The dark side of Swedish society

By Stephen Armstrong 700AM GMT thirteen March 2010

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The movie instrumentation of the initial book in Steig Larsson"s trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, opens in Britain this week Photo ALLSTAR

"Part of Swedens complaint abroad is that everybody thinks were similar to Abba and Ikea," says Stockholm-based stand-up stand up comic Magnus Betner. "Were a republic of pleasing people singing happy songs in in vogue modernist apartments. But thats not how we Swedes see ourselves. We have a very, unequivocally dim side, and I think youre usually usually anticipating out about it now."

Betner, the outspoken personality of Swedens surprisingly large stand-up humerous entertainment scene, has usually been requisitioned in to this summers Edinburgh Festival where, consciously or not, hes piece of a pointed informative advance by one of Europes oddest nations. Everywhere you spin in film, music, literature, conform and pattern theres a absolute Swedish presence.

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Recently, for instance, desirous shoppers were hospitalised following a host surge at a new Ikea store opening in North London. High-end character junkies, meanwhile, hunger for seat from Frant, an all-girl interior pattern company. Clubbers opposite the UK reserve for hours to listen to hip DJ organisation Swedish House Mafia, who will browbeat Ibiza this summer with their night at the islands select nightclub, Pacha. In pop, on the alternative hand, Swede Max Martin has ruled the charts for the past 10 years essay hits such as Baby One More Time for Britney Spears; I Kissed a Girl for Katy Perry and So What for Pink.

Now theres a surge of seductiveness in Swedish crime fiction, may be stirred by the BBCs extravagantly successful instrumentation of the Wallander array of crime novels by Swedish bard Henning Mankel, that stars Kenneth Branagh as the grouchy policeman. Mankels comptatriot, Steig Larsson, meanwhile, died from a heart conflict prior to saying his general bestselling Millenium Trilogy mortar him to the arrange of second-bestselling bard on the planet.

This week sees the movie instrumentation of the initial book in Larssons trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, expelled in Britain. So far, some-more than 2.5 million Europeans have seen the movie, and No Country For Old Men writer Scott Rudin has usually inked a understanding to have the Hollywood version. By the time Rudin has finished, majority millions some-more will have followed the story of inquisitive publisher Mikael Blomkvist and chaotic, freewheeling computer hacker Lisbeth Salander. What they find at the finish of that story, however, might shock them.

Tattoo starts as a slow-moving, kindly maturation investigator story but ends with scenes of abhorrence over anything Hannibal Lecter could imagine. Throughout the book version, Larsson keeps dropping genuine total relating to aroused crimes opposite women in Sweden. The Swedish pretension for the book is Men Who Hate Women, and footnotes allude to real-life incidents to insist how the illusory Salander whose polite rights are private at the humour of a decider is formed on genuine incidents.

Larsson, as with Betner and Mankell, spends majority of the time pulling detached the classify of happy-ever-after, ideally educated, socially approved and joyfully passive Swedes enjoying wild sex lives and ideally baked meatballs. The Millennium Trilogy marks Blomkvist and Salanders attempts to display puzzling murders in neo-fascist billionaire family groups as well as state-sanctioned aroused passionate abuse, paedophilia and rape. Larsson himself was a campaigning anti-Nazi publisher who set up his own version of the British anti-fascist repository Searchlight, so you can see because hed take this path. Mankell, however, was a timeless mainstream bard prior to he total Wallander. He did so in sequence to examine pedophile rings at the heart of Sweden"s security services and display open and institutionalised racism.

"Wallender was innate in May 1989 out of a need to speak about xenophobia. So the story came first, afterwards him," says Mankell. "I was essay the initial novel out of annoy at what was function in Sweden at the time the climb of xenophobia. That was my ambition. And, given acts of xenophobia are a crime, I indispensable a military officer.

"Even after the second and third books, I unequivocally wasnt meditative of a series. Then I realised I was formulating a apparatus that could be used to discuss it stories about the incident in Sweden in the Nineties."

Wallander and Blomkvist additionally wade by a little of the intensely upsetting undercurrents underneath Swedens tranquil amicable order. In Larsson and Mankels stories, both men confront Neo-Nazis who cooperate with Sapo, the Swedish version of MI5 and MI6 combined. In their version of Sweden, injustice is rife, assault opposite women is commonplace, whilst the trafficking of young kids for sex is facilitated by rarely placed lawyers and doctors.

One would be forgiven for dismissing these plotlines as pristine fantasy. After all, in 2007 Sweden was rated majority appropriate practising democracy by The Economist, slightest hurtful republic by Transparency International, majority subsequent to in gender family by the World Economic Forum, and majority inexhaustible donor of abroad growth assist by the OECD. Even the fable that the republic has an scarcely high self-murder rate isnt true. Coming about 35th in the world, Sweden comes in reduce than France, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. And yet, can it merely be fluke that last years exile Swedish movie hit, Let the Right One In, portrayed a kid evil spirit as a some-more trusting and sensitive figure than the bullying, undeveloped management total she encounters in 1980s Swedish society?

In 2007, the US State Department available 6,192 cases of kid abuse in Sweden by Nov of that year. It additionally reported homophobic crime was on the rise, and tens of thousands of rapes and made at home assault incidents in a race of usually 9 million. "Violence opposite women stays a problem," the inform concluded. Likewise, a 2006 inform from the organisation Global Monitoring on the blurb passionate exploitation of young kids found systemic faults in Sweden, together with permitting kid publishing to be viewed, nonetheless not downloaded, and unwell to caring scrupulously for young kids held up in sex trafficking.

Little of this would come as a warn to Larsson, Blomkvist or Salander, who confront all of this and some-more whilst questioning the heartless attempted murder of a child, assumingly at the hands of her rich, Nazi-sympathising family. "Sweden has nonetheless to come to conditions with the Nazi past," says Anna Blondell, who runs a Swedish grill in London. "We were neutral during the war, and the Nazi celebration still lives on. In fact, I think it will do well at the subsequent election, underneath a opposite name. Many people in the comparison era were unequivocally sensitive to Nazi ideas similar to eugenics but, distinct Germany, we have not so open about this."

Certainly the republic practised forced sterilisation of women deemed non-professional to be mothers until as not prolonged ago as 1975. Branded low class, or mentally slow, they were kept in Institutes for Misled and Morally Neglected Children, where they were in the future "treated". In 1997, the supervision certified that 60,000 women had been sterilised.

Meanwhile, Ikea owner and Swedens richest man Ingvar Kamprad suggested his childish Nazi sympathies in 1994, admissing to a nine-year loyalty with Per Engdahl, the plainly pro-Nazi personality of the Neo-Swedish movement. Kamprad claimed he couldn"t recollect if hed assimilated the Nordic Youth, Swedens homogeneous of the Hitler Youth. He apologised to staff in an open minute "Perhaps you find something in your girl you now, so prolonged afterward, think was silly and stupid."

Kamprad additionally certified to a drawn out Swedish clamp alcoholism. In a bid to curb binge drinking, the supervision has a corner on off-licences and closes them at 7pm. Drinking in the streets is illegal. Copenhagen, usually over the H2O from the Swedish locale of Malmö, receives hordes of booze-cruise Swedes each weekend.

So have we got Sweden all wrong? Is it still radically a republic of Vikings? Mankell bristles at the suggestion. "I would similar to to emphasize that Sweden is a unequivocally decent multitude to live in," he insists. "It would be silly to contend anything else. But we could have been improved currently if we had been opposite prior to if we hadnt thrown a couple of babies out with a little of the bathwater. I would similar to to shift that and we can usually shift by discussing. We know that if the complement of probity doesnt work, democracy is doomed. I think we are disturbed about that, so may be that is because investigator stories are so renouned in Sweden.

"Until not prolonged ago it was a unequivocally cold removed culture. Our art cant move about amicable change, but you cannot have amicable shift but arts."