Since 2002, 48 of the 50 biggest box-office worldwide openings of any movies have been fantasy films. Hollywood blockbusters based on comic book characters (Marvel Avengers or DC Justice League), fantasy novels (like Harry Potter or Twilight), screenplay adaptations (like Star Wars or Pirates of the Caribbean), or fantasy cartoons (like Beauty and the Beast) have grossed more money by far on opening weekends than any other genre (WeekendRecords 2021). All in all, these movies have grossed over US$20 billion. Of course, the numbers are skewed by Western and Anglophone countries where people have higher disposable incomes and films are screened in cinemas, but the popularity extends worldwide, including out of the box office. In the same period, only one fantasy movie won the Academy Award for best picture, and only four have even been nominated out of 141 (Oscar Awards Databases). Why do people queue up for such movies that are hardly realistic and rarely critically acclaimed? Why do some fictional characters and their stories strangely arrest our mind and affect us so deeply? The sheer extent of this phenomenon begs for an explanation.

In this book, we propose that such movies speak to—and build upon—a way of imagining the world that is common to humans and that compensates for certain gaps in modern life or amplifies dominant perceptions. We see such movies as examples of modern myths in popular culture that fulfill a similar role to the one played by myths enacted in earlier times. The ancients told legends and acted out plays and rituals while we watch movies and read novels. J. R. R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings influenced generations of readers, filmmakers, and now a gaming culture, strived consciously for mythopoeia, myth-making ( J. R. R. Tolkien, Humphrey, and C. Tolkien 2000; Tarnas 2019). “Successful films, like successful myths […] stir us to renewed action, emotion and thought” (Plate 2003, 7–8). Indeed, films and fiction are not the only examples. Myths are fundamentally symbolic, and from that symbolic perspective much of modern culture can be seen as myth-making. This includes, for instance, contemporary religious expressions and political drama or even the history that, in the words of anthropologist Victor Turner, “repeats the deep myths of culture” (Turner 1974, 122).

During the three decades in which the medical humanities has been recognized as a field of study, many literature professors have relied on the belief that read-ing, especially reading fiction, teaches students to be more empathic. Since neither becoming an empath nor becoming an expert reader of literary texts is an easy endeavor, the question of whether one can become more empathic by reading literature remains open (Pedersen, 2010; Jurecic, 2011; 2012; Ham-mond and Kim, 2014; Keen, 2014). Can empathic understanding be fostered in a literature course for medical students or premedical students? Does empathy transfer easily from the literature class to the clinic? And under what conditions might empathy endure, deepen, or dissipate over time? Although some teach-ers and students enthusiastically affirm that reading enhances empathy, so far, there is little agreement about what the word “empathy” means and how it can be taught.

One of the most astonishing paradoxes in modern military history is the fact that, during the Second World War, the extreme racist SS organisation engendered an army, which was possibly the most multi-ethnic and transnational army that the twentieth century ever witnessed. This was brought about by the establishment of a military branch of the SS, the Waffen-SS. During its existence, it expanded from a modest bodyguard at Hitler's disposal to a mass army through whose ranks passed more than a million men. Until the outbreak of war, the SS maintained high standards as to personnel, who were all volunteers. Not only did they have to meet tough physical and racial demands; by joining, they also entered a Nazi order of warriors demanding absolute faith in Hitler, unconditional subordination and profound ideological dedication as the pillars of their martial calling.

The head of the SS, the Reichsfu?hrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, envisaged an e?lite force of devoted Nazis, who would alternate between active duty in the field and other kinds of SS activities. They were not only to be soldiers but also role models leading a life as wholly dedicated SS men. They were to let their identity as members of the ‘order’ permeate all their doings including choice of spouse, reproduction, interior decoration of their homes, and celebration of red-letter days. Himmler hoped to create an elite of committed Nazis, welded together in a loyal brotherhood and hardened through war into merciless individuals, who would pitilessly annihilate the Third Reich's real and alleged enemies; be they hostile troops, Jews, mentally ill or any other so-called sub-humans.

While, until the outbreak of war, this order remained relatively homogeneous, the situation changed markedly during the war. Now, the SS began to moderate the demands on race and physical capability, introduced conscription and started to recruit from all over Europe. With these changes, the SS got new recruits, for example, from Norway, who were often as ideologically zealous as were the original German members. However, men who merely wished to avoid forced labour or were pressured into signing up also joined the ranks – individuals, who might not have heard of the SS before, now saw themselves in the uniform of this organisation. Additionally, there were hundreds of thousands of recruits from ethnic groups, whom the SS would never have admitted before the war.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, an unexpected female character entered Colombian literature through a serial novel (novela de folletín) published in the newspaper El mensajero (“The Messenger”). Authored by Soledad Acosta de Samper (1833–1913) in 1867, Dolores tells the story of a young woman who is introduced as the traditional romantic character, extremely beautiful, orphaned at a very early age, raised by a wealthy aunt, and a victim of leprosy, a terminal disease inherited from her father. What makes the character of Dolores unique in nineteenth-century Latin American literary production are the actions she takes after knowing that leprosy will take over her body. Instead of passively waiting for the inevitable, she chooses to isolate herself from everyone, repairs a small hut away from home where she has decided to live her final days and, most interestingly, reads and records her experiences as a young woman whose body becomes deformed by leprosy. To this end, Dolores builds a new place and pens a journal, activities that provide her with material and symbolic refuge from her sufferings. In the spaces provided by the hut and her writing, she finds some relief when confronting her impending death and, in the process, she uncovers her voice. This literary character distinguishes itself from the traditional romantic female protagonist of the nineteenth-century novel whose representation reproduced time and again the feminine ideal incarnated in the figure of the domestic angel. It also constitutes an example of Hispanic women's reflection about finding and/or making a place to escape from the scrutiny, persecution and harassment of others to establish a dialogue with themselves, discover, reflect, exercise and write their voices. Not only did they find and create refuges for themselves but, in the process, they also benefited from the healing properties of writing. Refuge for these writers was not only the physical space of the hut, the convent or other places in the world away from home but also the space in which they read and wrote at their own will, making a conscious choice that will allow their voices to flow and express their inner worlds.

In March 1945, an American interrogation officer asked Unterscharführer Kurt Kretschmer of Division Das Reich about his division's massacres and other atrocities in Southern France. He replied, ‘I do not know what happened, I was not there.’ The scope of the Nazi crimes made the investigation and prosecution gigantic tasks. In many cases ‘a perfect crime’ was at hand. Apart from the perpetrators, there were hardly any surviving witnesses. But even if evidence was extant it was uncertain that this would fall into the hands of the prosecutors and the judges. In the early processes, the war and the chaos of the times were still so close that the prosecution lacked a proper survey and the knowledge that later historical research based on archival material has been able to provide. Under these conditions, the perpetrators had an opportunity of lying their way out of their complicity in a way that would not be possible today.

Apart from being faced with an enormous burden of investigation, the Allies were hampered by big politics and the economic and military interests. In many cases, political-pragmatic considerations took precedence over the judicial processes. Therefore, the prosecution of the Nazi henchmen was imperfect in more than one way. First, because some sentences were passed on the basis of limited investigation and documentation. Secondly, because of limited resources or political consideration, many perpetrators were either not prosecuted at all, had very mild sentences or were granted amnesties.

The Sentence at Nuremberg

In November 1945, in the South-German city of Nuremberg, the Allies started the legal reckoning with the Nazi top tier. Over the following year, not only 22 surviving top Nazis but also the entire administrative and political system constructed by the Nazis, were being prosecuted. The tribunal had the authority to sentence whole institutions and organisations as criminals. The reason for this was to ease later prosecution of individual persons; hence the membership of such bodies would in itself become a criminal act. From 1 September to 1 October 1946, the sentences were passed: 12 death sentences, seven imprisonments and three acquittals, the NSDAP, the Gestapo, the SD and the SS were declared criminal organisations.

Along with other SS organisations, the Waffen-SS was dealt with in this sentence. In their testimonies, General Hausser and others tried to convince the court that the Waffen-SS was the fourth service of the Wehrmacht, completely separate from the SS.

In Sweden from the 1990s onwards, Gothic has invaded all cultural registers – highbrow literature, feature film, popular culture, children's books and young-adult fiction. Furthermore, it has been well received by audiences and critics both inside and outside the country. Most works are produced in response to the international tradition of Gothic with references to international classics and iconic works produced outside Scandinavia. In that way, Swedish Gothic upholds a long domestic tradition of densely intertextual Gothic that goes back to the Romantic period and the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Still, Swedish Gothic is a rather unexplored subject in the field of Gothic studies. One reason for this neglect is the global predominance of the Anglo-American tradition and scholarly studies dedicated to it. Another explanation is the strong realism-prone literary practice in Sweden; Gothic texts with self-conscious unrealism, anxiety-provoking imaginary and a mode of revealing something unconscious or supernatural have not met the requirements as highbrow literature until the late twentieth century. As Rosemary Jackson writes about fantastic art in general, Swedish Gothic has been ignored by native literary critics who have been engaged with ‘establishment ideals rather than with subverting them’. It was first in the 1990s that the existence of Gothic fiction was systematically examined in a number of studies by Yvonne Leffler. Since the millennium, scholars such as Mattias Fyhr, Sofia Wijkmark and Henrik Johnsson have studied different writers and aspects of Swedish Gothic. Most of the early studies have been dealing with nineteenth-century literature and canonised writers, such as August Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf. In the last decades, there has been a growing interest in other cultural forms and Gothic stories in different media, such as film, rock music and young-adult fiction. Drawing on these studies, this chapter will give a survey of Swedish Gothic from the early nineteenth century until the present moment.

The Rise of Swedish Gothic

By the end of the eighteenth century, many of the first English, German and French Gothic novels were imported, available for sale and possible to borrow from commercial libraries in Sweden. In addition, some of them were quickly translated into Swedish. For example, Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) was published in Swedish in 1800–04. Five novels by Ann Radcliffe were available in Swedish between 1800 and 1806, among them The Mystery of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797).

One of the most fascinating aspects of the language we share is the fact that very young children often can be heard conjugating irregular verbs such as “I know,” whose irregular past tense is “I knew,” as if they were regular verbs: “I knowed.” In a similar fashion, young children as young as four years old recognize that a story is not well formed (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 20) so that they balk when, for instance, one starts “The Three Little Pigs” with the brick house, and they do so even if they have never heard the story before. These facts suggest that the seeming volitional and spontaneous language we deploy is, in fact, ordered by discursive structures, which organize the reality they seem to represent. In his passionate study of the culture and community of the deaf, Dr. Oliver Sacks notes that

It was far from all SS soldiers who were prepared to die for Hitler and Nazism. In March 1945, the western Allies crossed the Rhine, and the following month the Soviet offensive against Berlin was launched. No one doubted any longer that the downfall of the Third Reich was imminent. Thus, as a soldier of the Reich one might choose to go down with the regime or try to survive either by surrendering oneself to the Allies or by deserting.

During the last days of the war, the German SS men fought primarily in their own country and might hope to return to civilian life when the war was over. The foreign Waffen-SS soldiers’ situation was different; many of them would be facing trial in their home countries. Nonetheless, many perceived prosecution at home as preferable compared to falling into the hands of the Red Army, for example by seeking refuge in the remaining embassies in Berlin, such as the Danish and Swedish. These endeavours were not particularly successful, but many succeeded in avoiding capture in various other ways. From the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, Baltic Waffen-SS soldiers got across to the Swedish coast or to Denmark and mixed with refugees. At the moment of surrender, other non-German SS men hurried into civvies pretending to be forced labourers, or they hid with friends, family, or girlfriends.

The extent to which the former SS soldiers managed to hide may be illustrated by the case of the 1st SS brigade. During post-war legal processes in West Germany, almost 1,000 former members of the unit were asked about their spell as prisoners-of-war, and it turned out that 10 per cent had completely avoided incarceration. Considering their war record as continuous participants in genocide it comes as no surprise that former members of the 1st SS brigade would do whatever it took to evade captivity. Those who, like the 1st SS brigade, belonged among the very worst henchmen of the Holocaust, were of course especially tempted to try to assume new identities during their imprisonment or simply lie low vis-à-vis the victors. Through listening to radio, Allied broadcasts, or the Nazis’ own propaganda, there was an awareness that the Allies had an ambitious agenda of bringing Nazi culprits to justice and that SS men were very much in the allied spotlight.

The therapeutic and health-promoting effects of writing have been explored by a number of researchers (see, for example, Pennebaker, 1997; Lepore and Smyth, 2002; Bolton, 2008), but the particular means whereby writing exerts its effects on health remain unclear. This chapter addresses facilitated creative writing as a rehabilitation measure with particular focus on the working mechanisms governing the effects of writing. The results are based on the research project Kreative skriveværksteder for mennesker med kroniske lidelser [Writing Workshops for InterventionsPeople with Chronic Illness], which was part of the Human Health (2018) focus area financed by the University of Southern Denmark, but they also include results from previous research projects looking at writing workshops for people with chronic illness (Hellum, Jensen and Nielsen, 2017; Zwisler et al., 2017; Hansen et al., 2019; Tarp et al., 2019). The chapter presents a model of the writing work-shops, describing the workshops’ form and content and some of the features that can promote or prevent a positive outcome from the creative writing. We suggest that the model might be relevant in relation to rehabilitation, health promotion, palliative care, and treatment.

Migration: An Overview

More than 250 million people around the world live outside their country of origin, signifying a 49 percent increase in global migration since the start of the twenty-first century (Khullar and Chokshi 2019). As an umbrella term, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) of the United Nations describes migration as the act of moving away from one's usual place of residence, whether within a country or across international borders, temporarily or permanently, and for a variety of reasons (International Organization for Migration [IOM] n.d.). These reasons range from the voluntary pursuit of seasonal or long-term employment opportunities to involuntary relocations for safety and asylum. More specifically, individuals who move and resettle temporarily are classified as “migrants,” while those who resettle permanently in a new country are classified as “immigrants” (International Rescue Committee 2022). Throughout this chapter, the term “(im)migrants” is used when describing all individuals who migrate for any reason, over any distance and at any time or frequency.

The United States is home to approximately one-fifth of the world's (im)migrant population, accounting for 46.6 million individuals (Budiman 2020). Based on Pew Research Center data adjusted for undercount from US Census data, most (im)migrants in the United States have legal status: 45 percent or 20.7 million are naturalized citizens and 27 percent or 12.3 million are lawful permanent residents. Another quarter (23% or 10.5 million) are residents with unauthorized status (Budiman 2020). The United States has also accommodated more than three million refugees since Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980, which established the current refugee program and sets standards for screening and admission (Connor et al. 2017; Khullar and Chokshi 2019). Despite their prominent presence in the United States, foreign-born residents are a minority population, constituting 14 percent of the United States population. For refugees in particular, the United Nations estimated that nearly one million refugees resided in the United States in 2019: approximately 0.2 percent of the country's population (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2019).

Reasons for migration can be subdivided into macro-elements (independent of the individual), meso-elements (related to the individual but not under their control) and micro-elements (related to an individual's personal characteristics and attitudes) (Castelli 2018).