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    Xenophobe's Guide to the Swedes
    Xenophobe's Guide to the Swedes
    Xenophobe's Guide to the Swedes
    Ebook85 pages1 hour

    Xenophobe's Guide to the Swedes

    By Peter Berlin

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    About this ebook

    Soulful sadness

    A common trait among Swedish people is a deeply felt svårmod, a dark melancholy born out of long winters, high taxes, and a sense of being stuck far out on a geo-political and socio-economic limb. They brood a lot over the meaning of life in a self-absorbed sort of way without ever arriving at satisfactory answers.

     

    Love all

    The Swedes indulge in sport for leisure and sex for pleasure. Some people treat sex as a sport in order to combine leisure with pleasure, and thus save time and energy.

     

    Nurture nature

    The Swedes have a dream: to save Nature from Man. This is more than just a visionit's as close to a passion as the Swedes ever get.

     

    Net loss

    Becoming rich in Sweden has never been easy. As Ingmar Bergman found out, even millionaires can have difficulties making ends meet when income tax is levied at 102%.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOval Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2008
    ISBN9781908120878
    Xenophobe's Guide to the Swedes

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      Book preview

      Xenophobe's Guide to the Swedes - Peter Berlin

      Americans.

      Nationalism & Identity

      Forewarned

      The Swedes are an enterprising, fair-minded people who suffer from a mild case of megalomania. For example, they think it entirely appropriate that the cartographer Mercator magnanimously drew Sweden roughly the size of India. They object to being lumped in with other Scandinavians, as if they had no identity of their own.

      The Swedes are an enterprising, fair-minded people who suffer from a mild case of megalomania.

      From a Swedish perspective the differences between the Nordic countries are stark. Denmark is horizontal, Norway is vertical, Iceland is melting, Finland is labyrinthian, and Sweden is stunningly pastoral.

      There is also the language difference. Every Finnish sentence starts in falsetto and ends in baritone. Norwegian sounds like Finnish intoned backwards, but is actually a provincial Swedish dialect. The Danes with their diphthongs and glottal stops sound as if they are caught between swallowing and spitting out a very hot potato. Only the Swedish language has evolved from grunted Icelandic gobbledygook to become the familiar and beloved singsong sounds of the Swedish Chef in The Muppet Show. Swedes find colliding consonants tricky. A modern Professor Higgins might offer the following challenge to a Swedish Eliza Doolittle: Say after me – the Japanese jackass cheated on the Chinese chick and be rewarded with The Yapanese yackass sheeted on the Shinese shick.

      There is hardly anything in any other country with which the Swedes do not compare themselves and their country favourably.

      The contrasts in national culture and character are equally glaring. The Norwegians are simple, plain-spoken folk, the Danes cheerful and fun-loving. The Finns are a taciturn lot whose mosquito bites occasionally make them holler and gyrate in what the guide books mistakenly call folk dancing. The Swedes have combined all these qualities and taken them to new heights by finding humour in plain talk, replacing silence with small talk, and eliminating body language altogether.

      Swedes are always surprised to discover that foreigners do not keep a framed map of Sweden above their beds. They are amazed to encounter people who think the capital of Sweden is Oslo, or that Sweden is the home of Swatch. Such manifestations of ignorance can only be combated with a concerted campaign of enlightenment which is why they never tire of lecturing others about Sweden.

      There is hardly anything in any other country with which the Swedes do not compare themselves and their country favourably, be it the length of an argument, the breadth of a generalisation or the height of an audacity. To add credibility, comparisons are usually given a thin patina of self-deprecation but this fails to conceal their underlying national pride.

      Patriotism

      The Swedes sniff at public manifestations of patriotism, conveniently forgetting that the blue and yellow Swedish flag is everywhere to be seen – at the top of garden flagpoles, on postcards, on birthday cakes, on the branches of Christmas trees. The colours of the flag are echoed on candles and napkins, on bottle labels and biscuit tins, even on Swedish company logos.

      The blue and yellow Swedish flag is everywhere to be seen – at the top of garden flagpoles, on candles and napkins, on bottle labels and biscuit tins.

      Swedes are not patriots in the usual sense. Victory monuments come in the form of rune stones rather than bronze statues. Ask them what links them to their native country, and they will hold forth, not about government, history or culture, but about deep forests, smiling archipelagos, crayfish served with aquavit, and flower-wrapped maypoles.

      Their flag features a yellow cross against a blue background and symbolises the nation’s Christian heritage. The flag’s colours are meant to bring back memories of childhood summers when the sky was bluer and the sun more golden than today. For Swedes the national flag is primarily an eye-pleasing backdrop. Rather than rallying people to action, it invites them to a picnic in the meadow.

      How they see themselves

      Swedish schoolchildren are exhorted to keep their heads high when the subject of the Vikings is raised in history class.

      The Swedish national anthem says it all: ‘We thrive on the memories of our glorious past’, a reference to the Storhetstid, or ‘Era of Greatness’, when Sweden ruled most of Northern Europe (see map). Even earlier, the Vikings had given the peoples around the Mediterranean, on the British Isles and in North America a taste of Swedish brawn. Today’s schoolchildren are exhorted to sträcka på sig – keep their heads high – when the subject of the Vikings is raised in history class.

      Since those heady days, however, the Swedes have made a spectacular about-turn from Rambo to Rimbaud, crusading for a world of innocence while doing a little gun-running on the side. In the 20th century, as nations were tearing themselves apart, the Swedes tried to mend the broken pieces. Raoul Wallenberg, Folke Bernadotte, Dag Hammarskjöld and Olof Palme have gone down in history as dauntless mediators who paid for their audacity with their lives. Inspired by their famous compatriots, the Swedes now see themselves universally as the World’s Conscience.

      They also see themselves as honesty personified. With unfailing regularity, Swedish cabinet ministers admit to sleaze and promptly resign. Honesty doesn’t get much better than that.

      How others see them

      The Norwegians find the Swedes insufferably puffed up, while the Danes consider them to be party poopers. The British see them as sexy but cold, and the Americans think they are Swiss.

      "The reputation the Swedes have for being a bit square is misleading –

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