Project description
Studying Scandinavian writers between tyranny and resistance
As Europe split along ideological lines in the 1930s and beyond, totalitarian regimes ramped up their use of culture as soft power. In Scandinavia, writers found themselves navigating overtures from both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the WatTs project sheds new light on this forgotten intellectual battleground. Specifically, it explores how national writers’ associations in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden responded to pressure, persuasion and propaganda. How did they resist or adapt? What values did they uphold? In recovering these histories, WatTs reveals how Scandinavian writers helped shape a transnational literary field and how they relied on common Nordic values when faced with tyranny.
Objective
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.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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5230 Odense M
Denmark
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