“This incendiary message was broadcast from Berlin to hot-blooded Spain by dazzling, blonde Brita Brager. It had a coldblooded purpose: to persuade Spaniards that signing up for work in German munitions plants would be a short cut to a life of opulent lechery.” According to this Time story from 1943, Ms Brager was the 23-year-old daughter of a Swedish naval attaché, presumably in Madrid, but other information is hard to find and I don’t know how many Spaniards listened to this kind of stuff anyway.

The interesting thing about this is its place in the development in Spain of the myth of Swedish ingénu nymphomania. In the world at large, which is to say the US, the perception that the Swedes had some rather strange customs seems to have taken hold in the 1950s with legal and media controversies concerning films like One summer of happiness and then Bergman’s Summer with Monika. Then in the 1960s came more high-brow, which is to say unbearably pretentious, screen porn from Vilgot Sjöman, and the launch in 1965 by the great entrepreneur of Swedish hardcore, Berth Milton Snr, of an alternative, popular meme stream in the shape of Private magazine. Several dozen people in Spain may have known who Bergman was (he first appears in La vanguardia only in 1958), but films in general didn’t make it over the border while magazines sometimes did. My impression is that Private was important in fleshing out and generalising the Swedish knocker in Spain, but that stuff was already happening in the 1940s and 1950s, if not before. The question is what. I suppose I really need to go and sit in bars and chat up retired truckers. The thought does not entice.

[
To say of a radio station that "It sends in 153 languages and dialects" strikes me as very unusual. The use here is close to telecomms use and also recalls 19th century poetic jargon, but I don't think I've ever seen it in this specific context before.
]

Tags: Berth Milton, private magazine, Swedish totty
Categories: Les bourgeois, The family, Theatre, Vegetables

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1. Aidan Kehoe
   November 23rd 2008 12:19

   Someone was calquing the German, hahah.

2. » “What is art in Latin countries is obscenity in the Nordic north”
   November 23rd 2008 20:02

   [...] had a bit more Time than I did and kindly sent me an article from 1930 which turns the tables on the filthy Swedes discussed this morning. It seems that towards the end of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship the Spanish postal service [...]