Raoul Wallenberg’s Insubordination

Abstract

Although not dealt with in Part I, it should be acknowledged that it is not only through classical hero patterns (an extraordinary courageous man fighting evil) that Wallenberg’s story can be told. Other readings can also be found when studying his life. For example, many statements, including those made by Wallenberg himself and by those who assisted him, clearly indicate that Wallenberg was not regarded, at least not at the beginning or in his outer appearance, as the prototype of a classical hero figure, full of physical strength and bravery.² Instead, Wallenberg seems to have represented other values that became more and more important toward the end of the twentieth century: soft skills, pacifistic values, care, or the ability to communicate.³ By 1946 the survivors sensed that Wallenberg differed in some ways from the traditional hero image, “The role of the hero both attracted and irritated him and he also lacked the hardness of the oldtime heroes.”⁴

On the one hand, heroes are often pressed as elite representatives of the values on which society is or ought to be based; on the other, as figures of a barely controllable dynamic energy and personal magnetism, geniuses or charismatic leaders whose power has little to do with established social norms and structures of authority…. Though “praiseworthy” and “noble”, such heroes “stand outside the normal orbit of human interaction and are never entirely fit for ordinary society.”¹