ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates post-World War II Swedish cultural memory discourses, focusing more specifically on how they progressively incorporated international perspectives into Sweden’s historical narratives. It begins with the reception and controversies that followed the publication of A Swedish Tiger (2021) by Aron Flam, before revisiting and contextualising a number of major Swedish post-war films and television series that dealt with the beredskapstiden (the “readiness years”) in three very different eras, the 1970s, the 1990s and the 2020s. Finally, this chapter discusses the Forum för Levande Historia (Living History Forum or FLH), a Swedish public agency established in 2003 whose aim, building on the lesson of the Holocaust, is to promote democracy, human rights and tolerance, demonstrating by its very existence how the country has finally incorporated the Holocaust into its own history.
