Who remembers Wollter’s bloodthirsty friends?

That’s because Sven Wollter has long been active in the Communist Party, a party at the extreme left end of the spectrum whose microscopic voter support has no equivalent in the party’s grandiose ambitions. Their hope is to take up armed revolt; they believe that people with the wrong opinions and of the wrong class should be imprisoned and eliminated, that private property should be confiscated, and that dictatorship (more precisely, the dictatorship of the proletariat) should be introduced in Sweden.

The party platform states that the party “was born in the struggle against the corruption of Marxism and the castration of the revolutionary workers’ movement that was imposed by bourgeois powers in the leadership of Soviet Union’s Communist Party in the early 1960s.” Just to be safe, the view that Soviet Communism degenerated after the death of Stalin is spelt out further on in the platform, where the importance of the Party connecting to the “successes of Socialist construction in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s” is mentioned.

The Communist Party likewise pursues cooperation with various modern-day successors to Stalin, like North Korea’s “eternal president” Kim Il Sung. The current Party leader in Sweden, Anders Carlsson, maintains that the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a sovereign state that has the right by international law to produce the weapon systems the country believes it needs for its defence,” this in reference to nuclear weapons. In last year’s May 1 celebrations, Sven Wollter joined the Red Front march, along with Elina Bodin from the Swedish-Cuban Association and Christer Lundgren, chairman of the Swedish-Korean Friendship Association. Like Wollter, Lundgren held a speech during the festivities, which in keeping with the style closed with a performance by a “children’s choir from North Korea.”

The fact that Sven Wollter is a talented actor does not prevent it from being a serious problem that SVT so indefatigably takes part in polishing the Wollter bust, where the actor’s professions of sympathy for one of the absolutely worst terror regimes of our time are regularly presented as a pleasant oddity. It is enough to wonder what fate would have befallen a technically driven actor from Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theatre who had begun to express extreme-right sympathies in the same way. Letting a Nazi actor sit and smugly assess his life’s work would obviously have been impossible on Swedish public television.

That example says a lot about how half-hearted the Western world’s reckoning with 20th century Communist dictatorships has been compared with the well-founded criticism of the evil doings of Nazism. Seen from a broader perspective, this mollycoddling of Sven Wollter seems typical of the tendency to present Communist oppression, such as that exercised in East Germany, as relatively harmless. That is, precisely the tendency that Hubertus Knabe draws attention to in his book Die Täter sind unter uns (‘The perpetrators are amongst us’), which is discussed by several of the writers in this issue of Axess. Knabe has had to endure a great deal of criticism for having pointed out the parallels between Hitler’s and Honecker’s dictatorships. But in Knabe’s view, it is even more striking that the systematic reckoning with Nazism never had any real counterpart with Communism.

Instead of preserving the memory of the peaceful revolution in 1989, people have turned to “ostalgia”: nostalgic retrospectives of that era’s most typical aesthetic expressions and phenomena of the East European state: DDR propaganda posters, Trabant cars, Party emblems and so on. While there are no streets with names that recall the revolution twenty years ago, names from the Communist era are still legion, and whereas people in the DDR who were punished for their opposition to the regime live today on small pensions (because they had sat in prison or were blocked in their careers in the DDR), former Stasi heads are living today in the best of health. Which, by the way, is true of Erich Honecker’s widow, Margot, the education minister in the DDR from 1963 to 1989. She now lives in Chile, says she still believes in her old ideals and picks up her pension check for 1,500 euros every month from the German state at its embassy in Santiago.

Of course, all this comes into play for young people in Germany today who have serious gaps in their knowledge about the East German dictatorship. What’s worse, the conceptions that constituted the very foundation of the political systems in Eastern Europe are once again growing in popularity. Both in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe, political extremist movements are gaining ground and winning ever greater legitimacy. Media mollycoddling of famous people who sympathise with the extreme right or the extreme left scarcely forestall that kind of development.