THE BERGMAN AFFAIR
Schwab., Armand Jr.
SWEDEN'S GENIUS THE BERGMAN AFFAIR Unlike France, where" I"affaire so-and-so" is a common newspaper convention, journalistically placid Sweden has very few affarer. It is therefore a remarkable...
...What explains the strong public reaction...
...came away liking it...
...So far the answer has been yes, they are worth it...
...ARMAND SCHWAB, JR...
...What seems inexplicable is the specific conduct of the tax authorities and the police: the fact that they burst in on the rehearsal, collared Bergman in public and took him away for hours of intensive questioning, lifted his passport and then humiliated him before the nation by leaking the story to the press...
...The news that Sweden had a foreign intelligence service, that it had cooperated unneutrally with U.S...
...Then there is the very fact that he is a star...
...whose activities and very existence were revealed to the public in the spring of 1973...
...They can imagine themselves humiliated...
...The first I. B. was the Information Bureau, a sort of Swedish C.I.A...
...would anyone have failed to see the ill effects of beating on Ingmar Bergman...
...It involved not spies and files and press freedom but Sweden's greatest artist-celebrity, the police, the sense of shame and taxes -above all, taxes...
...Bergman in particular has had an ambiguous status...
...intelligence, that it spied on domestic dissidence, was published by a small radical magazine, Folket i Bild...
...With the statute of limitations running out on one specific alleged offense, two plainclothesmen came to the theater, broke in on a rehearsal of Strindberg's Dance of Death and took the director off to police headquarters for questioning...
...Why are we (rigid) (cold) (tense) (lonely) (uncommunicative...
...More Swedes spend more of their time and energy worrying about their country and its institutions than any other people I know of...
...should capital-gains or personal-income taxes have been paid on certain proceeds...
...When I and my wife arrived in Sweden for our year's stay, they confiscated our liquor- the allowed two quarts each-because we'd put it in a trunk rather than in hand baggage...
...The actual merits of the case against Bergman cannot be judged on the basis of details available in the U.S...
...Could someone have been not only so harsh but also so wrong...
...When I complained casually at the Foreign Ministry press office, the head man checked by telephone and then said to me, unsmiling, "That's right, you were wrong...
...Bergman's films have often dealt with the terror of humiliation...
...It was the Pentagon Papers with some Watergate mixed in, but there was no pressing by the establishment press and the convictions were on the wrong side...
...According to a report by Bernard Weinraub in the New York Times, Bergman was deeply shocked and mortified, and three days later was in a hospital with a nervous breakdown...
...Is it all worth it...
...The civil servants may simply have bulled ahead, doing their job...
...The Swedish sense of propriety and community tends to make taxation almost a religious self-flagellation rather than an administered flogging, but still it hurts...
...What is important is that Sweden, which has one artistic giant, slapped down that giant and perhaps lost him to the larger outside world he avoided for so long...
...even among intellectuals the left finds him too unpolitical and the right too self-absorbed, and most Swedes are embarrassed by his tortured concern with the intricacies of the human condition...
...The administration of Olof Palme is not notably stupid...
...The rates are indeed very high: more than half of total income in direct and indirect taxes for a well-paid factory worker, say...
...Armand Schwab, Jr...
...You go by the book...
...It is alleged that Bergman was singled out-hounded with tax investigations and then treated roughly-both as an object lesson and because he is disapproved of by official Sweden...
...Why Bergman, though...
...Still, selective persecution of a prominent individual is hardly regulation and would not likely be authorized without review by political-level government officials...
...Those corporations and individuals, however, are comfortably ensconced in Sweden's Establishment...
...Egali-tarianism is no Social Democratic invention in Sweden...
...But in communal Sweden shame is right out there in public, recognized as the major lever- and proportionately feared...
...tax avoidance, which was once considered rather un-Swedish, is no longer unusual...
...Why, then, are Swedes so suspicious of official motives in this case...
...Artists are more vulnerable...
...In this it is hardly unique...
...The Prime Minister lives in a middle-class suburb...
...the magazine reporters were prosecuted and convicted for "indirect spying...
...Of course it may not have been all that purposeful...
...they wonder...
...It's a small town of a country...
...He stood very tall...
...You have to understand, first of all, the central role that taxes play in Swedish hearts and minds...
...is an editor of Scientific American who lived in Sweden for a year recently and came away liking it...
...Are highways, hospitals and parks worth the taxes, are security and order worth the bureaucracy and rules, are Volvos worth the rat-race...
...The big "export" industries are the pampered proteges that enable Sweden to rank either second (behind the U.S...
...People empathize with Bergman's humiliation...
...shame is the spur for aculturation and law-abiding in most places, I suspect...
...It can't be easy to police the whole business, and one can imagine that some official might figure: If we can get Bergman, that'll scare the others...
...or third (behind Switzerland) in per capita income...
...There were official denials, retractions and partial explanations, and ritual bewailings of damage to national security...
...There are not enough of them to dominate the administration, but they can make a speech or a move that can set teeth on edge...
...perhaps they wanted to cut him down...
...The case involves a Swiss corporation set up by Bergman in 1967 and dissolved in 1974: Was it real or a tax front...
...When Scenes from a Marriage was on television, as we keep hearing, all Sweden stayed home to watch...
...Treating everyone the same is dogma, even if it may mean treating everyone as something of a criminal...
...The Bergman business may make larger waves, even though the charges were later dropped...
...Among Bergman's friends and supporters the criticism goes further...
...B. affair...
...It was quite legal and it worked...
...And for centuries the Swedes have accepted it so: The authorities go by the book and you do what the authorities say...
...they live with shame but they don't like it Sweden is small and cold and provincial, but it is not stolid...
...Workmen look for unreported odd jobs, professionals incorporate themselves, entrepreneurs do complicated things overseas...
...But his movies have not been terribly popular in Sweden...
...And yet things like the I. B. affair keep reopening the question...
...he is reported to have said he will work mostly abroad in the future-this from a man who has never made a film anywhere but in Sweden and has said, "I couldn't live anywhere else for any length of time...
...Well, yes...
...It remained for a much younger press officer to point out later that we could simply take the four bottles from the customs warehouse when we left on a short trip, and then bring them in again correctly...
...Bergman's friends think he may have appeared too different and too free...
...Much is given for value received, but that's another story...
...Surely there are dubious situations involving Sweden's many multinational corporations or bankers or lawyers that might have provided object lessons...
...Now those are subjects to stir the hearts of Swedes...
...The Swedish civil service has for centuries been powerful, respected, cocky and uncommonly incorruptible...
...He's not a critic of the system," Weinraub quoted the actor Erland Josephson as saying, "he's just independent of it, and that upsets people...
...The Bergman affair could have been such a move, just possibly...
...The young Left was aroused, along with some other civil libertarians, but governments-socialist and democratic though they may be-tend to protect themselves, and the healing waters of national security soon closed over the incident...
...One should not be too prominent, too clever, too fancy, too rich...
...It is therefore a remarkable coincidence that the tough outer membrane of Sweden's cellular society should have been pricked twice in the past three years by an "I...
...It's interesting that many of the comments on the incident refer to Bergman's "humiliation.'' The point is often made that Sweden is a "shame society...
...Why did it run into trouble...
...He is a star and he is Swedish, and so he is cherished along with Bjorn Borg (tennis) and Ingmar Stenmark (slalom skiing...
...even in Sweden the financial facts do not appear to have been at the core of public concern...
...The early ones were too religious and the more recent ones too psychological...
...The second I. B. is the film-maker and stage director Ingmar Bergman, who was hauled out of a rehearsal at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm on January 30, accused of tax fraud...
...Vestigially Lutheran righteousness mixed with the cool Swedish brand of didactic Marxism can produce a special sort of young Cabinet secretary or assistant secretary that is enough to chill the soul...
...Various as-pects of the case have been argued for some time...
Vol. 103 • April 1976 • No. 8
