Was Ingmar Bergman Really a Nazi? Stellan Skarsgård Saying the Director ‘Cried When Hitler Died' Reopens the Issue

Yahoo

5 days ago

Few actors today can toggle between massive blockbusters, like 'Dune,' and small-scale auteurist works, such as Joachim Trier's 'Sentimental Value,' with the ease of Stellan Skarsgård. And few are quite as candid when they open up.
As reported by Variety from the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, where the actor was promoting 'Sentimental Value' and on hand for a tribute, Skarsgård made some startling comments about Ingmar Bergman, whom the Swedish actor worked for on a 1986 stage production of August Strindberg's 'A Dream Play.'
More from IndieWire
Neon and The Future of Film Is Female Announce Winners of Spring Short Film Fund Competition
Harris Dickinson's Directing Debut 'Urchin' Acquired by 1-2 Special - It's One of Cannes 2025's Very Best Films
The actor talked about his personal dislike of Bergman, whom he found to be tyrannical and manipulative. Skarsgård links Bergman's attitude as a director to the fact that Bergman was a Nazi supporter during World War II. This may be new information to more casual cinephiles now, but Bergman's Nazi sympathies are widely known. Bergman never hid this, and admitted his affinity for Nazism was not just a teenage infatuation — it was only when the Holocaust's atrocities were revealed at World War II's end that he completely disavowed Hitler and Nazism.
'Bergman was manipulative,' Skarsgård said. '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.'
Most admirers of Bergman have accepted the director's disavowal of Nazism following the war. But Bergman was 26 when Hitler took his own life in 1945, and Bergman had already been a prolific stage director and had even written his first movie, 'Torment,' for the director Alf Sjöberg, by that point. Sweden had been officially neutral during the war, though various figures in its government were sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazi regime. Bergman himself went to great lengths not to excuse, ignore, or explain away his Nazi sympathies.
Bergman acknowledged seeing Hitler in person on a family trip to Weimar, Germany, in 1934 when he was 16. 'Hitler was unbelievably charismatic. He electrified the crowd,' Bergman told author Maria Pia-Boethius (as reported by the BBC), who wrote a book about what Sweden's neutrality really meant during the war. And he noted that his family put a photo of Hitler by the future director's bed afterward. 'The Nazism I had seen seemed fun and youthful.'
The director also acknowledged his support for Nazism in his own 1987 memoir, 'The Magic Lantern,' where he wrote, 'For many years, I was on Hitler's side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats.' And he admitted to Pia-Boethius that 'when the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open … I was suddenly ripped of my innocence.'
This is not a portrait of an unrepentant Nazi. And any cinephile can see Bergman's anguish over the horrors of war in 'Winter Light,' 'The Silence,' and 'Shame.'
Much of Skarsgård's distaste for Bergman seems to be personal. At Karlovy Vary, he also said, 'My complicated relationship with Bergman has to do with him not being a very nice guy. He was a nice director, but you can still denounce a person as an asshole. Caravaggio was probably an asshole as well, but he did great paintings.'
This follows comments he made in 2012 to The Guardian's Xan Brooks, where Skarsgård spoke similarly, including of Bergman that 'I didn't want him near my life.'
To his credit, Skarsgård is almost certainly not saying that Bergman's body of work should be dismissed the way that Cannes tried to dismiss his own longtime collaborator Lars von Trier — in 2011, Cannes officially declared von Trier 'persona non grata' for calling himself a Nazi in an instantly infamous press conference promoting his film 'Melancholia.' Skarsgård expressed an aversion to language-policing in his talk.
'Everyone in that room knew he was not a Nazi, that he was the opposite, and yet they all used it as a headline. And then people who only read headlines thought he was a Nazi. He just told a bad joke. Lars grew up with a Jewish father, and when his mother was dying, she told him he wasn't his real father. It was her boss, who was a German,' the Swedish actor said in defense of von Trier.
'When I meet people, especially in the U.S., they still [ask about von Trier's Nazi comment at Cannes]. You have so many banned words over there. My kids can say any words they want – it depends on what their intention is.'
However, that Skarsgård's comments about Bergman came up in the context of von Trier, it almost seems like the actor is saying, 'Why is one director persona non grata and another not?' And it's also important to recognize the full context that Bergman's Nazi sympathies in his youth are something he strongly turned against.
Best of IndieWire
Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See
'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie
Nicolas Winding Refn's Favorite Films: 37 Movies the Director Wants You to See
Solve the daily Crossword