The History of Sweden exhibition at the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm is enormous. Not in terms of size, it is only 600 square metres, but in terms of ambition. The content is Sweden’s history over the past 1,000 years.
The exhibition is the third leg of a collaboration between the museum, television group TV4 and publisher Nrstedts. Together, these organisations, with the input of many academics and specialists, have created a “new” history of Sweden comprising a 15-hour television series, a set of eight books and the exhibition.
To appreciate what is so new about this approach you have to understand the notion of “medelsvensson”, a euphemism for the “average Swede” (Svensson being one of the most common Swedish surnames).
Medelsvensson’s identity is based on the tenet that Swedes are basically homogenous and aspire to normality. ome characteristics of this are a romantic relationship to the countryside, manifested by long summer months spent living in small red-roofed houses by a lake or on an island. There is also a commitment to fairness, pragmatism and the unspoken sense of being a favoured nation.
Medelsvensson’s history is that of great ages; the Vikings, the Lutheran reformation and the French court in the 18th century (which saw the beginning of the reign of the current Swedish royal family, the Bernadottes).
Foreigners were people who brought things to Sweden, such as canals, technology, sugar and labour, but these never changed the heart of Swedish identity.
Imagine then the impact of a 360-degree turn. Sweden is being presented as a nation of migrants with diverse histories and previously unexplored and occasionally murky pasts. Iconic emblems are disappearing – the Viking’s horns are off the helmet.
The idea was the brainchild of film-maker Christian Arnet, who was inspired by Simon Schama’s television series, A History of Britain, and the popular history boom in the UK.
He says: “I wanted to show that history is about cause and effect and that ordinary people are a crucial part of the process missing from the history that I was taught at school.”
Arnet believes that a whole generation of Swedes have been denied an awareness of their history and that the level of knowledge about their past is desperately low. He is out to win hearts and minds.
“I grew up with traditional ways of teaching Swedish history that deliberately avoided controversy and didn’t explore contexts,” he says, “and if you don’t know history, it is easy to condemn.”
Some condemnation has already appeared. Part of this is levelled at Dick Harrison, professor of history at Lund University. He has acquired a high profile as a co-presenter of the TV show, as a contributor to the book series and as author of the main text panels in the exhibition.
“Swedishness is a new phenomenon and a construct,” he says. “The 17th century, regarded as Sweden’s ‘age of greatness’, was in fact partly due to a constant stream of German, Baltic and Scottish entrepreneurs and workers.
“The 18th century was basically a French import that came and stayed. All of this is well-documented, but has not been shown in this way before.”
Such views have prompted nationalist groups to label him a traitor, describing his approach as “nation dissolving historiography”.
Criticism has also come from some Sami groups who feel that they are not being properly portrayed as the indigenous people of the North, something that would give them rights to the land, language and culture that they have spent many decades fighting for.
Underpinning this new approach to history is a commitment to tell the histories of groups that have previously been hidden. Lena Hejll is the curator at the Museum of National Antiquities and project manager of the exhibition.
She says they focused on contested histories, such as gay history, migration and nationalism. “We wanted to raise these. It was not possible to go deeply into them in such a small space, but we are showing the way the museum wants to go. The exhibition is a platform.”
The main threads are easy to find. A central one is women’s history, something that curators and public alike are passionate about.
“History books are 80 to 90 per cent about men, but in the TV series we wanted to show a 50/50 balance, something that is reflected in recent scholarship,” says Harrison.
This is applied in the exhibition too. The effect is mixed. There is new information often presented in imaginative ways, such as the recording of every ruler of Sweden plus spouse (some of whom were previously unknown), and some interesting quotes from prominent women such as the 17th-century Queen Christina, who reflected that “there are men who are as much women as their mothers, and women who are as much men as their fathers, for the soul has no gender”.
At other times it feels a bit forced, such as in the selection of key figures associated with the founding of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Six people are featured, five of them men, including the obvious big hitters Anders Celsius and Carl Linnaeus.
The only woman is called Eva de la Gardie, the first elected female member who, according to the text, is remembered for inventing a method of making schnapps with potatoes instead of cereals – something that doesn’t feel as important as measuring temperature or classification systems. The text continues with the observation that this new method led to an all-time record of drunkenness.
Inevitably some histories remain missing. Disabled people are not really present, and the design of the show is not particularly accessible. The lack of depth means that the treatment of subjects is sometimes superficial.
Hejll says they wanted to present visitors with an introduction as a “smorgasbord to whet the appetite for more. We have lifted up stories of groups that have been missing from the official histories of the past to inspire curiosity.”
One of the most surprising parts of the exhibition is the gallery dealing with the 20th century. As the curators have got closer to living memory, identification and selection of themes has inevitably become more difficult and contentious.
Sweden’s neutrality in the second world war has been a central debating point of recent times, but in the exhibition the war is reduced to one small text panel entitled “We Were Spared”. Hejll acknowledges that this is controversial. “Our approach is not typical,” she says, “and it was hard to make choices”.
Instead, the key event of the 20th century is the unsolved assassination of prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. This was Sweden’s Kennedy moment, which colloquially marks a loss of innocence and prompted the first spontaneous outbreak of public mourning in a country often parodied for its reserve.
It could look like the good old days before Sweden was catapulted into the insecurity of the modern world, but non-Swedes might find it hard to fully appreciate its significance.
The triumph of social democracy and the welfare state, the chosen central platforms for the 20th century, bring the debate full circle. Modern Sweden is still constructed on the quest for normality and equality, but some are more equal than others.
The exhibition talks of the “new Swedes”, meaning those people who account for about 12 per cent of the population and are made up of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. For many of them, the image of Sweden as a safe haven is at odds with daily life in some of the most segregated cities in Europe.
For the new Swedes, the country is more like the one portrayed by Swedish crime novelists Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell than the version associated with 1970s tennis star Björn Borg and pop group Abba.
The exhibition ends with the feeling of a new kind of Swedishness, based on more than 150 years of peace, which places it at odds with the rest of Europe, and which may prove to be as equally romantic as what has gone before. As the old myths are discarded, the new ones begin to arrive.
Lars Amréus is the director general of the Museum of National Antiquities and the National Historical Museums of Sweden, the public body that runs the museum. He says that as Sweden has no national museum, it is impossible for visitors to get an overview of its history in one building.
In his view, the Swedish museum sector, like the traditional approach to Swedish history, is old fashioned, divided and still working on 19th-century ideas of classification.
Amréus says: “We wanted to move away from this and create a platform where a large audience could be introduced to national history in one exhibition. This is a unique moment for us.”
Diana Walters works for the Swedish NGO Cultural Heritage Without Borders and is an international museum and heritage consultant
The Museum of National Antiquities is one of Sweden’s largest museums and its collection comprises more than 20 million objects. It is part of the National Historical Museums of Sweden, a public organisation that also includes the Royal Coin Cabinet: The Swedish National Museum of Economy. The organisation, which employs about 60 people, runs Tumba Papermill Museum as well.
The permanent exhibitions at the Museum of National Antiquities cover ancient prehistory through to the Viking period and the Middle Ages. With the creation of the History of Sweden exhibition, the displays now run right up to the present day. The museum also holds temporary exhibitions and a range of other activities.
The Prehistories exhibition allows visitors to encounter prehistory through eight personal life stories. Items on display include Sweden’s oldest preserved garment, a 2,000-year-old cloak that is woven in a shepherd’s check pattern.
The Vikings exhibition features 4,000 objects from the Viking period. It describes daily life a thousand years ago and also addresses the role the Vikings play in Sweden today, such as how nationalism and Nazism made use of Viking imagery in propaganda.
The Gold Room includes the 1500 year-old gold collar from Ålleberg, a key item in the museum’s collection because of the skill that was needed to make it. The Textile Chamber features medieval textiles from Swedish churches.
The Museum of National Antiquities also houses a large collection of medieval ecclesiastical art, including triptychs, baptismal fonts, and gold and silver treasures.
The exhibition is the third leg of a collaboration between the museum, television group TV4 and publisher Nrstedts. Together, these organisations, with the input of many academics and specialists, have created a “new” history of Sweden comprising a 15-hour television series, a set of eight books and the exhibition.
To appreciate what is so new about this approach you have to understand the notion of “medelsvensson”, a euphemism for the “average Swede” (Svensson being one of the most common Swedish surnames).
Medelsvensson’s identity is based on the tenet that Swedes are basically homogenous and aspire to normality. ome characteristics of this are a romantic relationship to the countryside, manifested by long summer months spent living in small red-roofed houses by a lake or on an island. There is also a commitment to fairness, pragmatism and the unspoken sense of being a favoured nation.
Medelsvensson’s history is that of great ages; the Vikings, the Lutheran reformation and the French court in the 18th century (which saw the beginning of the reign of the current Swedish royal family, the Bernadottes).
Foreigners were people who brought things to Sweden, such as canals, technology, sugar and labour, but these never changed the heart of Swedish identity.
Imagine then the impact of a 360-degree turn. Sweden is being presented as a nation of migrants with diverse histories and previously unexplored and occasionally murky pasts. Iconic emblems are disappearing – the Viking’s horns are off the helmet.
The idea was the brainchild of film-maker Christian Arnet, who was inspired by Simon Schama’s television series, A History of Britain, and the popular history boom in the UK.
He says: “I wanted to show that history is about cause and effect and that ordinary people are a crucial part of the process missing from the history that I was taught at school.”
Arnet believes that a whole generation of Swedes have been denied an awareness of their history and that the level of knowledge about their past is desperately low. He is out to win hearts and minds.
“I grew up with traditional ways of teaching Swedish history that deliberately avoided controversy and didn’t explore contexts,” he says, “and if you don’t know history, it is easy to condemn.”
Some condemnation has already appeared. Part of this is levelled at Dick Harrison, professor of history at Lund University. He has acquired a high profile as a co-presenter of the TV show, as a contributor to the book series and as author of the main text panels in the exhibition.
“Swedishness is a new phenomenon and a construct,” he says. “The 17th century, regarded as Sweden’s ‘age of greatness’, was in fact partly due to a constant stream of German, Baltic and Scottish entrepreneurs and workers.
“The 18th century was basically a French import that came and stayed. All of this is well-documented, but has not been shown in this way before.”
Such views have prompted nationalist groups to label him a traitor, describing his approach as “nation dissolving historiography”.
Criticism has also come from some Sami groups who feel that they are not being properly portrayed as the indigenous people of the North, something that would give them rights to the land, language and culture that they have spent many decades fighting for.
Underpinning this new approach to history is a commitment to tell the histories of groups that have previously been hidden. Lena Hejll is the curator at the Museum of National Antiquities and project manager of the exhibition.
She says they focused on contested histories, such as gay history, migration and nationalism. “We wanted to raise these. It was not possible to go deeply into them in such a small space, but we are showing the way the museum wants to go. The exhibition is a platform.”
The main threads are easy to find. A central one is women’s history, something that curators and public alike are passionate about.
“History books are 80 to 90 per cent about men, but in the TV series we wanted to show a 50/50 balance, something that is reflected in recent scholarship,” says Harrison.
This is applied in the exhibition too. The effect is mixed. There is new information often presented in imaginative ways, such as the recording of every ruler of Sweden plus spouse (some of whom were previously unknown), and some interesting quotes from prominent women such as the 17th-century Queen Christina, who reflected that “there are men who are as much women as their mothers, and women who are as much men as their fathers, for the soul has no gender”.
At other times it feels a bit forced, such as in the selection of key figures associated with the founding of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Six people are featured, five of them men, including the obvious big hitters Anders Celsius and Carl Linnaeus.
The only woman is called Eva de la Gardie, the first elected female member who, according to the text, is remembered for inventing a method of making schnapps with potatoes instead of cereals – something that doesn’t feel as important as measuring temperature or classification systems. The text continues with the observation that this new method led to an all-time record of drunkenness.
Inevitably some histories remain missing. Disabled people are not really present, and the design of the show is not particularly accessible. The lack of depth means that the treatment of subjects is sometimes superficial.
Hejll says they wanted to present visitors with an introduction as a “smorgasbord to whet the appetite for more. We have lifted up stories of groups that have been missing from the official histories of the past to inspire curiosity.”
One of the most surprising parts of the exhibition is the gallery dealing with the 20th century. As the curators have got closer to living memory, identification and selection of themes has inevitably become more difficult and contentious.
Sweden’s neutrality in the second world war has been a central debating point of recent times, but in the exhibition the war is reduced to one small text panel entitled “We Were Spared”. Hejll acknowledges that this is controversial. “Our approach is not typical,” she says, “and it was hard to make choices”.
Instead, the key event of the 20th century is the unsolved assassination of prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. This was Sweden’s Kennedy moment, which colloquially marks a loss of innocence and prompted the first spontaneous outbreak of public mourning in a country often parodied for its reserve.
It could look like the good old days before Sweden was catapulted into the insecurity of the modern world, but non-Swedes might find it hard to fully appreciate its significance.
The triumph of social democracy and the welfare state, the chosen central platforms for the 20th century, bring the debate full circle. Modern Sweden is still constructed on the quest for normality and equality, but some are more equal than others.
The exhibition talks of the “new Swedes”, meaning those people who account for about 12 per cent of the population and are made up of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. For many of them, the image of Sweden as a safe haven is at odds with daily life in some of the most segregated cities in Europe.
For the new Swedes, the country is more like the one portrayed by Swedish crime novelists Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell than the version associated with 1970s tennis star Björn Borg and pop group Abba.
The exhibition ends with the feeling of a new kind of Swedishness, based on more than 150 years of peace, which places it at odds with the rest of Europe, and which may prove to be as equally romantic as what has gone before. As the old myths are discarded, the new ones begin to arrive.
Lars Amréus is the director general of the Museum of National Antiquities and the National Historical Museums of Sweden, the public body that runs the museum. He says that as Sweden has no national museum, it is impossible for visitors to get an overview of its history in one building.
In his view, the Swedish museum sector, like the traditional approach to Swedish history, is old fashioned, divided and still working on 19th-century ideas of classification.
Amréus says: “We wanted to move away from this and create a platform where a large audience could be introduced to national history in one exhibition. This is a unique moment for us.”
Diana Walters works for the Swedish NGO Cultural Heritage Without Borders and is an international museum and heritage consultant
From old to gold: inside the Museum of National Antiquities
The Museum of National Antiquities is one of Sweden’s largest museums and its collection comprises more than 20 million objects. It is part of the National Historical Museums of Sweden, a public organisation that also includes the Royal Coin Cabinet: The Swedish National Museum of Economy. The organisation, which employs about 60 people, runs Tumba Papermill Museum as well.
The permanent exhibitions at the Museum of National Antiquities cover ancient prehistory through to the Viking period and the Middle Ages. With the creation of the History of Sweden exhibition, the displays now run right up to the present day. The museum also holds temporary exhibitions and a range of other activities.
The Prehistories exhibition allows visitors to encounter prehistory through eight personal life stories. Items on display include Sweden’s oldest preserved garment, a 2,000-year-old cloak that is woven in a shepherd’s check pattern.
The Vikings exhibition features 4,000 objects from the Viking period. It describes daily life a thousand years ago and also addresses the role the Vikings play in Sweden today, such as how nationalism and Nazism made use of Viking imagery in propaganda.
The Gold Room includes the 1500 year-old gold collar from Ålleberg, a key item in the museum’s collection because of the skill that was needed to make it. The Textile Chamber features medieval textiles from Swedish churches.
The Museum of National Antiquities also houses a large collection of medieval ecclesiastical art, including triptychs, baptismal fonts, and gold and silver treasures.