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Historisk tidskrift 122:2 • 2002

Innehåll (Contents) 2002:2

Uppsatser (Articles)

Bilden av Ådalshändelserna 1931 – 70 år av kamp om historien

Roger Johansson

Fulltext (pdf)

Summary

The Images of the Events in Ådalen 1931

During a demonstration 1931, four men and one young woman were shot to death and five others injured by military troops ordered to Lunde harbour in Ådalen. Inspired by a number of other researchers (Koselleck, Samuel, Somers, Stråth, Södring, Jensen and Burke, to name a few), my investigation has analysed how the story of the dramatic events in Ådalen has been told and changed from the days following the shots until the 1990’s. It is about how Ådalen became a concept, which in its turn has become part of larger stories with strong symbolism. My investigation is connected to others that have looked carefully at the Welfare State and the Swedish Model. However, it attains its unique profile partly through its focus on Ådalen, but more specifically through the breadth of types of material and levels of material which make up the basis for analysis.

During the period 1940 until the late 1960s, the attitude taken by Per Albin’s social democrats was given hegemony by its interpretation of Ådalen and the Welfare State: this is shown by the fact that Ådalen became less prominent in text books and less studied by historians, it was less discussed and the controversy altogether less heated. In this way, the image of Ådalen can also be read in silence.

A number of historians have pointed out that we write history from the perspective of our own time and understand and interpret it from the point of view of our epoch’s social and cultural questioning. History is written in definite contexts, where we read ourselves into larger stories. In my analysis, this becomes clear in respect to the challenges of the late 1960’s. Very roughly, things stood thus: 1968 sees a change in the writing of history in the literature of, for example, Birger Norman, and in this literature’s positive reception by critics, in schoolbooks for the compulsory school in 1970, in 1976 in union historical texts, and finally in the 1980’s in university texts and in the social democratic rhetoric used in the 1982 election campaign. For the first time since the start of the 1930’s Ådalen was used by the social democratic campaign in agitation against the bourgeois parties and the Employers’ Federation, and some weeks later, 25 000 people heard how the theme was taken up again at the inauguration of Lenny Clarhäll’s monument in Lunde, Ådalen. Not least in the union historical texts, in the mid 1970s Ådalen clearly became a pedagogical example of the need for solidarity within the workers’ movement. There are differences as well as similarities in comparing school texts and union historical texts. The latter were an expression of the movement’s own writing of history. It seems as though it was a general tendency towards the politics of the left which brought Ådalen into school texts for the compulsory school in 1970, while the unions’ history writers reflect another discussion which came to prominence in the commemorative writings that appeared after the change of government in 1976.

Ådalen has truly worked as a metaphor and an image in the sense discussed in modern research: the events quickly became a highly charged story on which various groups struggled to imprint their interpretations. The name Ådalen has for decades been used time and time again as an image or as a marker in various interpretations of the growth of modern Sweden.