The most European country in Europe

“Almost like the Baltic states, he sometimes thought. Sweden seemed to be surrounded by non-existent cultures.” Here is, he goes on to ponder, “the gateway to Europe, through which Swedish writers have ‘forced their way out’ in the past.” And when the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, twelve years later, travels through Sweden, he experiences the country as no less foreign than Per Olov Enquist experienced Germany, with the difference that Sweden is a completely positive surprise: “Here, no one seems to think of their own interests. No one calls for the base, egoistical interests that other societies are obsessed with.” Both writers sound as if they were talking about another planet.

Today, there are thousands of Swedes in Berlin. The city has become attractive in particular to young artists and intellectuals from all over Europe (and from the United States). They spend their wander-years in the capital of Germany, often in large apartments from the time around 1900, which they can rent for modest amounts. Probably they are mistaken when they think that they have really arrived in a metropolis – for Berlin, a city that is largely dependent on subsidies from the other federal states, is much too cheap to be a real metropolis. Berlin is a gigantic sanctuary for politicians, students, artists, journalists and pensioners, a city without industry and large-scale enterprises. But the Swedes, nonetheless, are present in Berlin, in another European country.

However, the feeling of distance that Per Olov Enquist or Hans Magnus Enzensberger experienced has given way to a normality which is hardly felt at all – a normality similar to that which must have existed in the years prior to the First World War, when it was common for intellectuals and artists to move all over Europe and when Berlin (in parallel with Paris) served as the capital for Scandinavian artists and intellectuals, from Georg Brandes to Edvard Munch and August Strindberg (even if the conditions were different then, since the German cultural space at that time extended over half the continent). To the question how much of Sweden is in Europe or how much of Europe is in Sweden, there are big and small answers.

The big answers might be about a common public space, about media watching and reacting to each other, about book markets where you read each other’s most important new books, about a common, semi-educated audience, about common interests or perhaps even about public discussions taking place across the borders. But the longer you think about these big issues, the more straightforward the answer becomes: there is a lot more of Sweden in Europe than there is of Europe in Sweden. Sweden is present in the European Union not only politically, nor only economically through its international firms, but also culturally – in literature as well as in music, in design and fashion, in ideals concerning social life and ecology. You don’t even have to pick on the Swedish crime novel and its neo-heathen sacrificial rites in order to have this presence confirmed.

There are dozens of photo books showing Swedish design and architecture on the German book market. Per Olov Enquist and Kerstin Ekman, Maria Sveland and Ninni Holmqvist are present in literary discussions as a matter of course, and when Volvo this summer passed into Chinese ownership, the sale occasioned a number of large newspaper articles about the society behind the cars. Seen in relation to the number of immigrants, Sweden is probably the most successful nation in the world today in the area of cultural exports. Especially among Germans, there is a romantic (and more or less unrequited) love for Sweden, which is then seen as a more successful version of their own country. Sweden’s cultural import, however, is more or less restricted to the Anglo-Saxon countries.

Or did anyone in Sweden hear about the writer Uwe Tellkamp, who two years ago published the great story about life in East Germany, a book that the critics not unjustly compared to the novels of Thomas Mann? Did anyone take notice of the total collapse of the public debate in Italy? Did anyone understand why Turkey needs a Muslim party in order to bring the country closer to Europe? Was anyone affected by the struggle of Polish intellectuals against the political mystification of the country’s history? To be sure, all of these events are present in the form of news, at least in the morning papers, but not as a subject for discussion concerning their causes or conditions. What was the relation, really, between the socialist regime in Germany and education? What precisely is a media society, and is Silvio Berlusconi’s dominant position in Italy not an indication of what many European societies will come to experience? How is the radical nationalism of the East European states related to their membership in the European Union (and to the nationalism of the old member states)?

Looking at the Swedish cultural debate from outside, you sometimes get the impression that it ignores such questions on purpose, in order not to encounter its own limitations and idiosyncrasies. Or why did the Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen receive the literary prize of the Nordic Council this year, for a book where the woman finds her way back to her Estonian native soil and then goes on, with the help of some forest mushrooms and intense contact with the earth, to defeat the man and the corruption of this modern world as a whole? Then you have the small answers, too.

Their significance must not be underestimated. After the end of the cold war Europe or, rather: the European Union has become an everyday experience surprisingly fast. This has happened all over the continent. The Union makes itself felt through the many projects that are partly funded by Europe, from Bulgarian bridges to avenue trees in Skåne in southern Sweden. Even if the bureaucracy in Brussels is scolded, one is pleased to make use of all of its practical (and sometimes also aesthetical) improvements. EU has established itself with everyone (though not in Sweden) through the common currency. The fact that nobody loves the euro (in the way that the Germans used to love their hard D-mark) is a sign that the new currency is still working. But above all, Europe has become a life form for surprisingly many people – a life form that has grown out of trade, traffic, tourism and, not least, through cultural exchange. It is a life form that is driven by the many people who want to take advantage of the new freedom, by migrating officials and mobile construction workers, by tourists, students and nomads of all kinds.

The new Europe is perhaps not seen so often on the cultural pages, but rather on highways and in restaurants. It manifests itself in Romanian beggars as well as in young Swedish engineers spending their trainee year in Paris, Munich or Zagreb. And when the fields in Småland one year carry blue blossoms (because of the flax), only to be covered by maize the next year, this is also Europe. Sometimes there is also a European audience, on the football stadiums, at song contests, but also at the opera houses. When the philosopher Jürgen Habermas tried to define the European community, in a newspaper article in 2003, he invoked five motives: a far-reaching privatization of religion, a stronger confidence in the state than in the market, a “sensibility for the paradoxes of progress”, the trust in solidarity and a massive preoccupation with peace and coexistence.

One might have doubts about the last two motives. The alliance between France and Germany is certainly a political achievement of historical proportions. But there are too many examples that speak against the thesis, not least in Eastern Europe, not to mention the Balkans. Europe’s relative internal peace after the Second World War is probably an expression of a determinate historical situation of surprising duration, rather than of a deep and strong desire in the relation between all Europeans.

But still: the first three motives are undeniably characteristic of the societies in all European countries, even if considerably more so to the west than the east of the old lines of demarcation between the blocs – with the exception of former GDR. And if Jürgen Habermas’s criteria for a European identity were the only ones, Sweden would appear to be the most European nation of all. But at the same time, there seems to be a considerably more reserved attitude towards Europe in Sweden than in, say, the Netherlands or even Greece. To be sure, Sweden is a small country if you look at its population, and as in all small countries, it claims its distinctive character (whether it really exists or not) in an almost fanatical way (at present, half of Sweden seems to cheer on Silvio Berlusconi’s football club AC Milan, because it happens to have bought a Swedish forward).

But there are small countries on the continent as well, which nevertheless do not develop such a reserved attitude. If you look a little closer at the interest that Sweden takes in Europe, for example by following what is covered on the cultural pages of the newspapers, from Svenska Dagbladet to Ystads Allehanda, the foreign reader experiences something for which he was not prepared: the Swedish interest in Europe, nowadays, to a large extent seem to be a question of class. Life on the continent, or at least in its western part, from Germany over France to Italy, seems to be a topic that for the most part concerns only a small group of educated and rather wealthy Swedes.

And who could care about Estonia and Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary, the Czech Republic or Montenegro, when there are islands in Thailand that are made out to represent paradise on earth, with beautiful days on the beach at affordable prices? The new opportunities of tourism, above all in the form of cheap flights and a successful ghettoisation of vacationers, strengthen this development. It is usually said that Sweden broke its formerly intense contact with Germany after the Second World War, for only too obvious reasons, in order to turn instead to the Anglo-Saxon world. But why did the same destiny befall France, perhaps with a delay of a few years (Paris, of course, was the capital of modern art until the 60’s) – not to mention the Netherlands or Italy?

It is true that Sweden to a large extent had received intellectual imports from the German-speaking countries – from Protestant theology to Bauhaus, from social democracy to the roman tic cult of nature – but these traditions were felt to be genuinely Swedish already in the 30’s, and their origin does not seem to be of current interest. The question, therefore, is whether the turn from Germany to the United States in the 50’s really was so crucial. Such was the case, to be sure, for the group of educated and perhaps wealthy people, and the closer to theology you got, the closer the continent must have been. But outside of this group? Perhaps it is even the case that Fargo, the small town in North Dakota (as in the eponymous film by the Coen brothers), was always closer to Fittja than Florence, at least ever since the great Swedish emigration to North America during the 19th century.

And then there is Britain – the ideal class society of bourgeois upstarts where English, fortunately, is also spoken. This orientation is strengthened by the influence that the free churches, at least historically, have had on Swedish culture. For this spiritual working-class movement, an achievement of laymen outside of all institutions or tried and tested authorities, propagates not only genuine, authentic (and consciously anti-historical) forms of expression: it also attaches no real weight to life outside its own community.

The closeness to popular culture with all of its secular revivals, on the one hand, and the tendency to take hardly any notice of the others, on the other hand, does not signify a contradiction in this context, nor in the cultural debate. Neither does it appear to be a coincidence, therefore, that immigrants (or their children, like Aris Fioretos) have written some of the most poignant accounts of Swedish society from the last years. This goes not least for Maciej Zaremba’s stories (which in many ways form a counterpart to Colin Nutley’s Sweden – apparently, an Englishman was needed to illustrate the dream that many Swedes have of their own country). The orientation towards the Anglo-Saxon world and its pragmatic values is reflected at the universities.

If higher education in the humanities is associated with low status in Sweden, if there is hardly any historian or cultural scientist who is known outside of the country, if it has more and more usual in this area for the doctor’s degree to be the last step before retirement – then this is not only a deplorable state of the intellectual culture in Sweden. It also means that it becomes difficult and sometimes impossible to connect Swedish culture to its origin and context (it is next to impossible to discern intellectual developments if you are not able to consider them in the context of the history of ideas). This neglect includes the philologies of foreign languages, but also history, history of art, cultural science in a narrow sense (film, history of media) and, above all, history of science.

Cultural debate and education in the humanities are siblings. The one does not exist without the other, and if you want to have a European cultural debate in Sweden, you should envision as much in the form of institutions as in the form of ideas. In both respects, there is a lot to be done. For while Europe has reached far into Sweden, as concerns road building and standardized measures of power sockets, the intellectual return to Europe has hardly begun.