"We would not be ourselves if we did not hold this opinion." : A history of reception analysing nationalism in and surrounding "God in disguise" by Hjalmar Gullberg and Lars-Erik Larsson (1940)

The subject of this essay is to analyse how “God in disguise”, as a poem by Hjalmar Gullberg (1933), as musically interpreted by Lars-Erik Larsson for Swedish public radio (1940), and as canonised over time as well as by the Swedish government’s proposal of an official national canon (2025), stages a national community. Using the government’s proposal for a national canon as a starting point I investigate “God in disguise” as a “window” to Swedish history, as they phrase it, and the national self-image this “window” frames and reflects. With Benedict Andersons theory of the nation as an “imagined community”, and literature as a technology for staging that national imaginary, as well as Wolfgang Isers and Hans Robert Jauss reader-oriented reception theories, I analyse how “God in disguise” may have been used and perceived within different historical and nationalist contexts. Within a nationalist framework, and through the readers’ identification with the poem and its projected histories, “God in disguise” stages an exceptionalist self-image of an inherently “good” imagined community.