Mother and daughter in 1935, ready to go for a walk in Vasa Park with other mothers of small children in the local area. Twenty years later, in a letter to her mother and father in Småland, Astrid Lindgren wrote: “In a moment my park aunties, Alli, Elsa Gullander, and Karin Bené, are coming to lunch here, and later we’re going to the theater to see Don Juan.”
For Astrid Lindgren, whether she was taking a walk, sitting on a bench, or watching from a window in her apartment, Vasa Park also functioned as a psychological laboratory, where she could observe human behavior and personality types, as well as children’s games and parents’ interactions with their sons and daughters. Even on her first few strolls through the park in 1930–31, Astrid was surprised and upset by what she saw. As she told Margareta Strömstedt in 1976–77: “It was when Lasse was little, and I took him for a walk in Vasa Park, that it really struck me how much children were browbeaten and trampled on by grown-ups. I realized that we rarely listened to them, we ‘brought them up’ by scolding them and even hitting them. I felt outraged on children’s behalf, and the feeling was reinforced when my children started school and I encountered the demands and authoritarianism there.”
The progressive view of child-rearing Astrid Lindgren advocated as an author and cultural commentator, which had become evident in her fiction by the late 1930s, took a sharp turn on December 7, 1939. At the bottom of page 13 in the Dagens Nyheter, squeezed between large advertisements for stockings, aspirin, and vermouth, was an opinion piece entitled “The Youth Revolt.”
The article was ostensibly written by a rebellious teenager. In fact, it drew on a presentation thirteen-year-old Lars Lindgren had given in his secondary school classroom, which his mother had helped him write. Astrid was so taken with the subject matter—“On the Art of Being a Child”—that she reworked Lasse’s text and sent it in to the Dagens Nyheter. The piece was heavily edited by the op-ed team: half the original text was cut, and the rest was sharpened and presented under the catchier title “The Youth Revolt.” An extra line was added near the beginning (“This is a revolutionary speaking”), and Huckleberry Finn was swapped out for the author Edgar T. Lawrence in order to better suit the age bracket of the writer. Whether Astrid Lindgren was involved in these changes is unknown, but Ulla Lund-qvist’s account of the episode in The Child of the Century (Århundradets barn), where one can read the article in its original form, offers no indication of that. Nonetheless, the final version packed a punch:
Summer 1938: the Ericsson clan, gathered on the steps of the house at Näs. Around the two parents, from left to right, are Ingegerd’s husband, Ingvar; Ingegerd; Stina and (hidden) her husband, Hans Hergin; Gullan (with little Barbro in her arms); Astrid; and Gunnar. On the bottom step are Karin, Lasse, and Gunvor.
The Youth Revolt
It’s not easy being a child, I read recently in a newspaper, and I was utterly astonished, because it’s not every day one reads something in the papers that’s genuinely true. This is a revolutionary speaking.
It’s not easy being a child, no! It’s difficult, very difficult. So what does it mean—being a child? It means you have to go to bed, get dressed, eat, brush your teeth, and blow your nose when it suits adults, not when it suits you. It means you have to eat rye bread when you’d rather have white bread, that you have to run down to the store to get a token for the gas without batting an eye, just as you’ve settled down with Edgar T. Lawrence. It means, moreover, that you’ve got to listen to the most personal comments from any adult about your appearance, state of health, clothing, and prospects without a word of complaint.
I have often wondered what would happen if we started treating adults in the same manner.
Adults have a tiresome fondness for comparisons. They love talking about their own childhoods. From what I understand, in the whole of human history there has never existed a more intelligent and well-brought-up generation of children than our mothers’ and fathers’. . . . A.L. / L IV.
These were the words of a mother writing in the guise of a young, antiauthoritarian high school student on behalf of oppressed children and young people everywhere. The signature “A.L. / L IV” represented a fictional Astrid Lindgren, a student on the Latinlinjen (an educational track that focused on the humanities) in the fourth year. And while the Dagens Nyheter editors had amped up the revolutionary angle, making the text blunter and more pugnacious, the article’s satirical dissection of parental double standards and exercises of power reveals that Astrid Lindgren was approaching a crossroads. She had to make a choice: continue writing journalistic pieces that were seldom printed, or stake everything on her literary talent?
Astrid’s Monkey Tricks
As adults, both Lasse and Karin confirmed that Astrid Lindgren was an atypical mother, equally willing to help her son write a school presentation as to join in with her children’s games and leisure pursuits. She was rarely slow to let her own inner child out to play, whether in cozy little indoor games and activities at home in Vulcanusgatan, where the family drew pictures and told stories, or during more physically demanding outdoor activities like sledding, swinging, climbing, running, hopping, jumping, skiing, or skating, either in Vasa Park or nearby Karlsberg Palace Park.
Astrid revealed herself to be a shrewd participant—she knew that an adult’s primary contribution to children’s games was simply giving them the opportunity to play. Lasse and Karin were never directed when and how to do so. As Astrid put it in an interview in Vecko Journalen in spring 1949, “Leave young people in peace, but be within reach if they need you.” She raised her children and played with them according to that rule, says Karin Nyman: “I don’t think there were ever any situations where Astrid told us children, ‘Now we’re going to play.’ Or where I asked her to. I do remember always wanting to be with her; somehow it was always so eventful and never boring.”
Astrid Lindgren reflected on her style of parental authority in a radio broadcast in December 1978. Pippi’s mother emphasized that “every child needs norms,” explaining her educational technique when it came to Lasse and Karin with the words, “I took their side against myself.” It was precisely this dual role—being at once parent and child—that she had taken in the indignant op-ed in the Dagens Nyheter in 1939, and she never got so old that she lost that rare skill.
Lithe and slender, Astrid Lindgren could activate her “game-playing” gene at the flick of a switch. Her inner child was always ready to play, except when she was writing, when she had to settle for giving her imagination free rein. When Lindgren was in Motala in 1977 to celebrate the local radio station’s birthday, she clambered up one of the tempting radio towers as agilely as a squirrel, much to the delight of the photographer. The same thing happened when the seventy-year-old author, accompanied by her friend Elsa Olenius—ten years older, equally fond of games and every bit as media-savvy—scaled a pine tree, loudly announcing to all the photographers on the ground that there was nothing in the Law of Moses against old biddies climbing trees. At an even more advanced age, when she was no longer physically capable of scrambling up radio towers and pine trees, she instead wrote a newspaper article about her fondness for climbing, which was printed in the Astrid Lindgren Society newsletter in September 2013:
I believe—just like Darwin—that human beings are descended from monkeys. At least, I am. Why else would I have spent my whole childhood and early youth assiduously climbing up trees and onto roofs and other places best suited for those prepared to risk their necks? One such suitable place, for instance, was the school gym: a peculiar set of pipes ran all the way along the hall, six meters above the ground. That was where I climbed—coming out the other side in one piece, astonishingly. My school friends followed my monkey tricks with mingled fear and delight. . . . Oh yes, I’m absolutely certain I’m descended from monkeys. But nowadays I’m not so aware of it.
As a young mother, however, she was very much aware of this tendency, and there were many occasions when she thought and acte
d like a child, risking scoldings from nearby adults. From a streetcar conductor in the 1930s, for instance, when Astrid—not setting the best of examples—dashed after it at high speed and leapt aboard, losing a shoe in the process and having to get off at the next stop to hobble back for it.
Other children’s mothers and fathers were rarely as spontaneous and childlike, so naturally her behavior attracted attention. One person who never forgot Lasse and Karin’s mother was Göran Stäckig, Lasse’s faithful playmate and best friend for more than ten years. Göran particularly remembers the icy winter Sundays they spent skating in Vasa Park, when Astrid, after hours of watching the boys’ valiant attempts to keep their balance and stay warm, bought food and scalding hot drinks for the small, freezing skaters. In 1986, when an adult Göran—by then living in the United States—heard that Lasse had died, he immediately wrote to “Aunt Lindgren,” reminiscing about the boyhood he and her son had shared in the 1930s and emphasizing that, although there were many Astrids in Sweden, there was only one Aunt Lindgren: “You taught me and Lasse to skate. I don’t know how you got hold of Lasse’s skates, because they had no points—they were beautifully rounded like a pig’s tail. You pulled us around on the rink again and again. And you bought us warm pastries that smelled wonderful.”
He’d spent many unforgettable hours with Lasse and his playful mother. One day, when Göran arrived at their fifth-floor apartment in Vulcanusgatan, Astrid and her son had stretched some woolen blankets between the two chairs they were sitting on. With wide, friendly smiles, they asked whether Göran wanted to sit in the middle. Assuming it was a bench, he sat down confidently between them—and found himself engulfed in blankets and laughter.
Lasse and Göran’s domain spanned the whole of Atlas, the area of Stockholm between the “mountains” of Vasa Park and the “wild waters” of Barnhusviken. They also made the daily trek to and from school at Adolf Fredriks Folkskola, and later—in high school—to Norra Latin, although Lasse’s mother worried at the end of every school year that he might be held back. He’d always been a daydreamer, struggling to concentrate in school and sloppy with his homework, so Astrid was always relieved when the two boys began the next year together after a long summer vacation. When she got the chance, she would stand them back-to-back to measure how much they had grown. She did so in August 1939, for instance, but even before the summer—on May 22—she had felt the urge to reach for her account book and write a long entry about the children. After all, they were only on loan:
My little Lars is getting to be not-so-little anymore. He’s in his second year of high school, and he’ll be finished in a few days. He and Göran joined the Scouts this spring, and he’s got a sleeping bag. He’s doing a little better in school than in his first year, and we hope he’ll be allowed to move up. He’s my beloved child, although I know we fight and row a lot when he and Karin play too many tricks. Yesterday, on Karin’s birthday, the whole family went to the “mountain” [Karlsberg Palace Park], where I hadn’t been for ages. And Lars and I used to go there so often with Göran. Sometimes it frightens me when I realize I’m not getting as much out of their childhood as I’d like—not teaching them what I should, generally not taking part in their lives as I ought.
SIX
Mothers of All Lands, Unite!
WHILE THE GERMAN WAR MACHINE WAS trundling toward the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941, one of the strangest and most wonderful characters in world literature was stirring into life. She was born in a country at one remove from the war, though the Swedes were uncomfortably aware of being surrounded by countries that were either occupied by Germans or at war with Russians. It was in these uneasy circumstances that the peculiarly named Pippi Longstocking first appeared, in a series of stories invented by a mother who was following the political situation so keenly it seemed like she was on her way to the front herself.
Pippi’s roots in the horrors of the Second World War, and in Astrid Lindgren’s abhorrence of violence, demagoguery, and totalitarian ideologies, are documented in the autobiographical work she spent two decades writing and compiling from newspaper clippings. At first she called it her War Diary, but it burst through those limits in 1945 and morphed into a postwar diary and Cold War diary, spanning nearly three thousand pages across nineteen small notebooks. The finishing touches were added in 1961, when she wrote the last entry and pasted in the last clipping. Her mother died that year, and Astrid’s first grandchild was born, ensuring the continuation of the female line for a future that looked neither bright nor peaceful, and which sorely needed more strong women. It was as though world history were going in circles, remarked fifty-two-year-old Astrid Lindgren on New Year’s Day in 1960: “The balance of terror between east and west continues. In the last few days we’ve been shaken by an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi attack in Germany, with the vandalization of the synagogue in Cologne, etc.”
With their broad scope and collagelike assemblage of yellowed newspaper clippings, flanked by handwritten comments on the latest political news and events in the author’s family during the 1940s and 1950s, Astrid Lindgren’s war diaries constitute a unique autobiographical work. From the outset, the diaries were conceived as an attempt to document the war and the long shadows it cast over the life of an ordinary family. As Astrid told Margareta Strömstedt in 1976–77, “I started writing the diaries to organize my memories, and get an overall picture of what was happening in the world and how it affected us.” On September 1, 1939, the day before Children’s Day was due to be celebrated in Stockholm, she picked up her pen:
Alas, war broke out today. Nobody wanted to believe it. Yesterday afternoon, Elsa Gullander and I were in Vasa Park while the children ran and played around us, and we were comfortably lambasting Hitler and agreeing it probably wouldn’t come to war—and then today! The Germans bombed several Polish cities this morning and are forcing their way into Poland from all sides. I’ve avoided any kind of hoarding for as long as possible, but today I bought some cocoa, some tea, some soap, and several other things. A ghastly depression has fallen across everything and everyone. The radio reports the news at regular intervals all day long. Lots of people have been called up. They’ve banned private cars on the roads. God help our poor, mad planet!
As for millions of other people, the Second World War proved a life-altering experience for Astrid Lindgren, changing her perspective on the world, on life, and on other human beings. In a later interview, she explained that the rage and indignation she felt toward Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Nazism, Communism, and fascism had been her “first real political involvement.”
The impulse to understand the causes and effects of the war, and to do something, to protest and inveigh, can be felt throughout the diary, sitting cheek by jowl with descriptions of peaceful Lindgren family holidays, birthdays, and vacations. One almost surreal example of the dual reality lived by many Swedes took place in midsummer 1941, when the Lindgren family vacationed on the island of Furusund in the Stockholm archipelago. Sture rowed the family’s small boat, Astrid swam and foraged for berries and mushrooms, and Karin’s cousin Gunvor from Småland came to visit. All seemed idyllic, and in the evenings—accompanied by the distant rumble of clashes between Finnish and Russian troops in the Sea of Åland—Astrid read the history books she had brought to learn more about world events. On June 28, she updated her diary:
Here I ought to paste in Hitler’s speech upon the outbreak of war, but that will have to come later. I’m sitting in my bed and gazing out across the drizzly sea after an uneasy night fighting off mosquitos, with guns thundering in the distance. . . . National Socialism and Bolshevism are like two great reptiles fighting. It’s unpleasant having to take sides with either one of them, but right now all I can do is hope the Soviets get a good thrashing after everything they’ve seized during this war and all the harm they’ve done to Finland. In England and America they’ve got to side with Bolshevism—that’s got to be even more difficult, and “the man in the street” probably
has trouble understanding it. Queen Wilhelmina of Holland said on the radio that she was prepared to support Russia, but with the caveat that she was still against the principles of Bolshevism. The largest forces in world history are facing each other on the Eastern Front. It’s dreadful to think about. Are we on the verge of Armageddon? I’ve been reading about world history here in Furusund, and it makes for rather unpleasant reading—war and war and war and suffering for humanity. And they never learn anything, just keep drenching the earth in blood, sweat, and tears.
In Revelations, Armageddon is the site of the final confrontation between God and Satan. Throughout Astrid Lindgren’s war diaries there are religious references to the world’s impending doom, for example on November 30, 1939, when Stalin’s troops invaded Finland: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!” (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?). Or February 9, 1940, when the first evidence of the barbaric cruelty behind Communism and Nazism surfaced:
What a world, what an existence! Reading the newspapers is a bleak business. Women and children hounded by bombs and machine-gun fire in Finland, seas full of mines and U-boats, neutral sailors being killed, or at best being rescued just in time on some miserable raft after days of suffering, the tragedy of the Polish people unfolding behind closed doors (nobody’s supposed to know what’s happening, but it’s still in the papers), special compartments on the streetcars for “the German master race,” Poles mustn’t go outside after eight o’clock at night, and so on. The Germans are talking about their “harsh but fair treatment” of the Poles—and you know what that means. It leads to such hatred! In the end the world will be so full of hatred that we’ll all suffocate. I believe this is God’s judgment being visited upon us. And on top of that we’ve had a harsher winter than any in living memory. . . . I’ve bought myself a fur coat—although I’m sure Armageddon will be here before I’ve had time to wear it out.