The Writers and the Totalitarians: The Scandinavian-speaking Writers’ Associations in the European Schism, 1933-1953

forthcoming

The Writers and the Totalitarians (WatTs) analyzes dynamics of great relevance to our current era by exploring how totalitarian cultural diplomacy and soft power was exercised, received, and negotiated by writers and intellectuals in the Scandinavian democracies during the political polarization that marked “the European schism” of the interwar, Second World War, and early Cold War years. The political and ideological dividing lines that came to define European political life with ever-greater starkness from the early 1930s onwards could not but make a mark on Scandinavian intellectual life. WatTs examines how the national writers’ associations in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden as well as the Swedish-speaking writers’ association in Finland reacted to and interacted with the German National Socialist and Soviet Communist regimes from 1933 and into the immediate post-war period. Despite their importance as fora for shaping, legitimizing, and discussing the attitudes and actions of Scandinavian-speaking writers, historical research has paid little attention to the writers’ associations, and even less to their roles and reactions vis-á-vis the epochal political, ideological, and cultural developments taking place in the Nordic countries’ Southern and Eastern neighbor states in the interwar years and beyond. By utilizing several understudied archival collections located across the Nordic region, which have never been studied in conjunction, WatTs heeds the transnational turn in historical studies and explores how the leaders and memberships of the Scandinavian-speaking national writers’ associations reacted to, interacted with, and positioned themselves vis-á-vis the Third Reich and the Soviet Union and their respective cultural diplomatic efforts, and how, in doing so, they both acted according to and shaped the norms of an important but overlooked transnational Nordic literary-intellectual field.