The Anti-Semitism of Willy Andersson Grebst, Barthold Lunden and Vidi

“Why would I hate Jews?” – Willy Andersson Grebst

Willy Grebst died in 1920 at the age of 44 years. So his lifespan missed the rise of fascism in Europe and we can only speculate on whether or not he would have been a Hitler sympathiser. Were he alive today, I think his greatest disappointment would be that his cherished boulevard newspaper, Vidi, is now remembered for all the wrong reasons: it is reviled as an anti-semitic, anti-gay, reactionary rag. Most of the blame for this “fall from grace” has to be laid at the feet of Barthold Lundén, Willy’s close friend, possibly his secret gay lover and Vidi’s editor from 1920 until 1931. After Willy’s death, Lundén rechristened the newspaper “Barthold Lundén’s Vidi” and proceeded to take Willy’s right wing views and magnify them to such an extreme that both editor and newspaper are now etched in Anti-Semitism’s Black Book as follows:

In the middle of the 1920s, Barthold Lundén’s newspaper and the Swedish Anti-Semitic Association of which he was President were the public rallying points of anti-semitism, particularly in West Sweden. The newspaper was extreme but not widespread: at most it had a subscription of 25,000. It openly sympathised with the rise of German Nazism and sold, amongst other things, swastikas. They drove around central Gothenburg in a small truck with placards warning about “The Jewish Peril”. Lundén was an extremist but it is difficult to completely dismiss him as a madman.[1]

Vid 1920 talets mitt var Barthold Lundéns tidskrift och Svenska antisemitiska föreningen, där han var ordförande, den öppna samlingplatsen för svensk anti-Semitism, särskilt i väst Sverige. Tidningen var extrem, men inte försumbar: som mest hade den en prenumerantstock på 25000. Man sympatiserade öppet med den framväxande tyska nazismen och sålde bland annat hakkorsmärken “med mängdrabatt”. I centrala Göteborg körde man runt men en liten lastbil med plakat där man varnade för “judefaran”. Lundén var en extremist, men är svår att helt avfärda som ensam tokstolle.

As founding editor of Vidi, Willy Grebst was not averse to publishing offensive jokes about Jews, poking fun at their miserliness or their poor Swedish. In the 29 January 1919 edition of Vidi, he took time to answer allegations that he was a Jew hater. “Why would I hate Jews?” he wrote, when he had Jewish friends, some he disliked and others he held in high regard. “Jew hater – no. Jew opponent – yes!” What exactly he meant by this distinction is not clear to me. It sounds more rhetorical than real. It implies he would be quite happy to consort with Jews provided that they shared his political views. Yet some of those views were predicated on sweeping racial or religious stereotypes. Realistically, the only Jews who might share his political outlook would be disaffected ones.

Stora Teatern, Gothenburg

It has also been noted that, had Grebst himself lived through the 1930s racial purity persecutions in Germany, he would have been blacklisted as partly Jewish because of his mother’s surname, Seelig. She would have been counted as a “jewess” even though she probably never set foot inside a synagogue in her entire life.[2] Surely Barthold Lundén must have known this inconvenient fact during his long friendship with the Vidi founder?

So who was Barthold Lundén? He was three years younger than Willy Grebst, having been born in Fässberg parish, Gothenburg on 20 December 1878. His father, Peter Lundén, was the parish priest and his mother was Emilia Kullgren. He qualified as an engineer at Chalmers and worked in Germany for a number of years before deciding to switch careers to music. After completing qualifications in music, he got work as a musician in the Concert Hall in Gothenburg. No doubt he first met Willy Grebst socializing in the city’s artistic circles. Well before his death, Willy Grebst introduced Lundén to the Vidi readers. In an article accompanied by a photograph of Lundén relaxing on a garden bench at Hindås, he explained that they discussed and argued and almost came to blows but also had great fun together. Clearly, both men were highly opinionated and grew to become very close.

When it came to art, Grebst and Lundén were on the same page entirely. Their taste was textbook fascist. Hitlerian. They loathed modern art and loudly opposed the purchase of it by municipal galleries. Modern art, Grebst wrote, was a form of mental illness [en sinnesjukdom].[3] During my 2011 trip to Gothenburg, I visited the Art Gallery to acquaint myself with some of the artworks that so riled the Vidi editors. The Impressionism of Anders Zorn, Bruno Liljefors and Eugene Jansson, now so charming, its revolutionary sting diluted by the effluxion of time. Ivar Arosenius’ “Self portrait with bleeding heart” must have turned Grebst and Lundén into spitting cobras as they studied the naïve, pasty image of a dishevelled artist with a dripping red heart on his chest. Grebst seemed to think that the success of Zorn and Liljefors was due to the ignorance of war profiteers who had more money than sense. In Bread, he wrote:

There came young spivs one after the other who in one way or another exploited trade conditions and frauds to grab their share of the gold as the war’s fury spun on. There came the pork profiteer, then the drug king. They had all started out small time when war broke out. They had bought and sold, sold and bought. Everything between heaven and earth had passed through their hands. Oil and cocoa. Tin and copper. Flour and cheese. Junk and paper. Tinned food and ointment. Bottles and bricks. Clinical thermometers and binoculars. Old pins and worn out rubber galoshes. Thus little by little had their businesses grown. They had become bolder and bolder. They had learnt the art of circumventing whatever export ban was in the way. They knew how to get particular licenses like the back of their hands. They knew how to smuggle goods via both Haparanda and Malmö. On every transaction, legitimate or illegitimate, they had earned enormous sums. Now they would reap the benefits. They had villas in the spiv town behind Lorensberg. They drove luxury French and English automobiles. They bought paintings by the cubic metre in the art gallery in Arkaden. Zorn and Liljefors! Liljefors and Zorn! For twenty thousand one day. Thirty thousand the next. They were daily customers in the large jewellery shops on Östra Hamngatan. Money ran through their fingers. No niggardliness at all. If there was a question about a thousand number price tag, who cares. A subscription to a club after midday, same amount. Ten thousand to a theatre. Five thousand to a new newspaper. Five hundred crowns here. A hundred crowns there. It was generosity without bounds. And it was just this that reconciled them to outsiders. The young profiteers’ easily earnt millions weren’t locked away in vaults. They were set in motion to every direction and corner. Leben und leben lassen! In this way, they came to be not just a minority without wider community support.[4]

During my May 2011 visit to the Gothenburg Art Gallery, it was bedecked in rainbow flags to celebrate an upcoming gay festival. Inside, a huge sculpture was on display: a pole dancer dangling upside down on her pole and wearing spectacular platform stilletos. I couldn’t help but wonder what Grebst and Lundén would have made of that? It was a sure sign that their side of the “art wars” had come out as loser!

If there was one thing guaranteed to draw venom from Grebst and Lundén, it was modern Jewish art. As a result, they tirelessly pursued Isaac Grünewald. Grünewald had been born in Stockholm, his grandparents having fled to Sweden from a pogrom in Lithuania. He was married to another artist, Sigrid Hjertén. In 1917, Willy Grebst published A Catalogue of Grünewald’s Artworks Displayed for Thinking People by W. Andersson Grebst [Katalog öfver grunewaldianska konstverk på W. Andersson Grebsts utställning för tänkande människor]. Grebst used Vidi to vilify Grünewald over a disturbance at Bohus railway station after the opening of an art exhibition. Grünewald and Hjertén were waiting to take the train back to Gothenburg but were stopped by the conductor on the grounds that Grünewald was intoxicated. A scuffle ensued during which Hjertén copped a slap in the face. Grünewald was ultimately sentenced to a month’s imprisonment over the incident.

Lundén kept the campaign going after Grebst’s death. In Vidi of March, 1929, he wrote:

Det är en fräckhet hos denna Isaac Snabelinsky Grünewald som gränsar till det sublima. Vi låta en sådan där kroksnablad Mindre Asiatisk ökentraskarättling, vars vagga stått i något stinkande smutsigt polskt eller ryskt Getto, där hans förfäder under årshundraden krälat kring i sin lump som andra skabbiga råttor, komma hit till vårt rena germanska Sverige.

There is an audacity about this Isaac Snabelinsky Grünewald that borders on the sublime. That we should allow such a hook-nosed Lesser Asiatic desert-trotting-descendant whose cradle sat in some stinking filthy Polish or Russian ghetto where his forefathers for hundreds of years crawled around in rags like mangy rats, to come here to our pure Germanic Sweden.

Barthold Lundén died on Easter Sunday 1932 in Ängelholm. Vidi essentially died with him. Europe was well on the road to World War 2 and the Holocaust, events that would posthumously discredit Grebst, Lundén and other peddlers of extreme right wing and anti-semitic propaganda. Would Willy Grebst have become a Nazi sympathizer? Surely yes … at least in the beginning. But it was in Grebst’s nature to argue with everyone in the end. I suspect that he would eventually have earned disfavor from the Nazis by criticizing some of their excesses. Denounced as the son of a Jewess, he may even have received a bullet in the back of his head in a quiet patch of Hindås forest. At least such a grisly end would have saved his good name.

As for the good name of Hans Erikson, I did not find any articles written by him published in Vidi. He may well have submitted some as he said but they were not selected for publication. A lucky break. Vidi – “I saw” – is a phenomenon that Gothenburg and Sweden now avert their eyes from.

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[1] Trond Berg Eriksen, Håkan Harket & Einhart Lorenz, Judehatets Svarta Bok (Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2008) p. 588, translated by A. Thelander.

[2] C. Vilhelm Jacobowsky, Göteborgs Mosaiska Församling 1780-1955 (Orstadius boktryckeri, 1955) p. 102

[3] Vidi, 29 January 1919

[4] Willy Andersson Grebst, Bröd: tvärsnitt genom samhället våren (1917) pp 42-43, translated by A. Thelander.