Swedish Proletarians towards Freedom: Ideals of Participation as Propaganda in the Communist Children’s Press of the 1920s
Alfred Andersson witnessed as a young boy the social and economic downside of Swedish class society during the mid-1920s. He was one of capitalism’s victims, doomed to a life of hard labour under unequal conditions. But Alfred refused to remain a victim: he fought back by organizing himself. This is, of course, if you believe his testimony in a two-piece letter published in the Swedish communist children’s periodical The Young Comrade (Den unge kamraten) in the beginning of 1924. In the letter he describes why he became a communist and how he successfully organized a local revolutionary children’s club.1 His is a model letter in the radical paper that targeted children between the ages of nine and 14. Young Alfred’s story touches upon several themes promoted by the editors. For instance, he doesn’t stay silent or accept things as they are. Rather he depicts himself in the position of an opponent to the current societal regime. In that position he opposes, for example, the inherited poverty that is most likely to make his a hard life as it had done his father’s. Furthermore, he opposes bourgeois children’s organizations such as the Scout movement or the Christian Sunday school. He turns to communism, therefore, as a way of liberating himself from oppression. From the editors’ point of view, his letter served as an inspirational didactic example depicting the need for class struggle.
Exporting the Nordic Children’s ’68: The global publishing scandal of The Little Red Schoolbook
The Little Red Schoolbook (1969) was one of the most well-travelled media products for children from ’68 aimed at children, and it was certainly the most notorious. Over the course of a few years (1970–2) it was translated and published in Belgium, Finland, France, Great Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, it also circulated freely in Austria and Luxembourg, and reached beyond Europe to countries including Australia, Japan and Mexico. It led to an obscenity trial in Great Britain, nearly toppled the Australian government, and caused a global publishing scandal. This essay therefore looks at the Scandinavian children’s ’68 in its international context, via a transnational, comparative analysis of the reception of the LRSB, in order to examine how ‘68 counterculture and ideas of childhood clashed and converged in the West around 1970. It asks: what can the publishing history of the LRSB tell us about the distinctive features of children’s media in Scandinavia at this time?
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of