Bauer's History

 For the past months a debate raged hard in Sweden. The catalysmic event was that the Sweden parliament was going to vote on simplyfing a the process of doing a judicial change of gender and lowering the age-limit to 16. The right-wing populist, followed by the christian right, made a call for their supporters to gather under a banner which aimed to stop this legislation from being passed. A call that however not suceeded since the parliament finally, after hours of debate, managed to passed the bill.  As a historian of sexuality I closely followed this debate, as filled with scientific errors it was. However, one of the right-wings MEP asked the following question: when are you woman? A question, that though aiming at ridiculing the supporters of the bill actually pin-points what many gender historians have asked themselves. It also shows the need to educate on what exactly gender theory is, and how it operates. A task which is not simple, nor have a clear-cut answer. In this...

 For the past week I have been reading a quite different book from what I usually read on my sparetime. Since I read alot of history in my line of work I seldom read books on social science or popular history, due to that it basically would mean to work in the little spare-time I have. However, I made an exception for the book Veras Resa - min syster nationalsocialisten (Veras Journey - my sister the national socialist) by Folke Schimanski.  In Swedish political history, you will sooner or later encounter Vera Oredsson (née Schimanski) whom for the past six decades been part of the right wing extremist environment. Furthermore, part of her infamousy comes from her being the first female party leader when she in briefly held leadership over the Nordic Reich Party (swedish Nordiska Rikspartiet), which in reality was chaired by her husband Göran Oredsson. Much can be said about Vera Oredssons life but to keep it short the following summary can work: Oredsson was born in Berlin in...

 For the past two weeks I have been reading a book called "The poor in lodz" (om Swedish de fattiga i lodz") which deals with life in a Polish ghetto during WWII. This ghetto was an exception in many ways, both due to its large production for the German army and that it never rebelled. Instead it stayed in operation until the summer of 1944, when Germany in a last desperate attempt to finish its dark deeds deported all of its inhabitants to finish its dark deeds. At the center of the story is Chaim Rumkowski, who for decades have allured historians. He was the elderly jew of the ghetto and had chief responsibility for almost a quarter million persons. During the war, he tried to negatotiate with the German authorities and tried to reach an agreement in which the Jews would not be deported to concentration camps in exchange for their slave labor. As a leader Rumkowski is remembered as a traitor, since he collaborated with the German authorities. Furthermore, he was prone ...

One of the main things I love about history is that the more I learn, the more taken for assumption knowledge is challenged. Since I've for the past year have been reading alot about the history of gender and sexuality, I've come to learn that our common perceptions of the past is often wrong. One such example is a doctoral dissertation by Sofia Kling titled " Vi våga ej helt leva " (we dare not to fully live) which discusses the fertility transformation that took place during the early 20th century.  Klings point of departure is a phenomena which have been the subject of debate within the discipline of demographics: in the first decades of the 20th century the western world faced a decline in birth rates. This decline can not be connected to natural events or enviromental factors that affects fertility. Instead the decline have to have it's root causes within human behaviour and a variety of ideas have been put forward to explain it. This fertility transition als...