The Utility of the ‘Other’: German Representations of Sweden in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This article analyses the representations of Sweden in a renowned and widely read German periodical, the Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, during the period 1753–92. The investigation demonstrates how a European country could be imagined and put to use in a nearby state, where its mental and physical closeness gave it the ambiguous status of a proximate ‘other’. Although Anzeigen identified with the northern kingdom in many respects, Sweden’s nature and climate, indigenous Lapp population and remaining German provinces constituted a basis for representations of it as ‘other’ rather than ‘same’. Nonetheless, Sweden and its literati were usually put in a positive light due to the existence of extensive Hanoverian–Swedish networks, an ideological identification with Sweden’s estate society and a willingness to embrace useful Swedish models. Anzeigen’s favourable renderings of these models amounted to a ‘patriotic–cosmopolitan economy’, through which particularistic experiences could be turned into universal phenomena and transferred to foreign settings.