Ingrid Bergman as Wartime Mediator : Swedish Immigrants as “the Same” in the OWI-film Swedes in America

The short film Swedes in America from 1943, produced by the Office of War Information, is constructed to show in which ways Sweden and the United States should be regarded as two nations nearly identical regarding social and human values. Up until this point, Swedes had in American cinema been portrayed as “the Other” but were now, in the American Second World War propaganda machinery, transformed from “othered” emigrants to assimilated American citizens. Correspondingly, in Swedish films everything American had been depicted as something profoundly non-Swedish and even dangerous. In Swedes in America Ingrid Bergman as narrator is used as a kind of mediator between the two countries and their inhabitants, and in the presentation I show how conceptions formerly considered as specifically Swedish or American in this film is melted together in an idea about unity and joint values.