Remembering Social Democracy: Monumentalization, political infrastructures, and stories of 'the people'

Building on interviews, observations and archival research this article traces the relocation of two previous parts of a labour movement-maintained political infrastructure, exploring the memories foregrounded and the histories rendered relatively invisible as two buildings were placed at open-air museums. In 1964 Gersheden's People's House was moved from a village in Western Sweden to the capital Stockholm and there placed at Skansen, the world's oldest open-air museum. Five decades later, in 2014, a theatre was moved from Linköping's People's Park to that town's own open-air museum, Gamla Linköping (Old Linköping), and inaugurated there the following year. Following these buildings, over time and across space, allows charting how memories of Social Democracy have over the course of six decades been differently curated, centring on a contemporary tendency to underscore People's Parks' and People's Houses' popular-cultural importance at the expense of an engagement with their past political role. But it also allows intervening in an ongoing struggle over the memory of (Swedish) Social Democracy, where a weakened labour movement today encounters a powerful populist party appropriating parts of the labour movement's past to fit a restorative-nostalgic agenda.