The Peace of Stolbova 1617 – a seminar on the beginning of a peaceful co-existence
The 400th anniversary of the peace treaty between Sweden and Russia has for obvious reasons been in the shadow of […]
A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
26 articles tagged with sweden were found.
The 400th anniversary of the peace treaty between Sweden and Russia has for obvious reasons been in the shadow of […]
The Russian Byzantinist Sergei Averintsev writes in a critical article about laughter in Bakhtin’s interpretation of popular medieval culture that Bakhtin makes laughter too absolute and that he was wrong in maintaining that it has nothing to do with violence. I apply the reasoning of both authors on a historical phenomenon: the witch trials in Sweden, focusing on one precise geographical place. There seem to be many factors behind the witch trials, but their cultural manifestations demonstrate the qualities of reverse or carnival, culture although without having laughter as their main feature, and including violence as a main element.
Sweden’s indigenous people, the Sami, have struggled for years to get more attention. With little result. But now something is happening.
How the realist approach during the years around 1970 played out in the force field of society and the psyche, the collective realm and the individual, is exemplified by our two very different Swedish case studies. Svedberg’s political narratives compose montages in which fictional, metaphorical figures are inserted side by side with political leaders drawn from newspaper clips. Kåks’s allegory-like oil painting shows a stone worker working in the face of his imminent disappearance. They both reveal myths as opposed to historically manifested commodity relations.
Christer Lokind: DC-3:an. Kalla krigets hemlighet [The DC-3: the secret of the Cold War]. Stockholm: Medströms bokförlag, 2014.
The evolution of political contacts between exile activists in Sweden and the occupied homeland sheds light on the largely underresearched phenomenon of anticommunist cooperation between capitalist and communist societies and challenges the narrative of the impermeability of the “Iron Curtain” between the Soviet Union and the West.
During the war von Otter worked at the Swedish legation in Berlin. In 1942 he met an SS officer, Kurt Gerstein, who had witnessed killings by gas at the Bełżec extermination camp. Gerstein joined the SS to oppose the Nazi regime from within and he asked von Otter to report to his government on the atrocities. At that time the official policy in Sweden was to not anger Nazi Germany by publishing reports on war crimes. There is much obscurity about von Otter’s report.
+ Cecilia Notini Burch, A Cold War Pursuit: Soviet Refugees in Sweden, 1945–54. Stockholm: Santérus Academic Press Sweden, 2014. 359 pages.
Like many other modern states, both the Soviet Union, with its authoritian socialism, and Sweden, with its social democracy, strived to shape their citizens' lives for the better. Both states considered it their duty actively to plan, organize and control housing.
+ Beate Feldmann Eellend: Visionära planer och vardagliga praktiker: Postmilitära landskap i Östersjö-området (Visionary plans and everyday practices: post-military landscapes in the Baltic Sea region). Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Stockholm Studies in Ethnology 7, 2013. 157 pages, ill.