Reframing Scandinavian World War II history: The case of contemporary Norwegian and Danish occupation films

In this article, I analyse two Norwegian and two Danish films made after the year 2000 that are set during the German occupation in World War II. I begin by outlining the differences in themes, narrative and aesthetics between occupation dramas of the immediate post-war period and those of the twenty-first century. The reframing of traditional occupation narratives often provides a more nuanced image of good and evil, heroes and villains, and may focus on hitherto absent themes in national history. There is a clear tendency to underscore the darker sides of national history and critique the way certain groups, including Jews, German refugees and soldiers, were treated. I argue that the reframing in modern occupation films is often a kind of national self-criticism. The analysis examines the various structures, narrative forms and aesthetics of recent occupation dramas and combines this with a discussion of theories of memory, empathy, feelings and the cognitive dimensions of historical films. The strength of this genre is that history is embodied: we experience history through identification with characters in a fully recreated world of the past.