The project has aimed to investigate Swedish-Jewish cultural personalities and cultural practitioners, i.e. artists, musicians and intellectuals active in Sweden during the 1900s, and their cultural expressions in light of their experience and processing of the Holocaust, World War II and the Jewish predicament. The reception of their operations and their impact on the Swedish cultural society has been analysed. Participants in the project have been project leader Henrik Rosengren, contributing: "Insiders or Outsiders? A Collective Biographical Study of Swedish-Jewish Musicians and Their Integration in Sweden During the 1900s"; art historian Tanja Schult, contributing: "The Holocaust's Aftermath in the Art of Swedish-Jewish Artists"; and historian Harald Runblom, contributing: "Hugo Valentin: Life and Work".

The initial contextual background was based on the tension between the image of the Holocaust as a Jewish versus universal experience. During the course of the project, the contextual background has been supplemented with other contexts in order to create a more complete understanding of not only the Holocaust's impact on the collective memory but also the understanding of exile existence of those artists, musicians and intellectuals who fled Nazism. These contexts have focused on the Swedish refugee policy, the Cold War, the tension between modernism and traditionalism, the view of the German post-1945 era and anti-communism. In Rosengren's case, the theoretical framework also assumes Albert Hirschman's concepts of exit, voice and loyalty.

The project's three main results:

1. The Holocaust as individual experience
The results of the project's sub-studies show large variations in the individual experiences and processing of the Holocaust. This is due in part to the different focuses in each project, but also illustrates quite clearly the variance in how the Holocaust was processed into Swedish society with respect to both temporal and spatial differences.
Hugo Valentin considered himself to belong to the fifth generation (Ashkenazic) Jewish immigrants in Sweden; according to Valentin it was a generation marked by "assimilation lethargy". For Valentin, the role of himself as a historian was strongly associated with his development from indifference concerning the Jewish predicament to Zionist. As early as the first half of the 1930s he spread knowledge of and wrote books and articles on the effect of Nazi policies in Europe. His systematic conveyance and publishing gives him a place among the pioneers of Holocaust research. The Holocaust was placed into the ranks of the persecution of the Jewish people and the final proof for the necessity of a Jewish state. With large networks within and outside the Jewish group, he became an intermediary between Jewish and Swedish cultural spheres.
Among the five exiles included in Rosengren's study, the Holocaust was not referred to as a source of artistic inspiration, with the exception of composer Hans Holewa who related a few of his works to the Nazi genocide. Generally, few Swedish composers related to the Holocaust in their compositions, with perhaps Moses Pergament as the most important exception. However, what also emerges in Rosengren's study is how anti-Semitism in general, and the Nazi racial policies and the Holocaust in particular, forced those who fled racial policy to reflect about Jewishness, regardless if they previously had regarded themselves as Jews or not.

2. The Holocaust and the collective memory
Schult's studies on the Holocaust and collective memory is emerging as a major analytical complement to the individual culture personality's processing of the Holocaust. Her research clarifies how the Second World War and the Holocaust left a deep imprint in Sweden, not only on individuals, but also in the collective memory. This is reflected, among other things, in the quantity of erected monuments referring to these themes and the establishing of the authority of the Living History Forum (FLH).
Furthermore, it is clear that the moral vision that characterized the debate on the Holocaust in the 1990s had an effect on how the artwork from the 1930s and 1940s, that in a critical way took up Nazism, was treated. It prevented this art from falling into oblivion. Knowledge of these works was, in other words, incorporated in the collective memory. The changing perception of the Holocaust as an event with universal human significance and the establishment of FLH opened up to provide financial support to the contemporary (art) projects. However, the government's attempt to place the Holocaust in the collective Swedish memory has also encountered resistance from artists who are turning against a prescribed and ritualized memory culture full of clichés.
Among contemporary art projects, there are artists who are critically questioning Sweden's neutrality policy, the transit of German troops and refugee protection. Others relate artistically to the National Socialist ideology, its symbols and the presence of these in the media. They are trying to deal with the constant presence of a historical process that today has been recognized as a historic landmark. Some artists are sceptical of the way mankind's greatest crime is used to represent human rights and defend democracy. For many, art is a way to handle personal experiences of the past, not least among artists with Danish, Polish or German background. Many artists visualize private memories of traumatic experiences from World War II and emphasize their relevance for contemporary, multicultural Swedish society.

3. The view of "the German" in relation to Nazism and the Holocaust

A central question in Rosengren's study was how the Swedish-German cultural relations and the perception of "the German" after World War II were influenced by the Nazi-experience and knowledge about the Holocaust. The survey shows, with examples from the five exiles and scattered examples from the music field, that it is possible to speak of an adherence to German speaking culture and "the German" that is not consistent with the image of the German speaking cultural and intellectual dethronement highlighted in previous research. The contact between Swedish and German music life was not broken by the Nazi experience. The intellectual and cultural shift from the German-speaking towards Anglo-Saxon culture, apparent in much of Swedish society after World War II, is not as clear in the music scene. The music scene's German contacts were indeed maintained and the hope of a German cultural resurgence - without brown color - was nurtured.

New research questions the project initiated:

Schult's initial research concerning relevant art work showed that Swedish art relating to the Holocaust has hardly been investigated. While there are empirical studies on some artists, much research remains. There is no single overview focused on Swedish art on WWII and the Holocaust and its aftermath in Swedish art. A corresponding lacuna can be seen in the music area, where there is a lack of systematic surveys and analyses of to what extent composers related to the Holocaust. Such studies would be an important complement to Klas Åmark's newly published work on Sweden and Nazi Germany, Next Door to Evil. More extensive studies of immigrant music personalities, and their influence on the Swedish music scene, are further research areas that the project carved out but has been unable to explore in relation to time and resources.

International experiences:

The questions and results of the project have been internationally spread by way of conference participations in Oslo, London, Krakow, Ottawa, Boston, Nottingham, Dublin; through publications in international journals and anthologies; and visits to foreign archives (Berlin, Copenhagen, Vienna). Rosengren's monograph, From German Autumn to German Spring, is also scheduled to be published in German by the publisher Von-Bockel Verlag.

The project's key publications and a discussion of these:

Tanja Schult, "Susanne, Eva and Anna Berglind: two generations of artists and the Holocaust trauma," in Lars M. Andersson and Carl Henrik Carlsson (eds), From Silk Scarves to Refugee Policy: Jews in Sweden - a history of a minority; Uppsala 2013. The article describes how the Holocaust trauma affected individuals and family groups and attempts to analyze the processing of the trauma through art and communication between individuals and society.
Tanja Schult, "How deeply rooted is the Commitment to 'Never Again'? Dick Bengtsson's Swastikas and European Memory Culture", in Christian Karner & Bram Mertens (eds.), Nation States between Memories of World War Two and Contemporary European Politics; Transaction Publishers, 2013. The article deals with to what degree the Holocaust has become a recognized reference point for European memory culture and how politics affect our norms and values on a ritualized or deeper level.

Henrik Rosengren, From German Autumn to German spring: five Swedish music personalities in Swedish exile in the shadow of Nazism and the Cold War; Lund, (2013). The monograph is the main result of Rosengren's project and is a collective biographical analysis of the exile experiences of five musicians and their contribution to the Swedish music scene in the shadow of Nazism and the Cold War.
Henrik Rosengren & Tanja Schult, "Culture in the shadow of the Holocaust," SvD 30 March 2009. This article shows the project's intention to also move beyond a strict academic circle and present research questions and some partial results in a more public format.

Harald Runblom, Hugo Valentin: Life and Works, (forthcoming 2014). An intellectual biography about Hugo Valentin.

Project publishing strategy:
Rosengren's monograph will be available through Open access

More Publications:

Rosengren, ”Ernst Emsheimer – Uppbrottets och lojalitetens pris”, i Andersson, Lars M & Carlsson, Carl Henrik (red.) Från sidensjalar till flyktingpolitik.  Judarna i Sverige – en minoritets historia, Opuscula Historica Upsaliensia 50, 2013
Rosengren, ”Hans Holewa  och exilens dubbelhet”, Nordisk Judaistik, (kommande 2013)
Rosengren, Österreichisches Exil in Schweden. Maxim Stempel und Hans Holewa, i Irene Nawrocka(red.), Exil in Schweden. Österreichische Erfahrungen und Perspektiven in den 1930er und 1940er Jahren, Wien (kommande 2013)
Schult, Förordet till antologin Hitler für alle. Populärkulturella perspektiv på Nazityskland, andra världskriget och Förintelsen, Stockholm, 2012
Schult, ”Efter minnet finns det inget? Provokatören Dan Park”, i Hitler für alle. Populärkulturella perspektiv på Nazityskland, andra världskriget och Förintelsen, Stockholm, 2012
Schult, ˮFörintelsemonument i Sverige 1949–2009”, Nordisk Judaistik, (kommande 2013)
Schult, ”To go or not to go? Auschwitz’ Distance and Urgency in Contemporary Art”, i Diana Popescu & Tanja Schult , Why now and how. Holocaust Memory and Representation Revisited,  Basingstoke/New York (kommande 2014)
Schult, „Frühe Holocausterinnerung in Schweden. Denkmäler für Ermordete – und Gerettete.“ Wiener Wiesenthal Institut, (kommande 2014)
Schult har dessutom initierat och medverkat i utställningsprojektet Att återvända till Auschwitz som visas på Uppsalas konstmuseum 19 oktober till 27 november 2013 med verk av Torsten Billman, Lennart Didoff, Maciej Klauzner, Aleksandra Kuscharska, Lenke Rothman och Maria Sundström.
För fullständiga publikationslistor se respektive hemsidor:
http://www.hist.lu.se/person/HenrikRosengren
http://www.valentin.uu.se/om-oss/medarbetare/tanja-schult/
http://www.valentin.uu.se/om-oss/medarbetare/harald-runblom/