika Janfelt, Att leva i den bästa av världar. Föreningarna Nordens syn på Norden 1919–1933 (Stockholm: Carlssons, 2003); Bendtsen 2011; Clerc 2011, 139–53.
65 Jane Gernandt-Claine, ‘Amerikanska Röda Korset’, Idun 1918/52, ‘europeiskt själfmord’, ‘inbördeskrig’; see Ahlund 2010, 57, 72; Bendtsen 2011, 126,130, 133.
66 Bendtsen 2011, 130, 133.
67 Annie Åkerhielm, ‘Det skymmer’, Idun, 1919/4, ‘inte någon ras som, ung och ofördärvad som den germanska rasen då’, ‘Vi behöva icke längre … fråga oss varifrån de nya barbarerna skola komma. Vi se dem livslevande inför oss, sammansmältningen av det mörkaste Asien och det mörkaste Europa, reella och påtagliga som hunnerna på sin tid, stadda i ett anryckande som hotar att bli vida mer omfattande än dessas.’ For Åkerhielm and the war, see Sif Bokholm, I otakt med tiden. Om rösträttsmotstånd, antipacifism och nazism bland svenska kvinnor (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2008); Claes Ahlund, ‘Krig och kultur i konservativ belysning. Annie Åkerhielm och Frida Stéenhoff från sekelskiftet till första världskriget’, Samlaren (2005), 97–150.
68 Henrik Hildén, ‘Det skymmer—skymmer det?’, Idun, 1919/11.
69 ‘Nyaste bilder från Finland’, VJ 1918/9; Ruth Hellström, ‘Var det människor?’, Idun, 1919/2; John Landqvist, ‘Det fria Finland’, Idun, 1918/3; ‘Fänrik Ståls land’, Allers 1918/12. See Elmgren 2008, 209–210.
70 Füredi 1998, 2, 17, 31–55. See Pick 1989, 230–4; Pick 1993, 155–6; Malik 1996, 123, 147; Mazower 1998, 77–105.
71 Kyllingstad 2004, 150–3, 178–85; Pedersen 2003, 83–5.
72 Gunnar Broberg, Statlig rasforskning. En historik över rasbiologiska institutet (Lund: Avdelningen för idé- och lärdomshistoria, Lunds universitet, 1995); Broberg & Roll-Hansen 1996; Kyllingstad 2004, 108–110, 130–58; Koch 2010.
73 Tommy Gustafsson, En fiende till civilisationen. Manlighet, genusrelationer, sexualitet och rasstereotyper i svensk filmkultur under 1920-talet (diss.; Lund: Sekel bokförlag, 2007), 210, 273, 293–6.
74 Kyllingstad 2004; Broberg 1995; Fredrickson 2002; Malik 1996.