Stockholm Syndromes? A visit to Sweden.

 

Sweden’s capital is prettier than Oslo. The natural setting, with winding canals and myriad islands connected by walking bridges, is accented by old stone bridges and a magnificent wall of buildings in earthy rainbow colors accented by stone brocade designs, statues, and spires. Old wooden sailboats hug the shore. One can sit at a café and watch water taxis, cruise ships, fast-moving clouds, and a steady stream of tourists and locals. We walked to one of the islands, sat on a rock, and watched tiny figures on twisted amusement rides across the water.

National Art Museum of Sweden 

We visited the National Art Museum. Renoirs, Monets, and a room for the Scandinavian impressionist Harriet Backer, who painted church interiors and southern Norwegian landscapes. Her artistic life was a lonely one. While many male impressionists had women who made their lives easier, Becker stayed single and alone, devoting her time to painting and worrying if it meant anything.

Norsk Musuem 

The Norsk Museum covers 500 years of Scandinavian history. I noted that outsiders and emigrants were essential sources. Foreigners (like me) are apt to misinterpret and make assumptions about new places based on little data. But we offer perspective. Humans don’t notice what is commonplace to them. A wealthy young Arab traveler described 17th-century Stockholm as ‘barely a hovel,’ which tells us as much about the world he came from as what he saw in Stockholm.

They have a large researchable collection of letters home from immigrants to Iowa, Minnesota, and North Dakota, including the correspondence of a young landless woman working as a maid in 19^th century Stockholm and her friend in Council Bluffs, Iowa, who reported that in the US midwest, “maids are fed bread with butter every day, and this most delicious invention: cake.”

The museum also had an alarming exhibit on the Arctic. Melting icecaps are releasing toxins from frozen animals preserved for thousands of years, garbage buried in ice, and a city of military refuse created by the United States during the Cold War that will unleash nuclear waste across the globe. An Arctic scientist said she is often asked if she is an optimist or a pessimist. She said she is an optimist because she has no other choice.

The Norsk Museum made me think about regionalism. Scandinavia encompasses Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Greenland. The historical influence of the region reaches to the British Isles, western Russia, and Viking trade and raid routes as far as Constantinople and across the ocean to North America. The Arctic Region is likewise non-contiguous, including all people across the top of the globe who share a world of melting ice and are being forced to adapt to rapid and catastrophic climate change.

Stockholm Syndromes?

We passed the bank building where, in 1973, robbers held some staff and customers hostage for days.  The hostages refused rescue by the police.  Their supposed identification with their captors led to the coining of the term Stockholm Syndrome. The Stockholm bank hostages argued that they were responding to the abusive and dangerous way in which the police dealt with the crisis. They deemed it safer not to cooperate with their so-called rescuers. Far from being people who were duped, they were discerners who saw that the police were a greater danger to them than the men who held them hostage. Their discernment paid off. The robbers did not hurt or kill their hostages. They came to relate to them not as their hostages, but as people in the same predicament, victims of the police.

Back in 2002, I wrote an article in which I discussed my support for Palestine. It made the rounds and got me on a list of “Self-Hating Jews.” While it was an honor to be on a list with Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, and Howard Zinn, it had yucky consequences for my teaching career. Self-hating Jew is an accusation akin to Stockholm Syndrome.

Stockholm Syndrome is not in the DSM— the psychiatric manual of mental disorders. Internalizing and replicating trauma, however, is well studied. Naming the syndrome is essential for treatment. Otherwise, the terror continues to be replicated. That is what we see today in Gaza.

 

 Middle East Museum, Jewish Museum, Palestine Protest. 

We visited the Middle East Museum and the Jewish Museum. The former began as a place to exhibit a collection of artifacts stolen by a British/Swedish expedition to Cyprus. The loot is spectacular—clay pots and figurines with intricate designs. We sat among them while eating lunch at their Baghdad Café.

In a back room, there is also a permanent exhibit of testimonies collected in 1980 of Palestinians who survived the 1946-1948 Nakba: massacres and forced exile of Palestinians carried out by Jews and British forces to make room for European Jews in the newly-created state of Israel. The stories of people being lined up and shot were shocking. I wondered if Jews violently removing people from their homes and deporting them, rounding up people and killing them, corralling others into occupied ghettos, can be explained as some variant of the Stockholm Syndrome. In this case, Holocaust and Pogrom survivors replicated the cruel practices of their oppressors, not to seek revenge, but to oppress another group in another geographical context.

The podcaster of this Scandinavian history series I am listening to said, “Viking was an occupation, not an ethnicity. They were the Scandinavians who raided, traded, and colonized. Think of it as a verb: the Scandinavians who viked. During their era, they were a minority — maybe 10%.  Most 9th-century Scandinavians farmed. Testimonies of Nakba survivors at the Middle East Museum said the Jews who attacked them in 1948 were unlike their Jewish neighbors before 1946. Those pre-Nakba Jews shared recipes and helped each other when they were ill. The Jews who attacked them after 1946 were the Jews who “Viked.”

The Jewish Museum is less than a mile from the Middle East Museum in a former synagogue. A guard examined our backpacks, shuffling his hands through our dirty laundry. The museum told the story of four waves of Jewish migration to Sweden, and traced the history of laws created to restrict Jewish migration, beginning with forced conversions and Jewish laws restricting jobs and participation in society. Today, Jews are included in a law that protects minority populations in Sweden.

The first wave of Jewish immigrants to Sweden arrived after a regulation in 1686 requiring they convert to Christianity.  There were public conversion pageants in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. In 1775, a wealthy Jewish businessman emigrated and refused to convert. The conversion stipulation was lifted, and replaced with a financial stipulation: come with enough $ and we will let you in. This is like the golden visas in Europe today, only for a targeted group. This second wave did not convert, but they did assimilate, both in culture and religious practice. Their rabbis even dressed like priests.

The third wave began around 1880 during the Great Migration out of Eastern Europe, with Jews escaping pogroms. The financial minimum had been lifted. This group was poor, in many cases, too poor to make the journey to the US. Their stories sound quite similar to those of Jews who came to Minnesota in the1890s and settled on the river flats in West St. Paul, gradually moving up the hill. They started as peddlers of scrap metal and eventually became shopkeepers.  Unlike the second wave, these immigrants were orthodox.They built their own synagogues, separate from the second wave.

The fourth wave is a story Stockholm likes to tell. A Swedish Lutheran man, Raoul Wallenberg, went to Hungary during the Nazi occupation and helped hundreds of Jews escape to Sweden. Wallenberg was in Hungary when the Soviets liberated the country. He welcomed them but ended up in jail in Moscow. His death date in the Soviet Union is unknown in Sweden.* The docent at the Jewish Museum noted that the story inscribed on Wallenberg’s statue does not mention that this rescue mission was a Jewish community project. Synagogue congregants recruited Wallenberg to represent them. Stockholm likes to tell the story as one of individual tragic sacrifice.

A fifth wave of Jewish migration happened after World War II. They were Holocaust survivors, most of them very young, who quickly paired off in mass marriages and set up a community separate in many ways from the rest of Stockholm. They were given factory jobs, and they worked and lived together. They were not necessarily religious. The museum notes that they built community as survivors and supporters of the new nation of Israel.

Which makes sense, given their historical experience.  Perhaps they did not know about the Nakba.

Today in Stockholm, there is a group of Jews for Justice and Peace. They marched in a protest a week on July 6, to protest  Israeli genocide in Gaza.  I wondered what generation of immigrants these moral activists came from. (The photo of them below is not mine.) I hoped to meet them when we joined a protest for Palestine near the subway station, focused on encouraging a boycott of companies that aid Israeli militarism or the Occupation.

Nothing is straight in Stockholm. The roads curve and knot the way this essay does. Here is where I end up:

Seeing the other in yourself is a moral stance and a survival strategy, not Stockholm Syndrome.

Seeing the other in yourself is dangerous for the status quo that fights wars to uphold apartheid systems and unsustainable, inequitable economies. They will do their best to pathologize you. It can make you want to bury your head. But if an Arctic scientist can be optimistic, so can we.

This essay about a visit to Sweden in July 2024 is part of a series. In October 2023, my spouse and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering how memory can liberate the present.