This anthology is the result of an international workshop with the aim to initiate new discussions and new research on cultural heritage – contested as well as uncontested. The workshop was held at the Department of Society, Culture and Identity at Malmö University, in October 2022. Contested heritage, sometimes also referred to as “dissonant heritage” or “difficult heritage” has been discussed, explored and studied by cultural heritage scholars from various disciplines over the last two decades. However, there is still limited knowledge about what contested or dissonant heritage is. How, when and by whom heritage can be contested and how it is related to or understood in relation to uncontested heritage are also unresolved questions. The contribution of this anthology thus falls at an intersection between the process-perspectives of critical heritage studies of cultural heritage, the empirical-historical studies of power and agency in social and cultural history (after the archival turn), and the conceptual fields that examine the use of history and history mediation. It rests firmly on the collective expertise drawn from historians and other scholars, at different stages of their careers, from researchers with theoretical proficiency as well as practical experience from cultural heritage work, both within and outside of traditional cultural heritage institutions. The result, if not a comprehensive rendering, is a range of multifaceted insights into research on why and how cultural heritage can be both contested and (un)contested.

The link between public health and migration control at the national level is well established in international migration research. This relationship is the starting point of our research on the Swedish management of refugees during the Second World War. The aim of the article has been to introduce the international research field migration and public health and analyze the role that public health strategies played in the organized refugee reception in the beginning of the 1940’s. We have studied the preparation and implementation of policies targeted to handle a larger amount of newly arrived refugees. Public health strategies played an important part in the preparations for the reception of a larger amount of refugees from Sweden’s neighboring countries. Existing laws and already established organizations created the frames for the emergence of organized refugee activities in the beginning of the 1940’s. This is very obvious in the routines that were established to identify and separate refugees that was suspected for having a contagious disease. In order to protect the national citizens all newly arrived had to pass through a health inspection. This included both a medical examination at the transit point as well as a two-week period in quarantine. After the quarantine the refugees were placed at permanent camps. The purpose of the isolation of the refugees was to prevent epidemics, most probably the isolation also contributed to perceptions about otherness of the newly arrived.

In this article we elaborate on the possibility to combine constructivist perspective and oral history within one methodological order to explore how identities are narrated and negotiated in different situations, contexts and interviewers. In oral history, the give voice” to marginalized or forgotten individuals or groups, stories and give them the possibility to speak from their perspectives. with these emancipatory aims of oral history. Simultaneously we analyze interviews in order to investigate identity constructions. concepts of intersectionality and narrated identity, which allow investigate how groups and individuals that are marginalized and negotiate their own and other identities. At the same time it is unclear interviewees understand these kinds of analysis of their narratives. combine a social constructivist perspective and oral history in a must be aware of this relation of power and explain to the interviewees doing and why we are doing it. In a broader research perspective deconstructive approach illustrates interesting assumptions about multidimensional identity constructions.

Genmäle i den pågående diskussionen mellan Malin Thor Tureby och Pontus Rudberg om svenk-judisk historieforskning (se Vol 31 No 1). 

Although digitization has become a word that is almost synonymous with democratization and citizen participation, many museums and other cultural heritage institutions have found it difficult to live up to this political vision of inclusivity and access for all. In Sweden, political ambitions to digitize the cultural heritage sector are high. Yet, institutions still struggle to reconcile their previous practices with the new technologies and ethical guidelines for collecting and curating material. This presenation discuss, with a collection of Holocaust stories that has not been digitized as an example, some of the the current gaps that exists between cultural heritage practice and government policy on digitization, open access, and research ethics. In the presentation I will also discuss some suggestions on how these issues can be resolved by reimagining digitization as transformation.

In a research project (funded by the Swedish Research Council), “Swedish-Jewish refugee receptions. Narratives and negations of “Jewish” identities and communities in Sweden 1933 –2013”, I work with narratives about and from ”Jews” in Sweden. The “Jew” has been a crucial category and even a stereotype in the formation of different Swedish national identities in different social contexts over time. In contrast to most other research projects with a focus on narrative material I want to analyse how a marginalized group like the Swedish Jews are negotiating their own identities and communities by othering and marginalizing or including other Jewish groups over time. I will do this by examining how the Swedish Jewish refugee activities have been narrated in different materials and contexts over the period 1933–2013. In this paper I work with narratives from the archive “Jewish memories” at the National Museum of cultural history (Nordiska Museet). During the years 1994 –1998 the museum collected autobiographical material (interviews and written life stories) from Jews in Sweden. Similar to how feminist researchers use the expression “doing gender”, I use the expression “doing Jewishness”. If doing gender refers to how the differences between men and women, masculinity and feminity are constructed and creates normative conceptions of what a true and correct masculinity/feminity is, I argue that you can investigate the doing of “Jewishness” in relation to Swedishness in the same way. In this paper I will focus on how “Jewishness” and “Swedishness” is negotiated in the interviews collected by the Nordiska Museet. How do the interviewees narrate “Jewish memories”? How do the interviewers ask about “Jewish memories” What themes are considered relevant to ask and narrate about? Who is interviewed and by whom? How do the interaction/communication between the interviewee and the interviewer create different types of narratives about “Jewishness”?

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Sweden saw an upsurge in state-sponsored memoryprojects pertaining to the country’s controversial and largely unspoken relationshipwith the Holocaust. The Holocaust memorial in Stockholm, the then Prime MinisterGöran Persson’s informational campaign Living History, and the StockholmInternational Forum Conferences, all demonstrated a heightened interest in theHolocaust—as history, as memory and as educational instrument. Central to theseendeavors was the collecting of survivor testimonies. One such example is thecollection Jewish Memories that was created during the years 1994-1998 by the NordicMuseum in Sweden. Today it is—comprising approx. 400 oral and written life stories,1 600 photographs and 100 objects and sound recordings—is, in sheer size, one of the most significant Swedish holdings of Holocaust memory in relation to Swedish-Jewish heritage. However, the materials were collected without informed consent and thecollection is protected by a 70-year clause that restricts access to the material on thebasis of it being too ‘vulnerable’. “Jewish Memories” remains hidden, inaccessible tothe public and to researchers without permission to study the material. The people whohave left their stories remain anonymous and their names, stories, and testimonies arenot heard in public or used by researchers. As survivor testimony continues to be acrucial genre to Holocaust studies, perspectives that pertain to how, and for whom,survivor stories are told highlight problems that relate to vulnerabilities, digitizationand accessibility. This paper would present the research project, The Ethical Dilemmas of Digitalization:Vulnerability and Holocaust collections, that was designed to research and explain how ethical problems become embedded in collections that pertain to Holocaust survivorsthrough processes of archivization, organization and digitization. The project also aimsto present suggestions for how these ethical problems can be addressed byreconceptualizing digitization as transformation by developing participatory and ethicalarchiving/digitization methods in order to make the collections like the Jewish Memories accessible.

In the spring of 1933, the halutz-quota was established in Sweden. This quota gave young German Jews the possibility to come to Sweden as transmigrants to receive training in agricultural work for 18 months and then continue to Palestine. In total, between the years 1933-1941 490 teenagers were sent to Sweden through the halutz-quota. The focus of this article is on how and what the young people communicate about their time in Sweden in different sources. Drawing from various unpublished materials produced within the movement in Sweden as well as interviews with former members of the He-Halutz, the aim is to place the persons who entered Sweden through the halutz-quota as central actors in the text, both as important agents in the past and as constructors of the stories of that past. 

Kapitlet tar sin utgångspunkt i tidigare forsknings diskussion om olika händelser som har varit viktigaför framväxten av en minneskultur kring Förintelsen, och hur ”de överlevande” över tid har blivit personer som ska hyllas, intervjuas och ihågkommas. Författaren ansluter sig till den forskning som har framhållit att det är viktigt att synliggöra hur centrala de förföljda och senare de överlevande själva har varit under degångna snart 80 åren, för att driva kunskapen omoch minnet av Förintelsen och nazisternas brott motmänskligheten framåt. I kapitlet argumenterar författaren för att Ilona Karmels bok Den polska flickan, som gavs ut på svenska 1954, kan förstås som ett viktigt bidrag till en sådan kunskapsproduktion, och att den kanses som en tidig publicerad berättelse från en judisk överlevande med anknytning till Sverige. Det som analyseras är dock inte Den polska flickan i sig, utan hur Ilona Karmel och boken mottogs av litteraturkritiker i svensk och svenskjudisk press. 

In this keynote I will discuss how persons who have experienced and survived the Nazi persecution and genocide have worked to keep the memory of their and others experiences alive. Drawing from different collecting initiatives, of memories, testimonies and stories, during the last 80 years, by and from Holocaust survivors, I will explore and discuss the role that survivors have played in the development of memory culture and historical research.

Muntlig historia kan användas som en dokumenterande metod för att skapa en ny primärkälla och för att nå ny eller utökad kunskap om det förflutna. Muntlig historia kan även praktiseras som en kulturanalytisk metod för att undersöka och söka förstå vilka kulturella komponenter som finns i en berättelse om ett ihågkommet och tolkat minne av det förflutna eller en särskild händelse i det förgångna. Minnet används då inte enbart som källa utan är i sig undersökningsobjektet. Utgångspunkten är då att minnet är en aktiv process som ständigt omförhandlar och skapar ett meningsfullt förflutet, och inte en passiv förvaringsbox för fakta om en förfluten tid. Forskningsuppgiften blir därmed inte enbart att söka nå och skapa ny empirisk kunskap om det förflutna, utan även att förstå denna aktiva process genom vilken en eller flera berättare skapar meningsfulla historier om det förflutna i olika situationer och kontexter. I detta kapitel diskuteras såväl den dokumenterande som den kulturanalytiska utgångspunkten för att praktisera muntlig historia.

In a research project (funded by the Swedish Research Council), “Swedish-Jewish refugee receptions. Narratives and negations of “Jewish” identities and communities in Sweden ca 1945–2010”, I work with narratives about and from ”Jews” in Sweden. The “Jew” has been a crucial category and even a stereotype in the formation of different Swedish national identities in different social contexts over time. In contrast to most other research projects with a focus on narrative material I want to analyse how a marginalized group like the Swedish Jews are negotiating their own identities and communities by othering and marginalizing or including other Jewish groups over time. I will do this by examining how the Swedish-Jewish refugee activities have been narrated in different materials and contexts over the period 1945–2010. In this paper I will focus on how Swedish Jewish identities and communities have been negotiated in relation to Jewish refugees and survivors in Sweden in individual life stories. Who are talking about Swedish-Jewish identities/communities in relation to refugee work and the Jewish survivors in their life stories? How and what is narrated about Swedish-Jewish identities/communities? How are ”the Swedish-Jews” and the ”survivors” related to the Swedish-(Jewish) society in the individual life stories? How are different groups and conceptions of identities created, while defined and categorized in the narratives about the refugee reception/activities? I work with material from the archive “Jewish memories” at the National Museum of cultural history (Nordiska museet). During the years 1994 –1998 the National Museum of Cultural History collected autobiographical material (interviews and written life stories) from three categories of people with Jewish origin; Jews who were born in Sweden, Jews who fled to Sweden before and during the Second World War, and Jews who came to Sweden from the concentration camps. The paper will also address epistemological and methodological questions about working with material (narratives, interviews and life stories) that have been created/collected by an institution such as the National museum of cultural history. Why was the collection of “Jewish memories” initiated at/by the Nordiska museet? What broad assumptions and specific issues animated / initiated the collection of “Jewish memories”? What intellectual, social, national and international contexts and influences shaped the collection of narratives?

Textbooks about oral history usually discuss methods for how to collect and analyze interviews, that that you as a researcher has been part in creating and collecting. Very little has been written on how to reuse interviews already collected by another researcher or interviews created and collected by an archive, museum or other cultural institution. There has been some discussions on the ways in which oral history has informed the creation of cultural heritage and contributed to the producing of public or collective memories that make certain versions of the past public and render other versions invisible. These discussions have often concerned oral history in museums and to some extent in archives. How do we approach interviews that may have been collected maybe 50, 20 or 10 years before we use them, interviews that have been collected by someone else in a different social, political and scientific context and/or purpose than we have as contemporary researchers? This paper will suggest a method for how to problematize and work with interviews that have been created/collected by a cultural institution.

In a research project (funded by the Swedish Research Council), “Swedish-Jewish refugee receptions. Narratives and negations of “Jewish” identities and communities in Sweden ca 1945–2010”, I work with narratives about and from ”Jews” in Sweden. The “Jew” has been a crucial category and even a stereotype in the formation of different Swedish national identities in different social contexts over time. In contrast to most other research projects with a focus on narrative material I want to analyse how a marginalized group like the Swedish Jews are negotiating their own identities and communities by othering and marginalizing or including other Jewish groups over time. I will do this by examining how the Swedish Jewish refugee activities have been narrated in different materials and contexts over the period 1945–2010. In this paper I will focus on how Swedish Jewish identities and communities have been negotiated in relation to Jewish refugees and survivors in Sweden in individual life stories. Who are talking about Swedish-Jewish identities/communities in relation to refugee work and the Jewish survivors in their life stories? How and what is narrated about Swedish-Jewish identities/communities? How are ”the Swedish-Jews” and the ”survivors” related to the Swedish-(Jewish) society in the individual life stories? How are different groups and conceptions of identities created, while defined and categorized in the narratives about the refugee reception/activities? I work with material from the archive “Jewish memories” at the National Museum of cultural history (Nordiska museet). During the years 1994 –1998 the National Museum of Cultural History collected autobiographical material (interviews and written life stories) from three categories of people with Jewish origin; Jews who were born in Sweden, Jews who fled to Sweden before and during the Second World War, and Jews who came to Sweden from the concentration camps. The paper will also address epistemological and methodological questions about working with material (narratives, interviews and life stories) that have been created/collected by an institution such as the National museum of cultural history. Why was the collection of “Jewish memories” initiated at/by the Nordiska museet? What broad assumptions and specific issues animated / initiated the collection of “Jewish memories”? What intellectual, social, national and international contexts and influences shaped the collection of narratives?

With the point of departure in discussions on knowledge production within the research filed of oral history and Judith Butler’s discussions on vulnerability and agency this article explores the collecting practices and archiving of stories from one group that often is referred to as vulnerable in Swedish society, the Jewish minority. The analysis is based on life stories kept in the archive of the Nordic Museum in Stockholm (Nordiska museet), that came about as the result of project focusing on Jewish memories in Sweden. The article explores in which ways the different actors – the professionals from the museum and the interviewees – in the knowledge production reaffirmed or contested prevailing discourses about Jewishness in the 1990’s and how this is manifested in different ways during the collecting process, archival practices and in the archived materials. The analysis demonstrates how a memory institution, despite the best intentions, might contribute to maintaining stereotyping discourses on for example Jewishness. However, the analysis also gives examples on how vulnerability enters agency when some of the individual Jewish narrators resisted certain descriptive discourses on Jewishness during the interviewees and the archival process. Hence, an important conclusion from this study is that the power of the knowledge production in the archive does not only belong to the initiators and interviewers working with the collection, but also to the individual narrators – when their acts of resistance is recognized as central in the creation of the collection and its archived narratives

There are a great number of archival collections containing testimonies or stories from Holocaust survivors. This presentation explores the making of one such collection: the Raoul Wallenberg Project Archive. The motives for and practices of how to collect, archive and use testimonies or stories from persons categorized as survivors have varied over time. Documentation methods are never neutral; rather they are rooted in a specific time and place, and sometimes also in specific sets of institutional histories, practices and ideas. According to Jacques Derrida, “…archivization produces as much as it records the event.” (1996:17) The purpose of this presentation is to explore Paul A. Levine’s and the other initiators and creators motives for making the Raoul Wallenberg Project Archive. 

Swedish Jews’ supposed inactivity over Europe’s persecuted Jews during the Holocaust has been a prevalent discourse during the post-war period. This article ponders the origins of that discourse and how it affects how and what Swedish Jews narrate about aid and relief work, and Jewish refugees and survivors, when recounting their memories from the 1930s and 1940s. This investigation also examines how previous research has addressed and represented the aid efforts of the Jewish minority in Sweden and discusses what new empirical knowledge about Swedish Jewish aid and relief work during the Holocaust we can ascertain by using oral history. Hence, it is also a contribution to the ongoing debate in the research field of ‘refugee studies’, initiated by the historians Philip Marfleet and Peter Gatrell, who emphasise both the importance of working with historical perspectives and asking questions about the sources at the disposal of historians and what sources they choose to work with when writing about aid, relief work and refugees.

This chapter examines the Jewish public discourse on the Holocaust and the survivors in Sweden during the first decade after the war. The author concludes that there was no silence surrounding the Holocaust in the Swedish-Jewish press. On the contrary, the press became an important arena for various discussions about the Holocaust. However, the author also identifies silences, or rather the absence of coherent narratives concerning Swedish-Jewish heroes and heroines, or actions taken by the Swedish-Jewish community on behalf of the persecuted Jews of Europe as well as concerning Jewish survivors in Sweden, especially women, who were not commonly present in the two main Swedish-Jewish publications. This is surprising, considering that most of the survivors in Sweden were indeed women.

Primarily informed by the debates in archival sciences both concerning the limits and possibilities of the archive as a site of knowledge production and regarding how the archive in itself and the archivists contribute to the shaping of the narratives of history. As well as, the debates in oral history on the re-use of archived interviews, this article suggests a methodologyfor how to (re)contextualise interviews previously collected and archived. I stress the importanceof hearing with the archive and collection, and I demonstrate how we can do this bydeconstructing the semantic genealogy of oral history collections as a part of our need as(re)users to reflect on our own use and (re)contextualisation of previously collected material. Doing so will allow us not only to understand the voices and narratives of the archived interviewsbut also to hear the tacit narratives of the archives and collections.

Oral history has been a vast and diversified field in the Nordic countries for several decades. The proposed roundtable is gathering senior and junior oral historians from oral history organizations or associations in three of the Nordic countries: The Finnish Oral History Network (FOHN), Memoar in Norway and the Oral History in Sweden (OHIS). The aim is to discuss and understand the past, present and future of oral history in the Nordic countries.       

The roundtable will take on a wider perspective on oral history in the Nordic countries.  What have been done in the past and what perspectives have been applied? What subjects has been researched and what is missing out? What theoretical and methodological developments can we see in the field of oral history in the Nordic Countries? What is the position of oral history in the universities, in relation to history and other disciplines? What are the major trends and how has our understanding and practice of oral history changed/not changed over time and space? What similarities and differences are there regarding how oral history is practiced in the Nordic countries? How and what can we learn from each other? What can we expect in the future from oral history in the Nordic countries in terms of developments, cooperation etc.?

Organizers: Martin Englund & Malin Thor Tureby

In this paper we will discuss and critically reflect how oral history can be used both as method and a source to investigate different authorities in knowledge production at cultural heritage institutions with oral history collections, with the case study MigTALKS as one empirical example.

MigTALKS was initially a so-called communication project instigated by the Swedish Migration Board with the purpose to put a face on the “immigrants” and to counteract a discourse about migrants as “poor refugees”. The project collected 100 life stories from migrants, which were donated to the archive of the Nordic Museum after the communication project was finished. 

Using methodologies previously progressed for investigating the authorities in the knowledge production processes at cultural heritage institutions (Thor Tureby 2013,2015; Thor Tureby & Johansson 2020) we explore the different actors’ understandings of MigTALKS as an oral history collection (the Migration Board, the Nordic Museum and the migrants). The concept shared authority (Frisch 1990) is central and used to challenge Laurajane Smith’s (2006) theory authorized heritage discourse (AHD) for analyzing the authority in the cultural heritage sector. In the presentation we will discuss how this methodology can be used to analyze not only how the authority of the migration board and the cultural heritage institution framed the interviews and the knowledge production, but also how the persons who contributed with their stories are expressing their authority, knowledge, and interpretations of and as migrants on migration.

Following the ambitions of international and national policy makers to digitalize the cultural heritage sector, a growing research field that deals with digitalization and cultural heritage has emerged. However, it has been argued that too much focus has been placed on technology and information policy issues and that research on how to achieve administrative effectiveness and preservation has taken precedence over studies of different actors’ engagement, participation and access to cultural heritage. Previous studies have also tended to problematize the “hows” rather than the “whys” of processes associated with digital heritage and digitalization. In addition, research has shown that collections documenting minorities and marginalized groups have been excluded from national strategies concerning the digitalization of cultural heritage. Therefore, the aim of this article is to investigate why and under what conditions digital heritage about and with migrants has been initiated, created and curated. We study the motives and the roles of different stakeholders in the digitization and patrimonialization processes of one collection containing life stories from migrants. Furthermore, in the article we understand stakeholders not only as decision makers, owners or managers, but also as any person or organization that feels affected by whatever happens to the object or piece defined as heritage. Consequently, a central element in the methodology of this research was the interviews conducted with crucial actors in relation to their engagements with the studied collection. During the interviews, we paid specific attention to the different motives of the involved stakeholders and why it was important to them that the collection was created and digitized.

Vilka uttryck tog sig modernitetens födelse i Sverige? Hur ser förbindelsen ut mellan folkmord och kultur? Och hur återskapar historikern förlorade historiska erfarenheter?

I Moderniteten som framgång och tragedi undersöker tjugosex forskare ett motsägelsefullt och dynamiskt 1900-tal. Utifrån skilda perspektiv behandlar antologins författare ämnen som kulturhistoria, judaistik, minnesforskning och historieskrivandet som konst och metod.

Med det svenska folkhemmets skenbara idyll och det stormiga Europas komplexa verklighet i fokus besvarar den här antologin frågor om vad moderniteten inneburit för människan som individ och samhällsvarelse. Och vad det betyder att vara modern.

In July 2020, two Holocaust memorials disappeared from a Jewish cemetery in Stockholm where Holocaust survivors who died soon after coming to Sweden for medical treatment in 1945 are buried. Though it occurred in the midst of both the global #TakeItDown movement and the Swedish government’s plans to establish a Holocaust museum in Sweden, this removal garnered no media attention or public outcry. Moreover, it was not, as might be expected, a case of antisemitic vandalism but a planned removal by the Jewish Community in Stockholm. This chapter takes this unexpected example of contested spaces of memory and heritage as a point of departure to consider and reflect on how ‘dead survivors’ of Nazism buried in Sweden have been commemorated. The analysis considers three Swedish cemeteries by delving into the sites’ past and present, the presence and absence of monuments and other forms of memorialization and contextualization, and how these aspects relate to the discursive and historiographical treatment of victims of Nazi persecution who came to Sweden in both historical and contemporary contexts, particularly in relation to issues of gender, place, and identity and belonging.