In a New Yorker article that was long enough to tell the story of wheat, John Lahr focused on legendary director Ingmar Bergman's "lifelong struggle to fend off the ghosts of his past,"—his ability to take "dark feelings" and "call them out into the open" in the richly autobiographical films for which he is renowned. Lahr examined Bergman's somewhat eccentric personality, his often chilly family relations, and his womanizing.

Yet nowhere did Lahr mention another ghost from the past that Bergman recounted in his 1994 autobiography: that along with many among his family and friends, and until his mid-thirties, Bergman was a fervent Nazi sympathizer. Visiting Germany before the war, he admitted participating enthusiastically in Nazi rallies. After the war ended, he came to believe, "like so many others" in neutral Sweden, that the Holocaust was an Allied propaganda device. Even well into the 1950s, Bergman entertained the idea that Hitler and Churchill were at least morally equivalent. Somehow, all that did not rate.

[Ed.: How Woody Allen manages to idolize the guy deserves its own probing psychological inquiry.]

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