Lars von Trier: Nazi?

Self-described "best film director in the world" Lars von Trier, whose ouevre includes Dancer In the Dark and Breaking the Waves, has admitted to being a Nazi. "What can I say? I understand Hitler,"  Trier told The Hollywood Reporter at Cannes, where he is currently promoting his new film, Melancholia. "I sympathize with him a bit..."

For all I know, von Trier's disclosure was not serious, and merely a tasteless attempt to elicit attention and controversy. If not, he joins a distressing number of Scandinavian 81 candidates tainted by association with the tenents of National Socialism. Knut Hamson, the Nobel Prize winning Norwegian author of Hunger and Growth of the Soil, was famously a Hitler enthusiast. Norwegian traitor Vidkun Quisling was important for being precisely that. Ingvar Kamprad, the Swedish founder of IKEA seems to have enjoyed a youthful flirtation with fascism. Swedish explorer and writer Sven Hedin may have been a proto-Nazi, of sorts. Even Thor Heyerdahl, some claim, at one point evinced Nazi sympathies, although everything else I've ever read about Thor Heyerdahl makes me skeptical of this.

Fortunately, there are at least  as many proactively anti-Nazi Scandinavians of note. Lars von Trier's fellow Dane Niels Bohr played an active role in resucing Jewish physicists from Nazi Germany. Jewish himself on his mother's side, Bohr had to be smuggled out of German-occupied Copenhagen in a thrilling episode of Allied espionage. Once safe in neutral Sweden, he persuaded the reigning monarch to make public his country's offer of asylum to Danish Jews, contributing to the rescue of thousands.

Danish musical-comedian Victor Borge, whose birth name was Rosenbaum, toured across Europe satirizing the Nazis as early as 1933. Norwegian author Sigrid Undset was not Jewish, but an outspoken critic of Hitler from the moment he seized power; Hitler returned the compliment by banning her Nobel-prize winning novels from the Reich. Her son, a Second Lieutenent in the Nowergian army, was killed during the German invasion, but Undset escaped to the United States, where she spent the final productive years of her life pamphleteering on behalf of the victims of Nazi oppression.

Swedish humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg was, in the words of Gordon Brown, "a man who chose to enter into one of the darkest corners of Nazi-occupied Europe for the sole purpose of saving Jewish lives." I will have a good deal more to say about Wallenberg, but not until after I attend an upcoming lecture on him, later this month, at the Heritage Nordic Museum. For the moment, I will remark that he his credited with saving tens of thousands from Nazi extermination camps, more than Schindler.

The Norwegian Resistance to the Nazi occupation is also the subject upcoming lectures. For now, all I need note is that the Resistance, and its leader Gunnar Sonsteby (the very sound of whose name surrounds my heart with a warm, sweet glow) stand an example of heroism that should inspire humanity for as long as humanity exists.

Here at the Scandinavian 81 we maintain a strict policy of moral-neutrality with regard to our candidates' qualifications. This is a compilation of influential Scandinavians, not necessarily positively influential ones. A list of history's most influential Germans, for example, must include Hitler as well as Goethe and Guttenberg. (Please don't point out that Hitler was Austrian.) You must to acknowledge your dastards as well as your saints. Of the former, Knut Hamson and Vidkun Quisling easily qualify for inclusion. Less certain are Ingvar Kamprad, Sven Hedin and Lars von Trier; they're all strong candidates, but by no means locked in, according to the current state of our research. Of the anti-Nazis, Niels Bohr, Raoul Wallenberg, Sigrid Undset and Gunnar Sonsteby are all certainties; only Victor Borge might realistically not make the final cut. Perhaps, on due reflection, we're prejudiced in favor of the saints.