The ideal of Scandinavian living is in vogue. Today it is possible, though not advisable, to buy how-to guides on hygge, the Danish art of cozy living. The Swedes, who think that the Danes are coarse and hence only cozy in the way of pigs in slurry, have their own untranslatable word, mysig, for the correct degree of coziness.

Really, Scandinavian living has never been out of vogue since Strindberg and Ibsen first pulled the rug from under the Lutheran paterfamilias. Wilde and Shaw repeated this trick in translation, thus forging the Anglophone perception of Scandinavians as atomized moderns, anguished and plain-speaking pioneers of a miserable track from Lutheranism to Existentialism. The Scandinavian drama, or at least its consequences for the Scandinavian family, survives in debased form in the television format known as “Nordic Noir.” The detectives live alone, drink alone, and eat cold frankfurters by the light of the fridge. Their wives have left, taking their single children with them: family counseling by Ibsen. The victims in Nordic Noir usually live alone, too. The murderers, in Strindbergian style, tend to come from affluent families.

The Scandinavians may have rejected the family, but they still idealize the home.

The Scandinavians may have rejected the family, but they still idealize the home. After 1945, Swedish designers of furniture and politics repackaged the losing ideals of Weimar Germany—pacifism, socialism, metal furniture, the welfare state—into a winning vision, an escape from history into stripped-down, stripped-pine simplicity. The