Stockholm Syndromes?

In Stockholm, we stayed in a once grand home on the edge of town now filled with junk, mold, and a dangerous set of stairs. It was super cheap and offered rye crackers, cheese, and oatmeal for breakfast.

Sweden’s capital is bigger and 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 one of the islands, found a rock, and watched tiny figures on twisted amusement rides across the water.

We visited the National Art Museum. Renoirs, Monets, and a room for the Scandinavian impressionist Harriet Backer, who painted church interiors and southern Norwegian landscapesHer 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.

We visited the Norsk Museum: 500 years of Scandinavian history.  A wealthy young Arab traveler described 17th-century Stockholm – barely a hovel. A young landless woman working as a maid in the 19^th century corresponded with her friend in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where “maids are fed bread with butter every day, and this most delicious invention: cake.” The museum has a large researchable collection of letters home from immigrants to Iowa, Minnesota, and North Dakota.

It also has an alarming exhibit on the Arctic. Melting icecaps will unleash toxins: 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, 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, and the breadth of its historical influence includes the British Isles, western Russia, and a Viking trade and raid route that reached down to Constantinople and across the ocean as far as…Minnesota?  The Arctic Region is likewise non-contiguous, including all people across the top of the globe who share a world of melting ice. The exhibit museum included a segment on the arctic people of Canada trying to adapt to rapid and catastrophic climate change.

We passed the bank building where, in 1973, robbers held some staff and customers hostage for several days, When the hostages refused rescue by police, their supposed identification with their captures led to the coining of the term Stockholm Syndrome. However, 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 were unable to 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.

In the evening we joined a protest for Palestine focused on encouraging a boycott of companies who aid Israeli militarism or the Occupation.  A man handed us stickers that says, “Free Palestine, Boycott Israel.” Back in our room, I put the sticker in the back compartment of my backpack.

Among the list of companies to boycott are those easy for us: Coke, Starbucks, Disney, McDonalds, and those that require us to make big changes: Airbnb and Booking.com. That night we researched Vrbo. Thankfully it is not on the list. We made a reservation with them for December in Corfu, Greece. The travel company is convenient, not necessary. We can find the same information through town websites.

On our way back to the train station on the last day, we carried our backpacks across town to visit 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. Today the museum features a temporary exhibit by LGBTQ artists.

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 are 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.

Stockholm Syndrome is not in the DSM— psychiatry’s 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.

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. What they were not, (are not) an ethnicity.

Back in 2003, 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, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, it stung and had yucky consequences for my teaching career. Self-hating Jew is an accusation akin to Stockholm Syndrome.

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. He did not look through my back compartment where I put the pro-Palestine sticker. 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 was Jews willing to convert, following a regulation in 1686 requiring conversions to Christianity.  There were public conversion pageants in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. In 1775 a wealthy Jewish businessman who wanted to immigrate to Sweden 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 much like the golden visas all over Europe today, only this one was for a targeted group.) This wave of immigrants, while not converting assimilated 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 scraps and eventually became shopkeepers. In Sweden, they are an orthodox group who created their own synagogue and practices, removed 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. 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. Stockholm synagogue congregants recruited Wallenberg to represent them. Stockholm likes to tell a story of an individual tragic sacrifice. 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.*

A fifth wave of Jewish migration happened after World War II, of 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 made 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 who marched in July 2024, with others to protest  Israeli genocide in Gaza.  I wonder what generation of immigrants these moral activists come from and how they came to be discerners; people who see themselves in the other.

Nothing is straight in Stockholm. We wandered its curves and knots the way this essay does, hoping to get somewhere worthwhile. Here is where I end up: seeing the other in yourself is a moral stance and a survival strategy, It is dangerous for the status quo of wars that uphold apartheid systems, and unsustainable, inequitable economies. The toxic waste from this madness will not stay frozen.

It is enough to make me want to bury my head, but if an Arctic scientist, unable to look away, can be optimistic, so can I.

(In 2018 another Swede began a global campaign worthy of a Stockholm statue. Who is this person and campaign? The first three people to send me the right answer and address by email: awmpedalstory@gmail.com will get a gift from London.)