Abstract

Politics and Scholarship Among Germans in Swedish Exile. The author's main source is H. Müssener's doctoral thesis on the fate of the about 5,000 refugees of German speech who left Hitler-dominated Europe for Sweden during the fateful years 1933-45. Thirty per cent left for political reasons. Only about 60 immigrants possessed an academic background. Well-known is the Swedish influence on Willy Brandt, Bruno Kreisky, Herbert Wehner and others. But whereas the political refugees could count upon the solidarity and assistance of their Swedish party associates, the academics would find themselves moving in a milieu which was still strongly influenced by the pro-German university tradition ever since the period of German cultural predominance following upon Bismarck's foundation of the Reich. Only two academics were awarded university professorships, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer in Gothenburg and the psychologist David Katz in Stockholm, who both had to cope with the prevalent positivistic orientation of Swedish philosophy. The pro-German attitude of the German departments, coupled with their purely linguistic tradition, made it impossible for two prominent scholars to obtain a subsistence within the universities: Walter Berendsohn and Käte Hamburger. In 1952, however, Berendsohn was given a readership at the university of Stockholm and thanks to him the German Department soon became a centre for literary research, especially with regard to German literature in exile. Also in musicology immigrants have come to play an important part. After the war German literary critics and journalists, many of them by this time bi-lingual , contributed to the re-establishment of cultural relations between Sweden and the German-speaking countries