Johan Östling’s Acceptance Speech

The Acceptance Speech

Minister, Ludvig Holberg Memorial Fund, Nils Klim Prize Academic Committee, ladies and gentlemen

If studying history can teach us anything it is that all forecasts have inherent limitations and that all predictions are uncertain. This applies to the big things in life – what was once a small sect in the Roman Empire grew to become a world religion. And it applies to the small things in life – what looked like being a perfectly normal Thursday in early March turned into a red letter day for me. I was in the process of picking up my son from kindergarten when suddenly, amidst all the noisy children, I heard my phone ringing. I heard a friendly Norwegian voice on the other end telling me that I had been awarded the biggest prize a young Nordic scholar of the humanities can aspire to. I was overwhelmed then – and I still am. History, like life itself, is full of unexpected twists and paradoxical turns.

The Nazis dreamed of creating a thousand-year Reich, but their ideology was dead after just twelve years. But National Socialism has not yet lost its grip on our minds. During the post-war era, it served as a counterpoint to civilisation, a dark and insistent experience.

Nazism’s mysterious vitality formed the basis for my research. I have been fascinated by how today’s Europeans constantly navigate by the previous century’s great disasters. In my endeavours to understand these phenomena, I have been inspired, as the Nils Klim Committee so rightly points out, by ’the German intellectual tradition that suffered from the development of German Nazism’. A beautiful example of the dialectic of history.

During the years following Second World War, relations between Swedes and Norwegians were tense. Sweden had emerged unscathed from the war, but refused to confront the concessions to Nazi Germany. But history teaches us that forecasts are of limited use and predictions uncertain. This applies to the big things in life – active, transnational history studies have contributed for many years to dealing with the traumas of the 20th century – in Norway and Sweden and in the rest of Europe. And it applies to the small things in life – today, a young Swedish historian who is part of this research tradition has been rewarded with a big and prestigious Norwegian prize. More than anyone else today, he rejoices in history’s inscrutable ways.

Thank you.

Johan Östling
Nils Klim Prize Laureate 2010