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Editorial for Vol. 32/1 of Nordisk judaistik / Scandinavian Jewish Studies. Editorial for Vol. 32/1

Titele in WoS: The metropolises of the Middle East

Swedish Jews’ supposed inactivity over Europe’s persecuted Jews during the Holocaust has been a prevalent discourse during the post-war period. This article ponders the origins of that discourse and how it affects how and what Swedish Jews narrate about aid and relief work, and Jewish refugees and survivors, when recounting their memories from the 1930s and 1940s. This investigation also examines how previous research has addressed and represented the aid efforts of the Jewish minority in Sweden and discusses what new empirical knowledge about Swedish Jewish aid and relief work during the Holocaust we can ascertain by using oral history. Hence, it is also a contribution to the ongoing debate in the research field of ‘refugee studies’, initiated by the historians Philip Marfleet and Peter Gatrell, who emphasise both the importance of working with historical perspectives and asking questions about the sources at the disposal of historians and what sources they choose to work with when writing about aid, relief work and refugees. Judisk och Kvinna. Intersektionella och historiska perspektiv på judiska kvinnors liv i Sverige under 1900- och 2000-talen”. Dnr. 2016–03983.

The Norden Associations (föreningarna Norden) were established in 1919 with the intention of promoting understanding and cooperation between the Nordic countries. The definition of “Norden” was negotiated from the very beginning, and Icelandic and Finnish associations were not established until the 1920s. Promoting understanding and cooperation was very much considered an educational effort, and Norden was imagined within educational efforts sponsored by the associations. In this regard, the associations had predecessors in the Nordic schoolteacher meetings that dated back to the age of Scandinavism in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Norden Associations created special school boards in the 1920s in order to both promote a more Nordic approach in some subjects—mainly language, geography, and history—and to promote cooperation between the countries, with the youth as the catalyst for a more Nordistic future. This article looks into how the Norden Associations imagined a Nordic school, in which a Nordic sentiment was established, and how this imagination related to the reality of the nationalistic school and to ideas of broader international cooperation, between which the “Nordic idea” has always been sandwiched. The article shows how the methods used effectively hindered the imagination of Norden and the “Nordic idea” beyond the scope of cooperation between nations.

How can the Danish lawn be read and interpreted through the last century? The cases vary a lot, therefore the cases reach out towards a general discussion.The investigation aims at exploring the Danish lawn in an international perspective, and lawns in landscape architecture or lawns as symbols signify critical points of view to societal matters.The present contribution explores the lawn as a central component in selected cases from 1915 till today. The modern breakthrough in the 1920s in Danish landscape architecture revitalized the lawn. Further artistic contributions in the 1950s launched the lawn in a delicate poetic edition. Only a few years later in the 1960s, the lawn signified the inhuman, industrialized suburb. The color TV in the 1980s made the lawn synonymous with commercial football and technology. In 2019, the lawn is an everyday thing, and parallelly it exists as the antonym to the ecological flower meadow – the “true” urban nature.

Coloniser or Tourist?: Questions and Exercises in Swedish History Textbooks, 1927–2015. The history of History as a Swedish school subject has usually been based on two sources: curriculum plans and textbook narratives. Drawing upon more than 900 exercises that occur in 72 history textbooks published 1927–2015, this article primarily examines which different approaches to history that have been prearranged to the pupils during the second half of the last century. It is shown that a great majority of the exercises, throughout the whole period of time, prescribes a simple reproduction of unchallenged truths. It is also argued that both disciplinarian assignments and aesthetic tasks, seem to appear at least as often before, as after, the 1970s. Subsequently, especially in the 1990s, the exercises occasionally ask for the individual student’s own opinions - without demanding them to consider any historical circumstances. Accordingly it is argued that while the former category of exercises most often enjoin the distanced view of the uninvolved tourist, the latter rather instructs the pupil to embrace the coloniser’s self-centred perspective of the past.

In September 1704 a man named Sæmundur Þórarinsson was murdered by the river Elliðaá (fig. 1). Steinunn Guðmundsdóttir, his 43-year old wife, and Sigur­ður Arason, a 26-year-old man who lived with his mother, had had an affair and when Sæmundur was found dead in the river, rumours arose that he had been murdered. Sigurður was arrested for the murder. He first denied all allegations, but eventually he confessed and said that Steinunn had urged him to kill her hus­band. On November 14tth they were both sentenced to death at Kópavogur’s assembly and executed the following day. He was beheaded and his head put on a stake. She was drowned. Both were buried in unconsecrated ground on the opposite side of the road (fig. 2). In the spring of 1988, the archaeologists Guðmundur Ólafsson, Lise Gjedssø Bertelsen and Sigurður Bergsteinsson excavated their remains. The excavation uncovered a pair of barrows (fig. 3). A lot of small stones had been thrown on top of the original layer by passers-by, a custom which prevented revenance according to Icelandic folklore. Grave 1. Under the pile of stones, in a shallow grave, with no traces of a coffin, lay the skeleton of a woman (figs. 4–6). Her legs were crossed, and most of the bones from the toes were not found. The left arm was slanted down towards the stomach, the right arm inclined up towards the chest. The fists were clenched. The skull was in a strange distorted position. Two cervical vertebrae lay outside normal position, and the two front upper teeth were missing, but one was found in the grave behind the skull. She had been drowned with a sack covering her upper body. Although the missing toes and teeth raised the suspicion of torture, there is, no written evidence of torture in Kópavogur and by civil law, torture of the accused, but yet not convicted was banned and recent analysis showed no signs of torture. A confession given under torture could not be used as evidence in a lawsuit, however, when a person had been sentenced to death, he or she could be tortured, as an addition to the punishment in Denmark as well as in Iceland. Grave 2. On top of the second pile of stones a lower jaw of a man’s skull was found and some loose teeth, the grim remains of the skull that had been placed on a stake, and eventually fallen down (fig. 7). In a shallow grave under the stones lay the skeleton of the beheaded man (figs. 6 & 8), with the skull and the upper 2½ cervical vertebrae missing. The legs were crossed (figs. 6 & 8). By his feet was a 9 cm wide round hole for the stake, supported by several stones. The decapitated head had been placed at the top of the stake to intimidate passers-by on the road (figs. 6 & 8). There were no traces of a coffin. From literary sources we know that at least 12 death sentences were carried out at Kópavogur’s assembly. The last one was carried out in 1704 over Steinunn and Sigurður in accordance to Icelandic law. The Kópavogur gravesite is the only excavated execution site in Iceland, but comparable cases have been found in Denmark, such as one from 1822. Thomas Thoma­sen Bisp was executed in Vendsyssel for the murder of his wife Maren Just­datter. He had an affair with his maid Ane Margrethe Christensdatter and poisoned his wife. Thomas was sentenced to death by beheading and penalty on wheels and steep. Thomas’s body, including the head pierced by an iron nail, was soon removed and buried in a nearby hill, where it lay undisturbed for 78 years until road workers discovered it (fig. 9). Then the bones came at Vendsyssel Historical Museum. Ane Margrethe was sentenced to lifelong work detention in Viborg Prison, but after many years she was pardoned. https://doi.org/10.33063/diva-400603

This article examines the dominant discourses of behaviour and discipline in the debate on schooling and the conduct of school pupils in Swedish professional teacher journals between 1946 and 1962, the formative years of the Swedish comprehensive school. Drawing from the theoretical framework of discourse, governmentality and the fabrication of the subject developed by Michel Foucault, the fabrication and governing of the school pupil is highlighted and analysed. The findings of the study are related to historical research of the period as well as Foucauldian studies where a historical shift of perspectives on discipline and behaviour in the school have been proposed. The result is a detailed analysis of the fabrication and governing of the subject within the dominant discourses of behaviour and discipline during the period, as well as a critical nuancing of the idea of this historical shift.