“Prince Eugen followed his conscience”

This is the title of an interesting article on Prince Eugen which appeared in Svenska Dagbladet yesterday. In it, Jesús Alcalá regrets that the Prince is today remembered almost solely as “the Painter Prince”, which he considers a bit diminishing. Alcalá wants us to remember Prince Eugen the man, who went against many of the norms and values of his class and his time. He attended the funeral of the great, controversial author August Strindberg in 1912, he advocated a dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian union before 1905, he showed public support for an officer who was frozen out for joining the Salvation Army, he found it a good thing if reformist social democrats would work with liberals, and, perhaps most importantly, he was a staunch opponent of Nazism which irritated large parts of the Swedish establishment during the Second World War. The author points out Prince Eugen as an excellent example of “a human being who is filled by the realisation that personal responsibility also extends to what is beyond the closest circle of persons”. The article is well worth reading both for those who are familiar with the Prince’s views and for those who are not:

http://www.svd.se/kulturnoje/understrecket/artikel_3405481.svd