In his teens, Bergman attended Palmgren’s School in Kommendörsgatan, a short scamper in the morning darkness first from Sophiahemmet and then from Storgatan, where his parents lived from 1934, after Erik had been appointed head pastor at Hedvig Eleonora. The structure still stands, five storeys high, although since 1988 it has belonged to the French state and functions as an embassy building. At the time, its echoing stairways were so clearly the inspiration for Frenzy, one of Bergman’s first screenplays. There was short shrift at Palmgren’s for the pupil who might arrive late for morning prayers, and Ingmar’s inhibited manner and rather weedy physique made him a favourite target for the mockery of many teachers. At this time, Bergman was thin and puny, with green eyes that would soon turn darker and that, from the earliest years, evinced an intensity remembered by everyone who met him. From infancy onwards he suffered from stomach upsets, which led to a recurrent ulcer in adulthood. He was by nature a maverick when young, and inevitably that collided with the dogma that informed every aspect of life at home.

Two apartments were at the disposal of the Bergman family on the top floor of No. 7 Storgatan in Östermalm. They were linked by a small staircase and a corridor, and Ingmar was given a tiny room behind the kitchen, down the staircase. Hs mother and sister missed the park at Sophiahemmet and placed potted plants in the windows to mask the street view, but Ingmar liked his quarters because he could see far out over central Stockholm and because he felt removed from the household activity. His father did not come back there often, and Ingmar became fast friends with Laila, the aged cook from Småland who had been with the family for nearly half a century by the time Ingmar reached his teens. (Jullan Kindal recreated this character memorably in Wild Strawberries and Smiles of a Summer Night.)

Bergman was probably more interested in playing his records of The Threepenny Opera than in entertaining the female sex. But in Dalarna he did meet one girl in her mid-teens with whom he had a rewarding and liberating relationship. In his autobiography, he describes ‘Märta’ as having ‘powerful shoulders and no hips, her arms and legs long and sunburnt, and covered with golden down. She smelt of the cowshed, as astringent as the marsh.’1 Then, in ninth grade, he met a female contemporary, the sturdy Anna Lindberg, who helped to release him from the emotional strictness of his domestic environment and the lack of any feminine company outside the family circle. The two teenagers would do their homework together and seize every opportunity to make love on the creaking bed in Anna’s family apartment at the junction of Nybrogatan and Valhallavägen. It may be that their early-morning excursion by boat during the summer holiday of 1933 on Smådalarö contributed to similar scenes in Summer Interlude, although evidence suggests that the model for Marie in that film was Barbro Hiort af Ornäs, to whom in June 1938 Bergman dedicated the first of his workbooks, ‘to my Babs’, saying that he ‘will never forget my days with you on Smådalarö’.2

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In the summer of 1934, Ingmar went to Germany for the first time, on an exchange visit involving some two thousand youngsters. The Swedes would go to Germany for the first part of the summer, and their German counterparts would return home with them to spend the final weeks of sunshine in Swedish homes. Germany and its history already intrigued Ingmar, who was assigned to a pastor’s family in the village of Heina, between Weimar and Eisenach. The large household included six sons and three daughters. Hannes, the teenager designated to look after Ingmar, was in the Hitler Youth, and the girls belonged to the German Girls’ League. Ingmar attended Hannes’s school, and was soon subjected to heavy indoctrination about the might and right of the Nazi cause. The pastor had a tendency to use extracts from Mein Kampf for his sermon texts, and Hitler’s portrait hung everywhere.

The family made an excursion to Weimar, first to a rally attended by Hitler celebrating the first anniversary of the National Socialist Party coming to power, and then to the opera for a performance of Wagner’s Rienzi. When Ingmar asked his host at what point during the rally he should say, ‘Heil Hitler!’, the pastor replied gravely, ‘That’s considered more than mere courtesy, my dear Ingmar.’ For his seventeenth birthday, Ingmar received a photograph of Hitler. Hannes hung it above Ingmar’s bed so that ‘you will always have the man before your eyes’. In his autobiography, Bergman admitted, ‘For many years, I was on Hitler’s side, delighted by his successes and saddened by his defeats.’3

On another trip, to the house of a neighbouring banker, Ingmar met a girl named Renata, and was smitten. He discovered only later that her family was Jewish. This explained the sudden and ominous silence the following year when, after a correspondence in German, letters no longer came from Renata. On going back to Germany the next summer – the exchange experiment was a success – Ingmar heard that the banker and his family had vanished. In his 1969 TV movie, The Ritual, he based some of Ingrid Thulin’s dialogue ‘almost word for word’ on letters he received from Renata.4

Ingmar travelled via Berlin on the way home after his initial visit to Germany, and the image of the capital provided him with inspiration for his radio play The City, for The Silence and for The Serpent’s Egg.

When Hannes, in turn, came to spend some weeks with the Bergmans, he found himself in a much less regimented milieu than his own. Out at the summer villa on Smådalarö, the Bergman family led a lazy existence free from the demands of city routine. There was tennis, swimming, dancing, even lovemaking. Hannes was thrilled by the presence of Margareta, Ingmar’s sister, and the two soon became seriously attached. There were eventually plans for them to marry, but Hannes, a pilot, was shot down on the first day of the German invasion of Poland.

Dag Bergman was one of the founders and organisers of the Swedish National Socialist Party, and Pastor Erik Bergman voted for the party on several occasions. Some of the pastors in his father’s parish were ‘crypto-Nazis’, according to Bergman, and the family’s closest friends often talked enthusiastically about ‘the new Germany’. But when, after the war, the newsreels of the concentration camps began to be shown in Sweden, Bergman realised the horror with which he had brushed shoulders. ‘My feelings were overwhelming,’ he told Jörn Donner, ‘and I felt great bitterness towards my father and my brother and the schoolteachers and everybody else who’d let me into it. But it was impossible to get rid of the guilt and self-contempt.’5

In the 1970s, after almost thirty-five years of reticence, Bergman could admit to having been affected by Nazi propaganda. ‘When I came home I was a pro-German fanatic,’ he said, although few of his contemporaries recall any pronounced political leanings in him in that period. One of the most meaningful consequences of this episode was that Bergman turned his back on politics in every form. For years he did not vote, did not read political leaders in the papers, and did not listen to speeches.

However, given that Jane Magnusson’s major documentary on Bergman, released in 2018 to coincide with the centenary of his birth, asserts so vigorously that he was in denial about Hitler’s regime until long after the Führer’s death, it’s essential to state some facts. He disagreed sharply with his brother Dag and did not belong to the Swedish National Socialist Party. Some of his closest friends and co-workers were of Jewish stock – the actor Erland Josephson, the costume designer Mago (Max Goldstein) and his script assistant and production manager Katinka Faragó. There is no trace of anti-Semitism in Bergman’s stage or screen work, and no suggestion that he espoused Nazi ideals such as Kraft durch Freude (‘Strength through Joy’). Indeed, in 1966 he had the courage to stage Peter Weiss’s scarifying play, The Investigation, about the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt. The villain in Bergman’s first filmed screenplay, Frenzy, is clearly modelled on Heinrich Himmler. In his 1949 feature, Thirst, he shows starving Germans pleading for food in the wake of World War II as a train passes through a station on the way home to Sweden. The Serpent’s Egg (1977) sought to locate the germ cell of Nazi ideology in the Weimar Republic of 1923, with a deranged scientist, Hans Vergérus, explaining that ‘It’s like a serpent’s egg. Through the thin membranes, you can clearly discern the already perfect reptile.’

In 1937 Bergman took what was known in Sweden as the student examination, an equivalent of the English A level (or High...