Preface

This book is about the impact of the First World War on the neutral Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. It offers a series of original analyses in a research field that is well established internationally, but seriously underdeveloped in Scandinavian historiography.

The introduction offers a systematic, comparative view of the history of the Scandinavian countries during the war, along with the general background for the more detailed case studies. The subsequent chapters represent a number of different approaches in history, media studies, and literary studies. Some of them explore how intellectuals tackled the issues raised by the war, or aspects of the military and economic consequences of the war, and a third group deal with the immediate war experience of Scandinavian nurses, seamen, and soldiers—volunteers in the Australian Imperial Force as well as Schleswig Danes mobilized in the German armed forces.

Scandinavia in the First World War is the first major result so far of the international and interdisciplinary ‘Network for the study of neutral Scandinavia in the First World War’, which I initiated in 2009 and have since then coordinated. Three network seminars have been arranged: in Uppsala in 2009, in Lund in 2010, and in Uppsala again in 2011, the results of which can be studied in the present volume. Financially, the network has benefited from the generous support of Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and a most welcome publication grant from Sven och Dagmar Saléns stiftelse.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Svante Nordin, Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Michael Jonas, and Louise Nilsson, all of whom are members of the network but for various reasons are not among the authors of this book, and who have formulated highly valuable ideas and suggestions in the discussions of the work in progress during the network seminars.

Claes Ahlund