Stig dagerman biography

Stig Dagerman was a literary phenomenon who took his own life when he was 31. A hundred years after his birth, a writer goes in search of his typewriter to make sense of his life and enduring legacy

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I first came across Stig Dagerman and his books sometime in the first months of 2011, in the foreign language section at Dussmann’s bookstore, on the Friedriechstrasse, shortly after moving to Berlin. The city lent itself to long conversations about history and politics, and I read voraciously on subjects I had seldom thought about while trying to understand the country I was living in. I visited Dussmann often and my purchases were aspirational and chaotic. The title German Autumn, with the black and white photo of a bombed-out building on the cover, promised to fill a sliver of my quickly expanding ignorance. I assumed the author was German: Dagerman. He was Swedish, and his reportage through the rubble of 1946 Germany was written with uncompromising clarity and sensitivity that stuck with me.

While still in Berlin I read his novel A Burnt Child, and though I don’t remember why, I finished the last pages while pacing frantically outside the door of our apartment on the Köpenickerstrasse in the middle of the night. I remember that my postscript to that book was a plunge into the internet to learn more about this man, his life, and how he’d come to write like this. I got the usual synopsis, vague or prudent, on his precocity and tragedy, which I would come to know by heart. I stumbled on the name of a daughter and found her on Facebook. There was no mistake possible: one of her most recent posts featured a photo –in black and white, like all photos of him ever taken– with a message on mental health, the consequences of depression, and the help her father never received. Eventually, I wrote to her; she never answered. It was a

Swedish writer

Stig Halvard Dagerman (5 October 1923 – 4 November 1954) was a Swedish author and journalist prominent in the aftermath of World War II.

Biography

Stig Dagerman was born Stig Halvard Andersson in Älvkarleby, Uppsala County. He later took his father's surname Jansson and then changed his name to Stig Dagerman in his teens. In the course of five years, 1945–49, he enjoyed success with four novels, a collection of short stories, a book about postwar Germany, five plays, hundreds of poems and satirical verses, several essays of note and a large amount of journalism. He died in 1954, having shut the doors of the garage and run the engine.

Literary style and themes

Dagerman is representative of the Swedish literary movement fyrtiotalism. His works deal with universal problems of morality and conscience, of sexuality and social philosophy, of love, compassion, justice, 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.

Legacy

The annual Stig Dagerman Prize awards individuals who, like Dagerman, promote empathy and understanding through their work.

In 2023 the centenary of Stig Dagerman's birth was celebrated in Sweden with various events and staging of plays. In Stig Dagerman's native Älvkarleby a park was namned after Dagerman and a statue of him was placed there.

Main works

• Ormen (The Snake) 1945, novel
• De dömdas ö (Island of the Doomed) 1946, novel
• Tysk höst (German A

‘Life expects of you duties which appear repugnant to you. You must now know that the most important thing is not duties but what permits you to be someone good and just. There are many who will say to you that this is a piece of asocial advice, but you only have to reply to them: When the forms of society are so hard and hostile to life, it is more important to be asocial than inhuman’ (Stig Dagerman).

“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 possibilies 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.”

Stig Dagerman was born in Sweden in 1923. He was the son of working class parents, his mother a telegraphist and his father an itinerant worker and train rail layer. They had not lived together and Stig was raised by his grandparents, of whom he had fond memories. His father then brought him to Stockholm.

The transition from country to city was a shock to his system. He was a brilliant pupil at school, if silent and reserved, and he found school and high school to be a prison. Life on the street and the solaces of cinema were some consolation for his nervous and anguished temperament.

In 1941 he joined the youth organisation of the syndicalist union Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganisation (SAC), the Circle of Syndicalist Youth, where anarchist ideas were widespread. He wrote regularly for its paper Storm. He then worked for Arbetaren (The Worker), the daily paper of the SAC, from 1943. Journalists for the paper were not allowed to earn more than the wage of a skilled worker.

In August 1943 he married Annemarie Goetze, the daughter of the German anarchosyndicalists Ferdinand and Elly Goetze. All three had fled from Nazi Germany, then taking part in the struggle in Spain in 1936, before