Stig Dagerman

Stig Dagerman, born in 1923, spent his childhood on a small farm in Älvkarleby, where he lived with his paternal grandparents. His unwed mother gave birth on the farm but left shortly thereafter, never to return. He would see her again only when he was in his twenties. Dagerman's father, a traveling day laborer, eventually settled in Stockholm. His son joined him there at the age of eleven.

Through his father, Dagerman came into contact with Anarchism and its ideological offspring, Syndicalism, and joined the Syndicalist Youth Federation. At nineteen, he became the editor of "Storm", the youth paper, and at twenty-two he was appointed the cultural editor of Arbetaren ("The Worker"), then a daily newspaper of the Syndicalist movement. In the intellectual atmosphere of the newspaper world, he met fellow writers and developed a taste for polemical writing. In addition to editorials and articles, Dagerman wrote more than a thousand daily poems, many highly satirical, commenting on current events. He called "Arbetaren" his "spiritual birthplace".

Dagerman's horizons were greatly expanded by his marriage in 1943 to Annemarie Götze, an eighteen-year-old German refugee. Her parents, Ferdinand and Elly, were prominent Anarcho-Syndicalists, and the family escaped Nazi Germany to be at the center of the movement in Barcelona. When Spanish fascists brutally crushed the Anarcho-Syndicalist social experiment there, the Götzes fled through France and Norway, with Hitler's army at their heels, to a neutral Sweden. Dagerman and his young wife lived with his in-laws, and it was through this family, and the steady stream of refugees that passed through their home, that Dagerman felt he could sense the pulse of Europe.

In 1945, Stig Dagerman at age twenty-two published his first novel Ormen (The Snake). It was an anti-militaristic story with fear as its main theme, channeling the war-time zeitgeist. Positive reviews gave him a reputation as a brilliant young writer of great promise. He left "Arbetaren" to write full-time. The following year, Dagerman published De dömdas ö (The Island of the Doomed), completed over a fortnight during which, he says, it was as if he "let god do the writing". Using nightmarish imagery, this was an allegory centered on seven shipwrecked people, each doomed to die, each seeking a form of salvation.

Critics have compared Dagerman's works to those of Franz Kafka, William Faulkner and Albert Camus. Many see him as the main representative of a group of Swedish writers called “Fyrtiotalisterna” (“the writers of the 1940s”) who channeled existentialist feelings of fear, alienation and meaninglessness common in the wake of the horrors of World War II and the looming Cold War.[5]

In 1946, Dagerman became a household name in Sweden through his newspaper travelogue from war-ravaged Germany, later published in book form with the title Tysk Höst (German Autumn). Rather than blaming the German people for the war's atrocities, calling them crazed or evil, Dagerman portrayed the human ordinariness of the men and women who scraped by in the ruins of war. To him, the root of disaster lay in the anonymity of mass organizations that obstructed empathy and individual responsibility, qualities without which the human race is threatened by extinction.

“I believe that man’s natural enemy is the mega-organization

because it robs him of the vital necessity to feel responsible for his fellow-man,

restricting his possibilities to show solidarity and love

and instead turns him into an agent of power,

that for the moment may be directed against others,

but ultimately is directed against himself.”[6]

The short story collection Nattens lekar (The Games of Night), published in 1947, met with high acclaim.[7] Many of the stories were set on his grandparents’ farm, and are written from a child's perspective. Dagerman used a tender naturalistic style that appeals to a wide audience. This same year his first play “Den dödsdömde” (“The Man Condemned to Death”) opened in Stockholm to rave reviews. Also in 1947 he published his empathetic account of people's sufferings at the time of the Allied Occupation of Germany, German Autumn (in its English translation), an eye-witness account of devastation and sorrows, a literary equivalent to the film Germany Year Zero.

The most famous of Dagerman's short stories, “Att döda ett barn” (“To Kill A Child”), exemplified the strong influence of film on his writing. In image after image, it portrayed in riveting detail how a series of perfectly ordinary events can be a prologue to horror as a motorists accidentally hits and kills a child crossing the road.

In 1948, he wrote three more plays and published his third novel Bränt barn (A Burnt Child). The story, a psychological account of a young man's infatuation with his father's mistress, was written in a tight, naturalistic style.

Dagerman wrote only one more novel: Bröllopsbesvär (Wedding Worries), published in 1949, regarded by some as his best. In this novel, he returned one final time to the setting of his grandparents’ farm and characters to describe the human condition, including a search for forgiveness and salvation. In this book, Dagerman, who throughout his career experimented with different literary styles, used stream-of-consciousness as a method of penetrating a character.

After his early and rapid successes, expectations kept rising, not the least his own. Dagerman struggled with depression and an onset of writer's block. He became restless in the now suburbanized Götze family, and was drawn to the medium of theater. As a playwright, and even a one-time director, he met friends and lovers within the theater world, leaving his family for periods at a time. Eventually, Dagerman broke away for good to live with and later marry the celebrated actress Anita Björk, with whom he had a daughter. But the break proved difficult, emotionally and financially. Dagerman felt guilty leaving his young sons, and took on mounting debt to support his first family. The assumption being that his debt would be paid up when he were to publish his next book ...

While battling deepening depression and a debilitating writer's block, Dagerman wrote an autobiographical essay “Vårt behov av tröst är omättligt” (“Our need for consolation is insatiable”) about his struggles and search for a way to stay alive. He also wrote “Tusen år hos gud” (“A Thousand Years with God”) – part of a new novel he was planning – which signaled a turn to a more mystical bent in his writing. In spite of his struggles, Dagerman continued to deliver his daily satirical verses for “Arbetaren”, the last one published on November 5, 1954, the day after his suicide.

Dagerman's works deal with universal problems of morality and conscience, of sexuality and social philosophy, of love, compassion and justice.[1]^: 14 He plunges into the painful realities of human existence, dissecting feelings of fear, guilt and loneliness. Despite the somber content, he also displays a wry sense of humor that occasionally turns his writing into burlesque or satire.[8]

“An imagination that appeals to an unreasonable degree of sympathy is precisely what makes Dagerman’s fiction so evocative. Evocative or not, as one might expect, of despair, or bleakness, or existential angst, but of compassion, fellow-feeling, even love.” - Alice McDermott in her foreword to Sleet: Selected Stories (David R. Godine, Publisher, 2013).

The British writer Graham Greene said this about him: "Dagerman wrote with beautiful objectivity. Instead of emotive phrases, he uses a choice of facts, like bricks, to construct an emotion."[9]

• Ormen (The Snake) 1945, novel
• De dömdas ö (The Island of the Doomed) 1946, novel
• Tysk höst (German Autumn), 1947, non-fictional account of post-war Germany
• Nattens lekar (The Games of Night) 1947, a collection of short stories
• Bränt barn (A Burnt Child) 1948, novel
• Dramer om dömda: Den dödsdömde; Skuggan av Mart (Dramas of the Condemned: The Man Condemned to Death; Marty's Shadow) 1948, plays
• Judas Dramer: Streber; Ingen går fri (Judas Dramas: No One Goes Free; The Climber) 1949, plays
• Bröllopsbesvär (Wedding Worries) 1949, novel
• Vårt behov av tröst (Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable) 1955, prose and poetry. Edited by O. Lagercrantz

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Stig Dagerman

• http://www.dagerman.us/, official website in English administered by Lo Dagerman
• (in Swedish) http://www.dagerman.se/