There were no "Bloodlands" (T. Snyder) in Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway and Denmark) in the 20th century, and the era was not an "Age of Extremes" (E. J. Hobsbawm). On the contrary: in the 19th century, Sweden and Denmark had lost all their wars and thus their great power status, and in 1905 Norway broke away from the dual monarchy with Sweden. After that, stable democracies and welfare states developed in the three countries, which were regarded as role models worldwide, real people's movement democracies, which were predominantly led by minority governments. In Germany, dichotomies were negotiated for a long time: Community vs. society, people vs. politics, culture vs. industrialisation - and National Socialism was rooted in such irreconcilable front positions. In Scandinavia, opposites were always to be reconciled, such as that between tradition and modernity. Small farmhouse museums were set up in villages right next to substations. The former served to reassure people of their ideals, the latter to promote material progress; identity building not in opposition to industrial modernity, but to make people fit for modernity. Perhaps this is why a groundbreaking agreement on the development of the modern welfare state was concluded in Copenhagen on the same 30 January 1933 on which the National Socialists "seized" power?

Since the 19th century, Scandinavian societies have developed into democratic communities from the bottom up, through involvement in grass roots movements, folk high schools and educational circles, through taste education, the training of healthy, athletic bodies and lifestyles, rational household management, a focus on child rearing, but also through the control and "normalisation" of people and the cool, purposeful exclusion of "asocials" or the "mentally handicapped" through eugenic laws and (forced) sterilisation. The repressive policies towards Sami or Greenlanders also served to homogenise white majority societies. This is not simply the unpleasant "flip side" of the coin or merely the "dark side" of history, but is a constitutive part of the development of the Scandinavian democratic welfare states. Collectivism and individualism, social democracy and neoliberalism, inclusion and exclusion have entered into a peculiar and to this day formative mixture in the "heroic" (H. D. Kittsteiner) or "ambivalent" (Z. Bauman) "high modernity" (U. Herbert). This tension is explored in the Danish series "Borgen - Gefährliche Seilschaften" (DK 2010-2013, 2022), among others.

I will use paradigmatic events, cultural practices, buildings, works of art, films/series, key literary and journalistic texts, political decisions, etc. to illustrate what makes Scandinavia so special. How were athletic bodies supposed to strengthen the nation? How did milk propaganda work? What role did tourism play in internal nation building? How was the rationalisation of washing up supposed to stabilise families, increase birth rates and thus strengthen the nation? How were people supposed to educate themselves to become modern people through the appropriation of tasteful, simple, inexpensive and durable design? How do these societies constantly scrutinise themselves with the help of enquiries in order to optimise themselves - even their own power apparatus? How were (and are) the permanent dynamics of modern societies dealt with in parallel in the visual arts, films, literature and, in particular, the crime novels popular in Germany? And what about dissent and eccentrics, and the famous "Jantelov" ("Thou shalt think thyself nothing better")? How did societies deal with criticism, how broad or narrow was the concept of (political) "violence"? What concept of freedom do we find in Scandinavia; what is the relationship between conservatism, liberalism and social democracy, tradition and avant-garde? The book is intended to fulfil (critical) reader expectations, while at the same time breaking stereotypes and fanning out the ambivalence of these cultures.

Preliminary work:

• Etzemüller, Thomas: Total, but not totalitarian: the Swedish "Volksgemeinschaft", in: Bajohr, Frank/Wildt, Michael (eds.): Volksgemeinschaft. New research on the society of National Socialism, Frankfurt/ Main 2009, pp. 41-59
  
• The Romanticism of Rationality. Alva & Gunnar Myrdal - Social Engineering in Sweden, Bielefeld 2010 (English 2014 and 2016)
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: Search movements: Sweden's path to "ambivalent modernity", in: Lehnert, Detlev (ed.): Gemeinschaftsdenken in Europa. The social concept "Volksheim" in comparison 1900-1938, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 2013, pp. 149-169
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: Nationalism, Democracy and Exclusion in the Swedish Welfare State of the 20th Century, in: Jansen, Christian/Zepp, Marianne (eds.): Kann es demokratischen Nationalismus geben? On the connection between nationalism, belonging and equality in Europe from 1789 to the present day, Darmstadt 2021, pp. 243-275
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: Unparalleled state failure. The Assassination of Olof Palme, in: Sabrow, Martin (ed.): Assassination and Society, op. cit. (Leipzig) 2023, pp. 163-182
  
• "Heroic modernity". Ambivalence of an epoch, Bielefeld 2025