The Historians

I read Cecilia Ekbäck’s The Historians during the pandemic, attracted by its setting of neutral Sweden during WWII.

Before reading the book, I wondered about the exact shape of Swedish neutrality. I know from my familiarity with Ireland’s experience during the war that neutrality can mean a variety of things. Although Ireland was technically neutral, as many as 245,000 Irish people—or 8% of the population—migrated to Britain from 1939 to 1945, in order to join the armed forces or work in factories. I had the impression that Sweden might be the opposite: neutral on its face but working to help the German war effort behind the scenes. However, most accounts that I’ve read present a more complicated picture, including Ekbäck’s fictional one.

Sweden provided Germany with iron ore crucial to its wartime steel production, for use in planes, tanks, ammunition and other necessary items for its military campaigns. Before the war, Germany imported iron ore from several sources, but with the imposition of a British blockade, the nearby supply became critical. Access to Sweden’s iron ore was a decisive factor in the German invasion of Norway, since most the iron was mined in Kiruna and Malmberget in northern Sweden and shipped through the Norwegian port of Narvik, inside the arctic circle.

Ekbäck lives in Canada now, but was originally from northern Sweden. Roughly a third of the book is set on or near “Blackåsen Mountain,” a fictional Lapland mining town. Ekbäck explains that she envisioned the area as a mix of the northern villages she knew in childhood. Though most of the story takes place in Stockholm and the university town of Uppsala, some of the most important characters are from mining families, including the young historian whose murder sets off the action. The mountain serves as a place of secrets—and, possibly, of shame—looming in the background behind the more controlled and polished façade of the capital.

Though mining is a major theme, the true secret of Blackåsen has more to do with the treatment of the Sámi people than with iron and its centrality to the German war effort. The story ultimately concerns the ways in which Swedes resemble Germans, rather than the specific ways they helped the Blitzkrieg. Ekbäck seems more interested in the places that Nazi ideas and Swedish ones overlapped, and the mountain operates as a metaphor for that confluence, since it is a place encompassing both Sweden’s ties to Germany and its mistreated minority population. As her friend from university discovers, the young historian who gets killed was investigating the State Institute for Racial Biology—an organization sending representatives up north to measure the Sámi with calipers, among other unsavory activities.

Just as the mountain functions as a microcosm of Swedish right-wing tendencies, the old pre-war Uppsala University friend group stands in for the country’s foreign relations. In addition to the murder victim from northern Sweden, Britta, and her upper-class friend from Stockholm, Laura, we also meet the Norwegian Karl-Henrik, who ends up losing a limb in his work for the resistance; Erik, a Dane choosing to stay in Stockholm to escape the occupation of Copenhagen; and Matti, a Finnish nationalist who fought in the Winter War and is back in Sweden representing his country. The complexity of the interaction among the five old friends adds wrinkles to any simplistic picture of Swedish international ties. Although Sweden’s self-interest dictates its deferential posture towards Germany, the story suggests its primary relationships are to the other Nordic countries—the deep links, like the ones among the friend group, pre-dating the shallow mercenary demands of the present.

Laura’s attitude toward Karl-Henrik and Erik suggest that her most natural sympathies are with the residents of occupied countries, rather than their occupiers. This is true even though when they were younger members of her friend group had been seduced by some aspects of German racist ideology—in which, of course, they as Scandinavians fared pretty well. It is originally only the Finn in the group who can see the downsides of that particular worldview. Yet there is something of a reversal by 1943, when the story takes place, since two out of the three Scandinavian countries represented in their group have learned the reality of German ideas the hard way, whereas the Finnish member of the group found himself allied to the Germans, and resents Sweden for not joining Finland in its war with Russia.

This is not to say that the characters in the book are cardboard-cutout allegories. On the contrary, the suspenseful elements of the plot work very well, because the friendship between Britta and Laura feels realistic and compelling—unlike the pace or plot of some other mystery novels I could name. I kept coming back to that bond, when other parts of the story shaded into exposition or abstraction. It makes perfect sense that Laura would want to know what happened to her old friend, even though they were no longer in close touch. Given her social status and connections, she is well-placed to try. The contradictions in Britta’s character offer several different avenues of genuinely interesting investigation. Like Laura, the readers wants to get to the bottom of who she really was. For instance, Britta was seen with a Swedish Nazi leader before she died; were they fellow travelers, or was she a kind of spy?

The attendant lurking question of the nature of Sweden’s wartime attitude is never far behind, but for me at least, it did not intrude on the flow of the story.