This article critically explores how the AI image model Stable Diffusion generates visual histories of Scandinavia in the 1930s. While the past has always been mediated, this study suggests that generative AI models constitute a black-boxed yet easily accessible tool for the narration of history. We draw on recent works in digital memory studies and use an explorative hands-on methodology to subject AI images to visual semiotic analysis to better grasp and discuss how generative models produce synthetic representations of the past. Focusing on how the model generates modernity symbols and historical figures, we unpack a series of issues concerning the relationship between AI and historical representation that warrants further research. Along with the generated results, we discuss limitations in the training data, tension between generic past and historic specificities, as well as how Stable Diffusion produces an algorithmic tourist gaze, national stereotypes, and anachronisms. This article heeds the call to employ infrastructure-centric approaches to understand how tech companies govern users’ capacity to shape memory practices and craft popular images of the past. 

This article reconsiders the Swedish filmmaker Gösta Werner's experimental short film The Sacrifice (Midvinterblot, 1945) and places its production history in an ideological context. In this case study, the article shows that The Sacrifice, which depicts gruesome old Norse pagan rituals of sacrifice, threw light on the director's collaboration with the Nazi controlled German film company Universum Film AG (UFA) in the production of propaganda newsreels and that the film evoked a debate on the representation of violence in the aftermath of World War II. While some critics accused The Sacrifice of being influenced by 'Blut und Boden' and other elements of Nazi ideology others praised the film for its formal innovations and it was named the Swedish short film of the year. Tracing how these practices affected the authorial discourse surrounding Werner during and after the war, the article raises questions not only concerning how other media practitioners handled this chapter of his life, but also how he himself treated the war years in the construction of his own biographical legend.

This article approaches the subject of German film policy in Sweden during World War II from a new perspective. While several film scholars have mapped the connections between the German and Swedish film industries in the past, less is known about the German surveillance of Swedish film criticism, Swedish cinema audiences and Allied newsreel competitors. Drawing on previously overlooked archival material from the German film company Ufa's Swedish subsidiary, digital newspaper archives and previous research on German film strategies abroad, this article offers new insights into the ways Ufa monitored the film market in neutral Sweden.