The Battle of the Umlauts - a Short TL

[Utgard96]

”Well, to outsiders we may look quite similar, but that’s not how anyone here sees it.”

These were the first words spoken by anyone I interviewed during my week-long tour of Scania, and in many ways, they encapsulate the entire history and worldview of the Scandinavian nations. There’s no way to tell a Dane apart from a Swede on sight, and to us outsiders, their languages can seem almost laughably similar (although this is less the case for the spoken languages than the written ones). But the idea that they’re somehow part of the same people is one that has been categorically rejected throughout a millennium of history, and the two nations have fought more wars than any two other countries in Europe.

The man who uttered the words is Gustav Adolf Delsing, Professor of Nordic Languages and History at the Caroline University of Lund, the oldest and most respectable place of learning in Scania. Its campus looks exactly like what we’ve come to expect from university campuses by popular culture – old brick buildings, many of them covered in ancient, unruly branches of ivy, and surrounded by maples whose leaves have just begun to turn from calm, reliable green to bright flaming red. Ten years ago, one might have turned them into a metaphor for the province as a whole, with its dysfunctional, occasionally violent politics turning on issues of identity more often than issues of governance. Scania has calmed down in recent time, but the old divides remain.

Professor Delsing is a redoubtable old Protestant gentleman from Sweden proper, who therefore has a somewhat more grounded view of local history despite his faith. I ask him why he believes Catholics and Protestants have been unable to bury the hatchet here of all places.

“There’s just too much history. Ask a Swede about Denmark, and he’ll tell you about the Stockholm Bloodbath, Christian II’s machinations against the Swedish Reformation and support for Sweden’s Catholic bishops, and the abuses of the Catholic Church. Ask a Dane about Sweden, and he’ll tell you about Charles X’s campaigns, about priests being slaughtered in the street by raucous Swedish men at arms, about the conquest of Scania and the suppression of the Church there. This university was founded to provide instruction for Protestant clergy in Scania, with the dual goal of spreading Lutheran doctrine and establishing Swedish as the sole language. As you can tell, neither part worked all that well, but people remember these things. When there’s fighting in the streets, they do. And it took until the 1970s before we started to admit Catholics on equal basis, so for many people, the memories are first-hand.”

“Too much history” is an understatement if it’s anything. Scania changed hands in 1658, but the story really begins with the Protestant Reformation in the 1520s. When it first began, Denmark and Sweden were busy fighting – because of course they were – but with Sweden under the heel, Christian II was free to crack down on the doctrines for a short time, issuing formal condemnations of Hans Tausen (the leader of the Danish Protestants) and his followers, and vigorously propping up the Catholic clergy in Sweden. Gustav Trolle, the Archbishop of Uppsala, was one of Christian’s main allies, and on his return to Denmark, Trolle was left partially in charge of Swedish affairs. This would have a profound effect on the course of both Swedish and Danish religious history. When Gustav Vasa secured Swedish independence, he charged Trolle with treason and wanted him executed, but the Vatican interceded on account of his episcopal dignity, which incensed Gustav to no end. A few years later, he broke with the Catholic Church and endorsed Olaus Petri’s Swedish translation of the Bible – in 1527, the Riksdag of Västerås gave formal authority to confiscate all Church lands. In Denmark there was a ten-year interregnum before Christian was able to return to the throne, by then a committed counter-reformer, and with the appearance of a Danish delegation at the Council of Trent, the country visibly marked its return to the Catholic fold.

It's understandable, then, that Sweden’s conquest of the whole eastern third of the Danish realm a little over a century or so later ruffled some feathers. The Archdiocese of Lund was suppressed, replaced with a Protestant superintendent who answered to the King of Sweden and the Superintendent-General of Uppsala. The printing of Bibles in Danish was at first encouraged, but subsequently the practice was stamped out in favour of allowing no written language other than Swedish to be used for religious purposes. The Scanians rose up in revolt, and the Danish used it as a pretext for crossing the Sound, on three separate occasions in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Since then, there has been only limited military action by Denmark against Scania, but there’s always been undertones in the background.

“Oh yes,” says the Professor when I ask him about this. “Denmark continued to send aid to Scanian rebels well into the 19th century, and funded most of the clandestine churches in the province until the passage of the Dissenter Acts [allowing free practice of Catholicism and other state-approved forms of religion] in 1886 and 1887. Even since then, and especially during the bad years of the 80s and 90s, there have been persistent rumours among some of the Protestants in Scania that the Catholic groups are being funded by the Danish Crown and/or the Vatican. I personally give no credence to this – the Danish government hasn’t claimed Scania in a serious way for nearly a century now, and it’s hard to see what they’d have to gain by funding terrorism.”

Heading back to the railway station through the streets of Lund, it is indeed hard to see – this remarkably well-preserved medieval city feels very much like an oasis, the eye in the storm that is Scania and its heritage. But as ever, there are signs that this is not the case – the bins all have complex lids designed to prevent anyone being able to attach explosives to them, and in one place on Petri Kyrkogata the rows of old buildings are suddenly interrupted by a huge concrete edifice, the city council rooms, which according to a sign outside was built on the location of three previous houses which were exploded by the Scanian Freedom Army in 1977. There are lamppost stickers left over from the May elections, with various slogans from either side, and of course the flagpoles outside the city council building are flying the Swedish flag at full staff, as they’re required to do every day of the year. I’m forced to remind myself that the peace and quiet is probably less because of Lund’s denizens being able to set their differences aside, and more because there just aren’t that many Catholics around to cause divisions. Lund remains a Protestant city, and therefore somewhat aloof from the conflict.

As I board the train, I’m sure matters will be different in Malmö…

 

[Utgard96]

There’s something unmistakeable in the air from the moment of stepping off the train into Malmö’s ageing red-brick Central Station. This place has been in the news so many times that it’s become something of a byword for terrorism, in much the same way as Koloszvár or Havana have for other parts of the world, but as one might expect, the locals are uncomfortable with this reputation. A large banner hanging in the station hall welcomes visitors to the “City of Parks”, and the image of greenery and water is prominent in the brochures I find at the tourist office across the road from the station. They have been trying for some time to find a suitable tourism slogan, I’m told – including one memorable incident in 2009 when they tried to celebrate Scania’s agricultural heritage by referring to the large production of rapeseed in the province, getting the English translation ever so slightly wrong and birthing a short-lived sensation on the teletype in the process. Of course, the translation mistakes go both ways, as anyone who has heard the ten or so variant pronunciations of “Malmö” that can be heard in foreign media can attest. Matters are of course not helped by the dispute over whether Ö or Ø is the appropriate letter to use in the city’s name, a question so heavily steeped in sectarianism that more and more public sources opt for the internationalised “Malmo” as a neutral position.

It’s not far from the station to the hotel – across the canal and then across the street, in fact. Both Malmö and Lund once had broad ramparts protecting the city from attack, and while Lund’s ones are long gone, Malmö has retained the former city moat in the form of a roughly rectangular canal enveloping the historic city centre. Boats have run around it in summer for the benefit of tourists, but as of now the service has stopped, and in the colder seasons the canal is largely disused. It was the scene of 1998’s “Walpurgis Bath” incident, where a number of largely Protestant students from the Borgarskolan grammar school celebrating Walpurgis Night were run into the canal by members of a pro-Danish student society at Malmö Latinskola, but with that exception it is about the only part of Malmö where there have been no noteworthy attacks of any kind. This can perhaps be explained by the existence of Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods both inside and outside the canal, which has made it something of a unifying symbol as one of the few structures prominently associated with neither side.

The first person I’m meeting with is Per Gahrton, deputy leader of the Scanian Democrats party and one of Malmö’s twenty deputies to the Lantdag. The Democrats are technically a unionist party as they advocate no change from the status quo, but have always stood for (their own brand of) common sense before sectarian divisions. They’re dogged in this by their almost exclusive association with the Protestant part of the province, having only a small number of prominent Catholic members, and their failure to extend far beyond the Malmö-Lund area and surrounding exurbs. Of their ten deputies, only one represents a rural division, and it is Österlen, filled with middle-aged transplants from the metropolis and differing significantly from the rest of the province in many ways. Gahrton represents Malmö West and Limhamn, a largely Protestant division where he polled second in the personal vote for the 2016 elections, narrowly beaten by Mårten Billström, the top candidate for the Union Party.

I meet Gahrton in his constituency office, which is in a block of flats on a side street not far from Fridhem, the most important commercial centre in the western part of the city. This isn’t remotely unusual – even the Union Party have frequently resorted to renting office space in most of suburban Malmö, the Lodges of Vasa increasingly being seen as somewhat impolitic meeting places for the party itself. Gahrton is well-known for holding biweekly open houses where his constituents can come to him with their issues, which puts him a cut above most politicians here in terms of outreach, and very likely has a part to play in his popularity. As I enter the office, I realise it’s the day of one such meeting as there’s a sign on the door and chairs lined up along one of the walls.

My first question is simple. Why is the province still so deeply divided?

He laughs. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Personally, I’d like nothing more than for us to be like the rest of Sweden, or indeed Denmark” – he seems to add on the latter part as an afterthought – “but it seems not many people agree with me. People still take stock in their religious and cultural identity, and ultimately that determines who they vote for more than any policy question. It seems to be changing in some sections of society – we managed to beat the Union Party in Malmö Central last time, for the first time ever, and we got within ten percent of them in this division. But in most of the rest of the province, the politics of identity still reigns, and it’s showing very few signs of stopping.”

“Is it fair to categorise things that way? Wouldn’t it be possible to say that the moderation of the Union and Labour Parties in recent years means that some people have begun to vote for them out of ideology rather than identity?”

“Possibly, but it’s hard to see evidence of that happening. And in any case, once elected, they seem not to act on that much. The Union Party seems to be more willing to work with the Scanian League than they are to work with us or Labour, we saw that clearly after the last election, and I think it’s a shame that they’d rather govern with sectarian nutters than work constructively for the good of the province with us.”

“So you disagree with the view that the Premier is moderate to liberal by the standards of his party?”

“By the standards of his party, I don’t know, but he’s no moderate by any standard I can subscribe to.”

As I leave his office, I’m surprised by how anyone with a temperament like Gahrton’s can be considered a popular affable moderate, but of course, I’ve only been in Scania for two days.

 

[Utgard96]

The suburbs of Malmö grew in two phases – first along the roads leading out of town in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then in the 1950s and 60s to fill in the empty spaces between the corridors formed by the first phase. The Old Town was divided between the wealthy Protestant west and the poor Catholic east, and as first-phase suburbs sprang up, they largely took after the character of the established neighbourhoods closest to them. The western suburbs, thus, took after the western Old Town and became home to the wealthier elements of the city (although Limhamn, being an old industrial town, tempered this somewhat in the southwest), and the eastern suburbs became populated largely by the lower social classes, which due to the discriminatory housing practices of the time disproportionately meant Catholics. This created the divide that has defined Malmö ever since, although the slum clearances of the post-Baltic War period led to the entire Old Town being thoroughly gentrified and, to compensate, many of the social housing projects in the southwest were quite socioeconomically, and indeed religiously, mixed. Perhaps for that reason, it was at Lorensborg, a high-rise social housing development in the southwest, that violence first came to Malmö’s streets in 1973.

At the southern end of Pildammsparken, site of the highly successful Baltic Exhibition of 1914, there stands a slab of rock. It’s quite unremarkable Scanian granite, cut into a perfect rectangle with the proportions 1:4:9, and the southern side bears an inscription reading as follows: “ON THE 4TH OF MARCH, 1973, NEIGHBOUR FOUGHT NEIGHBOUR ON THIS STREET, AND NINE OF MALMÖ’S SONS PASSED INTO THE ARMS OF THE LORD”. Below this are the names of the nine victims, and the words “LET US NEVER FORGET”. It’s a tasteful memorial to an event whose proportions almost make it seem understated, but such are the Scanians – like their neighbours, they don’t put much stock in ostentatiousness, and would see a more prominent memorial as calling undue attention to a situation many would rather forget.

Lorensborg was a model development, built in the mid-1950s alongside the stadium of Malmö FF (one of the city’s two main football clubs, alongside Rosengaard Idrætsforening – the two have their base mainly among Protestants and Catholics respectively), and under the social housing system then in use, its two thousand flats were reserved almost entirely for the Protestant community. Across the green, Borgmästaregården/Borgmestregaarden (the stroke is part of the official name, and for this reason the area is commonly known simply as BMG) was home to a mixture of groups, but over the course of the 1960s became more and more Catholic, and resentment began to grow as services were more and more concentrated west of the stadium in Lorensborg. That BMG was split between two majority-Protestant wards, and as such had no chance of electing sympathetic councillors, did not help matters. Borgerretsforeningen (the Civil Rights Union), set up in 1970, organised BMG residents, and in 1972 the Union held a march from the more deprived Catholic-majority suburbs to Malmö Castle to show their dissent. The BMG section happened to march through Lorensborg, and resultant tensions caused two people to be significantly injured.

No fatalities occurred as a result of the 1972 march, but it nonetheless sparked the decent into regular open street violence that marked Scania in the early 1970s. The Swedish state and the Scania Police Board responded by cracking down on suspected separatist movements in 1973, arresting over a hundred people on various more or less factual conspiracy charges. In response to this, a second march was held, this time with a single route in order to safeguard the marchers from attack. Nevertheless, on passing the MFF stadium, the march was faced with a police cordon designed to prevent them from entering Lorensborg, and while most marchers were diverted, some attempted to rush the cordon. The question of responsibility for the resulting violence has been argued to death over the forty years that followed, but suffice it to say that the hussars were called in from their nearby garrison to contain the rising anger within the march, and by the end of the day nine people lay dead and another twenty or so were seriously injured in the fighting, including one policeman.

Since then, the stadium site has become a focal point of activism on both sides of the divide, from the “Marches for Peace” of the 1990s to the several anti-Danish rallies staged by MFF supporters outside their stadium. A number of Swedish and Scanian flags are raised above the stadium as I walk by, and additional Swedish flags can be seen hanging from windows in the Lorensborg tower blocks, but there are precious few people actually around. The Swedish league system, which every Scanian club except Trælleborg IK and Ramløsedrengerne belongs to, plays over the summer rather than following the continental football season, and MFF played its last scheduled match of the year over two months ago. That ended in failure against Skånska AIF, a Gothenburg-based club largely supported by that city’s Catholic community, which itself went on to lose the finals to Norrköping.

It’s a short walk from Pildammsparken to Møllevangen, the traditional centre of Malmö’s Danish Catholic community and one of few places in Scania to spell their name with an Ø in all official capacities. It’s one of the better-preserved areas in the city on balance, with old tenement houses from the late 19th century lining the narrow but regular streets and a main square filled with café tables and market stalls selling almost everything under the sun in this relatively insular part of the world. It’s here that I’ve come to meet with the new leader of the Labour Party.

Once the dominant force within the Catholic community, the rise of Gorms Hær has chipped away at Labour’s hold outside Malmö and Helsingborg, where they retain a few disparate pockets of strength. The party’s future has been uncertain since the end of physical-force separatism, but hopes remain that economically left-wing voters will stick with their party, and many within the party are hoping that making a stronger case for radical ideology will help attract voters from across the sectarian divide.

Mikkel Wiehe had been a prominent voice on that wing of the party for decades prior to winning the leadership, originally as a protest singer and later as a member of the Lantdag, always based in this part of the city. His style has never been directly aggressive, but always pointed and headstrong, and he became known for sparring with the party leadership over the agreement with the Unionist minority government in the 2004-08 Lantdag. It speaks volumes about the doldrums the party faces that after the 2016 election, with their previous leader having lost her seat, Wiehe was given the nod as seemingly the only popular figure remaining in the party.

I meet him in the outdoor tables of a pub on Møllevangstorvet, the neighbourhood square and centre of commerce, which is decorated with a rather battered equestrian statue of Charles XIV Gustaf, the king who repelled the last Danish invasion of Scania in 1774. The statue has been controversial, and was frequently defaced and vandalised during the late troubles, but it has survived to the present day nonetheless. I decide to open the interview by asking Wiehe about it, and to my surprise, his response is not to criticise the placement of such a triumphalist statue in an overwhelmingly Catholic area.

“You know,” he says and looks off into the distance, “in a way, that statue is Malmö. It was once a slab of stone taken from up in the hill country, then the city fathers took it, shaped it, moulded it to fit their view of what a city should be. The city fathers of Malmö were seeing things from their Swedish Protestant perspective, where everything was about kings on horses, and glorious victories, and the watch on the Sound, and all the other things. But that wasn’t how the people who actually lived in the city saw things, and so they tried their best to reshape the statue to fit their view of what the city should be. Sometimes they used violent means, sometimes not, sometimes they succeeded, sometimes they didn’t. But they resisted. And today the statue looks very different from what the city fathers intended, but nonetheless one can admire it for its resilience and the organic nature of how it earned its shape.”

“Do you believe it will continue to change in that way?”

“Of course. When we look at the course of human events, ironically enough, the only constant is change. Malmö will keep on changing for as long as it exists, because the people who inhabit it will keep on changing. It’s not inevitable for that change to be violent, and I certainly hope it won’t be, but the change itself is inevitable. And anyone who recognises this, anyone who admits that change is coming and doesn’t try to fight it, no matter their religion or culture, is welcome to help shape the future face of the province in their own image.”

We continue in that path of discussion for some time more, until I interject by asking to turn the conversation to politics. The leader of the Labour Party replies in a very characteristic way – he strokes his beard, looks at me and says “Were we not talking about politics before, then?”