Was Ingmar Bergman really a Nazi?

Telegraph

9 hours ago

During his lifetime, and beyond, the film director Ingmar Bergman was widely believed to be a genius. Yet even geniuses have their flaws, and Bergman came festooned with his: allegations (put into the public domain by himself, before he thought better of it) that he raped a former partner of his; an embarrassing arrest for tax evasion and, most notoriously of all, the suggestion that he spent his youth as a fully paid-up Nazi supporter who bitterly mourned the death of Hitler.
The last and most damaging story recently re-entered the public domain courtesy of the actor Stellan Skarsgård. While Skarsgård was attending the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic, where he was promoting Joachim Trier's acclaimed new film Sentimental Value, in which he plays a Bergman-esque director named Gustav Borg, he was asked about his own relationship with Bergman. (He had acted for him in the Eighties in a stage production of Strindberg's A Dream Play.)
Skarsgård did not mince his words. 'Bergman was manipulative. He was a Nazi during the war and the only person I know who cried when Hitler died. We kept excusing him, but I have a feeling he had a very weird outlook on other people. [He thought] some people were not worthy. You felt it, when he was manipulating others. He wasn't nice.'
Skarsgård acknowledged that Bergman was still capable of greatness as an artist, if not a human being. 'My complicated relationship with Bergman has to do with him not being a very nice guy,' he explained. 'He was a nice director, but you can still denounce a person as an a--hole. Caravaggio was probably an a--hole as well, but he did great paintings.'
Skarsgård wasn't commenting on any fresh revelations, yet the actor's remarks have nevertheless caused something of a furore – not least because Bergman, who died in 2007, is widely regarded as one of the most significant and important film directors who ever lived.
From his breakthrough in the 1950s with the films Smiles of a Summer Night and, especially, the seminal The Seventh Seal to such classics of cinema as Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander, and Persona, Bergman became synonymous with challenging, always boundary-pushing cinema that appealed to audiences and his peers alike.
Martin Scorsese said that 'it's impossible to overestimate the effect that Bergman's films had on people' and Stanley Kubrick wrote privately to the film-maker: 'Your vision of life has moved me deeply, much more deeply than I have ever been moved by any films. I believe you are the greatest film-maker at work today.'
Woody Allen went further, however, not only by calling Bergman 'probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera', but by making several pictures, including Interiors and Another Woman, that were overt homages to the director. His 1982 film A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy was a loose remake of Smiles of a Summer Night.
Such was Allen's admiration for Bergman that, when he even glowingly reviewed his memoir for the New York Times in 1988, he did not even consider the revelation worth mentioning. 'The picture one gets,' he wrote, 'is of a highly emotional soul, not easily adaptable to life in this cold, cruel world.' However, his idol's party line was to admit to a youthful flirtation with fascism, something that was long since abandoned by the time that he became one of the world's best-respected film-makers.
Bergman first saw Hitler when he was 16, on a school exchange trip to Germany in 1934, when he was taken along by his Hitler Youth-supporting host, Hannes, to the Weimar Republic. The impressed youth later described the dictator as 'unbelievably charismatic… he electrified the crowd.'
Hannes's father, a clergyman, was sufficiently impressed by the Führer not only to festoon his house with images of him, but to give Bergman a picture of his idol as a gift on his 17th birthday, 'so that you will always have the man before your eyes'. When his young guest, anxious to fit in, asked at what point during the rally he should shout 'Heil Hitler', the pastor replied: 'That's considered more than mere courtesy, my dear Ingmar.'
By Bergman's own admission, he was a 'pro-German fanatic' by the time that he returned home to Sweden, seduced and impressed by Hitler and all things National Socialist.
Unfortunately, he found himself in simpatico company. His father Erik, who later inspired the film Fanny and Alexander, was an unrepentantly Right-wing figure who believed that Hitler was the answer to the world's problems. As Bergman told the writer Maria-Pia Boëthius in 1999 – she was questioning the truth behind Sweden's much-vaunted neutrality in the Second World War – 'The Nazism I had seen seemed fun and youthful. The big threat were the Bolsheviks, who were hated.'
Although the director himself did not participate in any overt anti-Semitic actions, his brother Dag joined some friends to attack the house of a local Jewish man, covering the walls with swastika symbols. (Dag would later become a respected diplomat.)
Bergman himself soon saw the consequences of his association in a small but chilling fashion. When he visited Germany, he befriended a local girl named Renata, and began a correspondence, only for this to come to an end when Renata and her family simply vanished one day. They were, of course, Jewish.
Although Bergman spent some mandatory time in military service in Sweden, he did not fight in the war. If he had done so, it is likely that his loyalty would have been to Germany. Unlike Dag, however, he was never a member of the Swedish National Socialist Party, which his brother was responsible for founding and operating.
Still, as he wrote in his 1987 memoir The Magic Lantern, 'for many years, I was on Hitler's side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats.' Yet the eventual awakening that he faced came shortly after the end of the war and the subsequent collapse of Hitler's regime. 'When the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open, at first I did not want to believe my eyes,' he would say. 'When the truth came out it was a hideous shock for me. In a brutal and violent way I was suddenly ripped of my innocence.'
Those who have attempted to excuse Bergman's youthful folly have argued that, although Bergman did not fully repudiate Hitler and Nazism until 1946, when he came to an understanding of what he had been impressed by, it was a seismic shock to him that changed the course of his life and career.
As he told his friend and producer Jörn Donner: 'My feelings were overwhelming and I felt great bitterness towards my father and my brother and the schoolteachers and everyone else who'd led me into it. But it was impossible to get rid of the guilt and the self-contempt.'
Thereafter, many of his films and stage productions dealt explicitly with the evil caused by the Nazi regime, whether it's his English-language picture, 1977's The Serpent's Egg, which is set in 1932 Berlin, or his decision to stage Peter Weiss's The Investigation, about the Auschwitz trials, in Stockholm in 1966.
Several of his most acclaimed pictures also looked, more obliquely, at themes of guilt and lack of communication brought on by conflict, including 1963's The Silence, which follows the journey of two sisters and was inspired by Bergman spending time in post-war Germany. Or 1968's Shame, in which a marriage, and an unnamed country, are both torn apart by civil war.
It would be reading too much into these films to see them as a straightforward apologia for his earlier beliefs – which in any case were not common knowledge until the publication of his memoir – but there can be little doubt that they weighed upon him.
It would also be a mistake to take Bergman's comments at face value. As Jane Magnusson, who made the documentary Bergman: A Year in the Life, said in 2019: 'The fact that he had sympathies with Hitler… he wanted to talk about them. And nobody else did. He was pretty much alone in Sweden when he came out in the ​1980s and said, ​'I went to Germany, I was in Weimar during the parade and I yelled ​'Heil Hitler!' And I loved it.'
'It's horrible that he didn't reject Hitler before 1946. It is very late. That's a problem. But I don't think Bergman thought Hitler was a good idea because he hated Jews. Sweden was very afraid of Russia at that time and I think he just thought that it was better than what's going on with them.'
It is also likely that Bergman never fully repudiated his youthful Right-wing views. The director Roy Andersson, who studied at the Swedish Film Institute Film School in the late Sixties, remarked that '[Bergman] was a so-called inspector of the film school that I attended, and each term we were called and we had to go to his office and he gave some advice, or even some threats, and he said, 'If you don't stop making Left-wing movies… If you continue with that you will never have the possibility to make features. I will influence the board to stop you'.
Bergman often described the most traumatic event of his lifetime as being his 1976 arrest on income tax evasion charges. These were eventually dropped, but caused him to leave Sweden for Munich. From there, he continued his career, albeit to diminishing artistic returns. It would not be until he returned to Sweden in 1982 for Fanny and Alexander – an epic often considered Bergman's crowning achievement – that he would make another truly acclaimed film.