Hembygden som självkännedom och folkbildning. Theodor Hellman och daningen av en poetisk hembygd och centralanstalt för en nationell enhetsskola på Murberget i Härnösand

Abstract

“Know thyself”: this antique aphorism was re-actualised in the late nineteenth century as a credo for the museums of cultural history in Scandinavia. In this essay, this aphorism will be explored in close relation to the concept of hembygd. It is argued that these two concepts were intertwined into a foundation for an organic knowledge theory, which was in turn spread to a political nationalistic sphere and into the planning of a national unitary school for all classes in Sweden.

In the early twentieth century, the museum curator and elementary school inspector Theodor Hellman formulated his concept of hembygd. Through his contemporary, the philosopher Hans Larsson, the concept will be presented as an intuitive whole, i.e. as a higher poetic order of knowledge in which thought intertwines with feeling. I argue that Hellman in his hembygd reworked Larsson’s idea of ‘intuition’ to a nationalistic essence. This hembygd took the Swedish people back home to a true sense of reality, to its national roots, and to an organic understanding of its place in history and society. Also, to attain scholarly legitimacy, the concept of hembygd was blended with general aspects of Cultural Darwinism to a cocktail of idealism and naturalism. As such an essence, hembygd was fundamental for the heritage institutions established in Härnösand after the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian Union in 1905.