August Strindberg - Hemsöborna (Stockholms stadsteater)

Han kom som ett yrväder en aprilafton och hade ett Höganäskrus i en svångrem om halsen. (He arrived like a whirlwind an evening in April and had a Höganäs jug in a belt around his neck.)

~ August Strindberg, Hemsöborna

The quote above is probably one of the most famous of all introductory sentences in Swedish literature. It is taken from August Strindbergs book Hemsöborna which was first published as a novel in 1887. Strindberg spent a couple of summers at Kymmendö in the Stockholm archipelago. The inhabitants on that island took the novel personally and fobid Strindberg to return there because of it. I went to see a theatre version of the novel, directed by Stefan Metz at Stockholms stadsteater yesterday

The cast of Hemsöborna. Photo: Sören Vilks

The plot revolves around the inhabitant at a farm at the island Hemsö in the archipelago outside of Stockholm. The farm is run by the widow Flod (often called madam or moster [aunt]). Her son Gusten prefers to be out on the sea hunting and the farm decays, so she sends out for help and Carlsson is hired as a farmhand to help and he is the one arriving as a whirlwind an evening in April. 

Ann Petrén as Madam Flod.
Photo: Sören Vilks

Carlsson knows a lot about farming, but nothing about the sea, but with his help the farm prosper and everyone seems to like him quite well (in the case of Madam Flod a little too well...), but Gusten remains sceptical. Carlsson rents out one of the houses to summer guests. They have a maid he falls in love with, but after hearing Madam Flod proclaiming her love for him and realising he would get his own farm, he marries her.

The marriage, however, changes Carlsson and he goes from energetic farm to greedy entrepreneur. This theme is something it has in common with Chekhov's The Chery Orchard which I saw in Göteborg last week. Hemsöborna treats it far better though! The Cherry Orchard tried too hard to place the plot into a modern setting, it did not work because it felt too much like it was forcing political standpoints down in your throat and a classical play was added sort of like an afterthought. Hemsöborna, however, sticks quite well to the original plot and because it does, it manages to portray how power and money can corrupt a man.

The book

All the actors (even the often dancing extras) were very good. I am a big fan of Ann Petrén who played Madam Flod since long before this and she was really amazing here as well, but Claes Malmberg worked very well as Carlsson as well.

In The Cherry Orchard I was very confused by the scenery. With the actors coming out of boxes and trees in the background that was not even cherry trees and nothing about it really added up to what the characters were saying.

The scenography of Hemsöborna was very simple but extremely effective. It was all made up of corrugated fiberboards covering the entire stage, screen which showed what I think was Strindberg's own paintings and with sticks being used as waves, tree branches and fishing-rods. However the scenography also turned out to be extremely effective. The last scene is about Gusten and Carlsson together with the farmhands Rundqvist and Norman being out on the ice in a snow storm and the ice starts to break up into ice floes. The rest of the cast tore off those pieces of corrugated fiberboard pretty much piece by piece and it worked very well.

So to sum it all up: while the Göteborg theatre production of The Cherry Orchard (which was the one production I was looking forward to) was one of my probably worst theatre experiences ever, Hemsöborna (which was an unexpected christmas gift) turned out to be one of my best theatre experiences ever (Not the best. That is still Othello at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London.) and it restored my faith in the theatre that got torn a bit last weekend.





The photos, besides the first and the last ones, was borrowed from here. Photographer: Sören Vilks

Historical Women - Elsa Andersson

Today is the birthday of Elsa Andersson, the first Swedish aviatrix, so I thought I should talk about her in my series about Historical Women.

Elsa Teresia Andersson was born in Strövelstorp outside of Ängelholm in Skåne, the southernmost province of Sweden on 27 April 1897. She was the daughter of a farmer and her mother Alma died giving birth to her little sister Stina in 1903. Her elder brother Sture later emigrated to America and her other brother Harald became an electrician.

Not far from her home was Ljungbyhed where the military had been practicing since the 17th century (Skåne belonged to Denmark up until 1658 and I have no idea if the place was used before that and that the Swedish army just took over or if it started afterward.). Among other things practiced there was flying which might have woken Elsa's interest in flying. At Ljungbyhed was also Thulins flygarskola (Thulin's flying school) where Elsa was accepted. She graduated in 1920.

After graduation, she wanted to learn how to use a parachute, but the only teacher and expert in Sweden, Raoul Thörnblad, refused to teach her. Because of this, Elsa moved to Berlin in 1921.

Unfortunately, she died in january 1922 at the age of 25 when she had problems releasing her parachute during a jump at Askersund in Sweden. In 1926, Svenska aeroklubben (the Swedish Aero Club) erected a monument to her honour at the site where she died. She was buried at the cementery in Ströveltorp.

In 1996, Swedish writer Jacques Werup wrote the book Den ofullbordade himlen about her life and life was also depicted in the Swedish film Så vit som snö in 2001.





Pictures  were borrowed here and here.

Vere Gordon Childe - Phryne's archaeologist friend?

Today is the one year anniversary of this blog, my digital baby. And in what better way can I celebrate than write a post about two of my favourite subjects: Phryne Fisher and archaeology. The former was actually the subject of the first real blog post I wrote on this blog, a couple of days after the introductory one.

My view on Phryne has changed a little as I have had more time to think about her as a character, but since I started the books I have also started to gain new knowledge about her, so I think an update is needed. However, this post will not be so much about her character as it will be about a mentioning of a friend of hers in the book version of Blood and Circuses. We do not get to know much about this friend other than it is a man and he is an archaeologist who have been bitten by a lion.

Phryne had been told that the moment before the prey was seized by the predator, it went limp. It ceased to fear or care. An archaeologist friend had talked about the moment when a lion's teeth had closed on his shoulder. Dreamy he had said. The world had ceased to matter. The last mercy, he had said to creatures destined to be dinner was that they went down sweetly and gently to death, reconciled to their place on the menu.

~ Kerry Greenwood, Blood and Circuses

As an archaeologist myself, I have been wondering about her archaeologist friend and I think I have found a male archaeologist, contemporary with Phryne, that would fit quite well even if I have no clue if he was ever bitten by a lion.

V. Gordon Childe

His name is Vere Gordon Childe and he is viewed as one of the most prominent archaeologists of his generation. He was born in Sydney in Australia in 1892, but througout most of his career he lived in Great Britain.

Childe came to study classics at the University of Sydney, before moving to England to study Classical archaeology at the University of Oxford. During his time at Oxford he became a socialist, active in the campaign against the First World War which he saw as coerced by imperialists and which hurt the European workers.

In 1917, he returned to Australia, but due to his socialist engagement, he could not find work in academia and engaged himself in the Australian Labor Party. However, working for them, he became critical towards their politics and took another step to the left on the political scale and engaged himself in the left political movement called Industrial Workers of the World.

Childe emigrated to London again in 1921 where he got work as a librarian at the Royal Anthropological Institute and he also travelled the European continent and brought home the notion of culture from German archaeology to British archaeology. In his book The Danube in Prehistory from 1929, he defined it as:

We find certain types of remains - pots, implements, ornaments, burial rites and house forms - constantly recurring together. Such a complex of associated traits we shall call a "cultural group" or just a "culture". We assume that such a complex is the material expression of what today we would call "a people".

How the notion of culture has been used and is still used (both implicitly and explicitly) in archaeology is a subject I love to discuss and I do think Childe's definition still has more relevance for how archaeologists treat the concept today than contemporary archaeologists in general would like to admit. To express my thoughts on the subject would make up at least ten other posts. One thing about his archaeological influence do I need to clarify though.

There are three major theoretical paradigm that usually come up in archaeological publications and classes and Childe sort of has a foot in all three of them. I will here use a lot of -isms that might be tricky to understand if you are not used to an academic language. In those cases, I have linked to the Wikipedia articles about them. If you have any questions about it, please feel free to ask in a comment or on the link post for this entry.

• Chronologically, the first one is usually call Culture-historical Archaeology, Culture Archaeology or simply Traditional -archaeology. This paradigm has a less explicitly defined theoretical base than the later two, but in short the foundation can be found in evolutionism and diffusionism. The notion of culture (pretty much as it was defined by Childe in the quote above) was central to understand the archaeological material. Bruce G Trigger in his book A History of Archaeological Thought (2006) divides up this paradigm between one earlier he calls Evolutionary archaeology and the later Culture-historical archaeology, but most archaeologists do not seem to make the same distinction and the Culture-historical archaeology is very much based on evolutionism also.
• Because of the misuse of Culture-historical Archaeology in Nazi-Germany, archaeology went into a crisis after the Second World War and came out of it by combining a positivistic philosophical theory with a functionalistic view on society and culture into what is normally called Processual Archaeology or New Archaeology. American archaeologist Lewis Binford is normally considered to be the founder, but Childe actually did "experiment" with a functionalistic approach to archaeology before him.
• Postprocessual Archaeology is the newest of the three major theoretical paradigm in archaeology and does not only contain one single theoretical approach but many, for example structuralism, post-structuralism, hermeneutics, gender theory and marxism. The main thing they have in common is their critic of the rigid positivistic approach of New Archaeology and even here you can glimpse the influence from Childe. He turned to marxism to help him in his studies of European prehistory shortly after his first trip to the Soviet Union in 1935.

This is only a short account of Childe's contribution to archaeology. Describing it all would make this entry far too long, like I said above. Therefore I have decided to focus on his personal life.

In 1927, he became Abercromby Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and took an interest in the Neolithic period on the Orkney Islands. He did some excavations there, the most famous one of the Neolithic village Skara Brae between 1928 and 1930. From 1947 to 1957 he also worked as director of the Institute of Archaeology, London and together with Stuart Piggott and Grahame Clarke he founded The Prehistoric Society.

Upon retiring, he moved home to his native Australia, where he settled down in Blue Mountains for awhile before commiting suicide there in 1957.

Kerry Greenwood uses real life aviator Herbert Hinkler in Ruddy Gore so she is not opposed to the idea of using real life people in a fictional setting. It is, however, very much unclear if Greenwood even knows about Childe (even though he is one of the more influential archaeologists, he might not be known outside of the field). Considering his nationality, where he was active and when, however, I think it is a possibiltiy that Phryne would actually know him.

As I have said before, I am not so found of the comparisson between Phryne and Indiana Jones and to be honest I think the annonced title of the upcoming Miss Fisher film, The Crypt of Tears to fit much better with the latter than the former (which worries me immensely, but I still hope my worries to be unjustified!), if you see Phryne's archaeologist friend as Childe, they do, in fact, have something in common. After all, I have long thought "Indy" might have read too much of Childe's work and he is mentioned by him in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull from 2008.

Edit 27 April 2017: Someone on Facebook made me aware of the fact that the person who was bitten by lion that was referenced in Blood and Circuses was none other than David Livingstone ("I presume.") (1813-1873) and linked to this article about the incident. However, he was not really an archaeologists, mostly considered to be an explorer and missionary.





References

• Bjørnar Olsen 2003. Från ting till text. Teoretiska perspektiv i arkeologisk forskning. svensk översättning: Sven-Erik Torhell, Lund
• Bruce G. Trigger 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought, Cambridge
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._Gordon_Childe 

Photo of Childe was borrowed from here.

Anton Chekhov - The Cherry Orchard (Göteborgs stadsteater)

Last Friday, I went to see Göteborgs stadsteater's production of Anton Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard (Original title: Вишнёвый сад) directed by Anja Suša in Göteborg (Gothenburg). It tells the tale of the aristocratic Madame Lyubov Andreievna Ranevskaya who returns to the family estate that is about to be auctioned to pay the mortgage. She gets offers to help save it, but is not at all interested in them and it is sold to Jermolaj Aleksejevitj Lopachin who is the the son of one of the family's former serfs. He cuts down the cherry orchard as the family leaves the estate.

The play deals a lot with class issues with an aristocracy trying to remain its status and societal position in a changing society and a new upcoming bourgoisie class trying to trying to find its way in their new materialistic reality. It opened at Moscow Art Theatre on 17 January 1904 and I can see how it can work in a modern setting whre classes are changing and no one really knows how to deal with there new position in society.

However, the production at Göteborgs stadsteater did not adapt the play into a contemporary setting very well. Almost throughout the entire play it felt like the characters actions did not fit with what they said, making the production feel confusing. The political statement became quite exaggerated and too much in your face for my taste. They were also the best example of how the character's actions did not fit with their actions, making the statements feel very misplaced, even though some of them I can actually agree to some extent with.

In the original play, Ranevskaja's brother Leonid Andrejevitj Gajev likes to play billiard, which in Göteborgs stadsteater's production had been changed to table tennis for some unknown reason. According to the English Wikipedia page about the play the billiard obsession is a symbol of the aristocractic decadent life-style and incompetence to adapt to a new reality. Having Lopachin come in with a golden table tennis racquet trying to interupt Ranevskaja and Gajev's game, like he did, would therefore be quite a strong symbol, but it was all lost to me due to the confusion that I felt about the play already by then.

I must admit, I was mainly interested in seeing the play because Simon J Berger played Lopachin. He is my favourite Swedish actor and he and the others did a good job with it all. The only problem I had was with the character Dunjasja who is described as husa (maid), which was not at all clear. The girl sounded robotic and I sat through the entire play wondering if it was intentional or not. She also had a puppet, which seemed to be an older version of herself which made it even more confusing. The main reason why I think the robotic tone of her voice was intentional, was that she did not use it while speaking with the sort of changed voice through the puppet.

So to sum it all up, as I have now read about the play, I can understand a few of the choices that was made during the production, but I should not have to read about the play to understand what I saw on stage and a lot of it is still a great mystery to me...

Sports teams and Phryne Fisher's age - thoughts about Marked for Murder

"All is fair in love and football Miss Fisher."

~ Jack Robinson, Marked for Murder

 I have written all about my thoughts and feelings about the terrorist attack on Stockholm on 7th April 2017 here and here and this entry will not really be about that. More about thoughts I got from walking on Drottninggatan last week.

I talked about the Jersey barriers in the shape of lions in the latest of my entries about the Stockholm attack. They have become sort of symbols for the attack and almost every single one of them has at least one flower bouquet on its head or body and some of them are almost covered with flowers, flags, candles, teddy bears and text messages.

One of the most powerful things from my walk along Drottninggatan last Wednesday was three of the lions standing in a row just in front of the crosswalk to the departement store Åhléns that the truck hit. Each one of them was completely covered but their faces and on top of their head they had one scarf from one of the three major sports club in Stockholm: AIK, Djurgården and Hammarby. Some of the supporters of those three teams are not always the best of friends and it is not uncommon for matches to end in violence. This is why I find the three lions representing each one of those teams such a powerful tribute. They stand together in all the tragedy. (Unfortunately, due to the big crowd surrounding them, my photos did not turn out good. The lions you see here to the right are others.)

The scarfs and the unification in tragedy of the three sports club in Stockholm, made me think about the episode Marked for Murder in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. The episode's major theme is Australian football and the plot involves the two teams Abbotsford and West Melbourne. As far as I have understood these two teams are fictional, but an Australian friend of mine tells me that Collingwood and Carlton which are mentioned by Phryne and Jack do exist.

 The sport is described as a mix between European football and rugby by Wikipedia and it was founded in Victoria (the state Melbourne is in) in 1858. To be honest I do find the sport a bit confusing just reading about it, but I am sure it all makes sense when you watch a game or play it. I did find a video explaining the rules on Youtube:

You can also read more about the Australian Football League (AFL) here and about the Swedish one (AFL Sweden) here. (I actually was surprised that there were quite a few Swedish teams. I have never heard about it over here. The first Swedish team was, according to Wikipedia Helsingborg Saints, founded in 1993.)

In Marked for Murder the games themselves play minor roles. It is not until the very end that we see the very beginning of a match between Abbotsford and West Melbourne. Instead the plot is all about intrigues behind the football field. Phryne is called in by Bert (an Abbotsford supporter) to investigate the theft of Abbotford's coach, Joe Maclean's lucky hat. When Phryne is there, the team's star Harry "the Hangman" Harper is found (fittingly enough) hanged with a West Melbourne scarf in Abbotsford's locker room. Phryne, of course, calls Jack and he and Hugh arrive to help Phryne investigates.

The episode is tied in with the overarching plotline about Jack's ex-wife Rosie and her family and there is some quite interesting use of foreshadowing. You can argue, that you already at the end of Murder Most Scandalous starts to see what man George Sanderson really is, but in this one he really shows his true self. As a West Melbourne fan, he oppose Jack bringing in the West Melbourne star Stan Baines and he does not hesitate using his personal knowledge of Jack being an Abbotsford supporter for personal gain.

Jack: "Rosie, I thought you'd returned to the West Melbourne fold"
Dot: "Yes, father would have loved that, but unfortunately for him, Sidney's a fervent Abbotsford man. Another one."

~ Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, Marked for Murder

I disussed how conservative Rosie is in my entry about her and Jack back in November 2016 and this is expressed again in what team she supports. Her father is a West Melbourne fan, but the quote above indicates that she changed alliances to Abbotsford while married to Jack and now she is back as an Abbotsford supporter because her new fiancé, Sidney Fletcher is. This, women changing loyalty to their husband's team is further developed by the discussion Bert and Dot are having later in the episode.

Bert: "Lucky I didn't tell him you're a West Melbourne girl. Until you hook up with Hugh Collins, that is."
Dot: "If Hugh marries me, I don't see why I should convert."
Bert: "No choice. He'll want to take his kids to the game."
Dot: "I'll divide them up. Just like my mum did. Girls for the West and boys for Abbotsford."
Bert: "It's people like you who bring footy clubs down, Dottie!" 

~ Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, Marked for Murder

This makes me think that women were not thought of as real sports fan but needed to be loyal to whatever sports team their fathers/husbands supported. When seeing Phryne at the entrance to the Abbotsford locker room, Jack also seems surprised ("A football ground Miss Fisher? The last place I'd expect to find you.") also indicating that sports are not really meant for women. Phryne then tells him that she has been a football fan since she was little, but that she is a lapsed Collingwood supporter since their game against Carlton 1910. This conversation and the addition to it at the end of the episode containing the explanation to why she is lapsed.

In the books Phryne is born 1900, and is therefore 28 at the time the books start. TV Phryne seems to be a bit older (Essie Davis is all beautiful and does look younger than her real age of 46-47, but I do not really think she can pass for 28...) and a lot of other plotlines indicates this as well. However in Marked for Murder she states that she was 10 years old at the time her mother forced her to leave her football interest when she tried smuggling Carlton's newest recruit a beer at their game against Collingwood in 1910. This is the most concrete example of Phryne's age we get in the show I think and it indicates that TV- and book-Phryne are the same age. However, I do not really care so much for it. I love the idea of Phryne being ageless. It makes her eternal, just like any superhero should be.

Stockholm - after the shock lifted

"Men inga vildvittror kunde skrämma bort Ronja från hennes stigar och ställen..." ("But no harpies could scare away Ronja from her pathes and places") 

~ Astrid Lindgren, Ronja rövardotter/Ronja, the robber's daughter

It has been a week and a rather strange and emotional one at that. Last Saturday, I wrote my first thoughts and reactions to what happened in Stockholm a week ago (It can be read here.). I have been into the city a couple of times now and on Wednesday, I sort of made a "reclaim Drottninggatan" action when I walked the whole street from Odenplan via Norrtullsgatan in the northern part of the city down to the parliament in the south. (Here is a map of how I walked for those of you who are not familiar with Stockholm.)

You really sort of notice when you walk into "the zone" so to speak. Everyone slows down, starts talking in lower voices and there is an atmosphere of regardful piety. The rest of the city is just as lively as ever, but that area, even though it is in the middle of the city and just as crowded as usual, it is a place for reflection and mourning. The whole street has turned into an ocean of flowers and candles and teddy bears and people are leaving messages on the big wooden board covering the hole in the facade at the departement store Åhléns where the truc ended up and when there were no space left, people started writing other types of notes and also writing on the concrete tiles that make up the street. It is such a powerful place right now. What I am so very happy about and proud of is that I did not feel any sense of hate. Instead there is so much love and comfort to the messages and the athmosphere which really induce hope.

There has been a trend to cover polices and their cars with
flowers thanking them for their effort. The message on the
stair at Sergels torg bottom right reads "Kärlek" ( Love) and
 the one in the flowers "Sleep tight! We are making love win."

I think I have been in shock ever since it happened, but my reaction Wednesday night was unbelievably physical. I felt chilly and thirsty and I started crying without really being triggered by anything. What is good is that I do feel like everything lifted afterwards. It is easier to breathe again and I am glad I have not started hating or got particularly angry. Or, that is a truth that needs a bit of modification. When some stupid Swedish trolls on the internet are writing comments like "Äntligen!" (Finally!) about the attack on social media thinking this event will get everyone on their side, I have been extremely angry because of their stupidity. And I am not the terrorist who did it's biggest fan either, but I still cannot help wondering what has driven them to hate so much. Who recented them so they had to answer in kind loosing trust in both themselves and others?

The media has got a lot of criticism and to some extent, they deserve it and, especially the tabloids and the columnists, probably should consider a collective course in how to best handle a crisis, what they have done well (even though probably completely unconciously) is that they have focused almost entirely on what is happening in the real world and not so much on what is being said on the internet. I think this has led to the racism being toned down to only a muffled murmur in the background. This has slipped a bit in the past two days, but I believe that I can see a small shift in the way internet comments are being treated by the media. It is more: "How come they would say things like that?" But for like the first time ever, they are also writing article about what is fake about the things that has been said online.

In the middle of all the emotional turmoil that the latest week has been filled with, I find myself still having been able to think rather rationally. This has surprised me since I have rather paniced and acted irrationally. I have rather reflected on the stories I have heard and read from eye witnesses and what it tells me about humans in general and Swedes in particular.

As a student in the humanistic sciences, I am often more inclined to say that humans act according to systems and structures which is true in general. However, I have for quite some time also wondered how our strictly biological nature can be tied into this mix and I think I understood it last week.

Flowers, flags and teddy bears and of course the dog who got
killed has got his own shrine filled with biscuits and toys.
My own contribution (the red rose in the lower left picture)
was to his pile.

I have long believed that humans have a tribal nature. We are meant to live together with each other. We have done so since long before we turned into homo sapiens. This tribe, however is probably to a larger extent socially constructed then biological, which I will get back to later.

What the heroic stories I have read and heard from the Stockholm attack have got me thinking is that one of our most basic instincts is to defend this tribe to all cost when it is under attack. (I do think prejudices are part of this particular instinct and the problem is not that you have it, but how you handle it!) The guards at Åhléns had apparently gone against their company policy to take cover (Seriously, what kind of policy is that for security guards?!) by running towards the danger than away from it.

These lions are the Jersey barriers on Drottninggatan and they
have sort of become symbols for the entire attack. Almost
everyone of them has at least one flower and some of them
are covered almost entirely.

There was also a bus at the crossing street Kungsgatan which was about to colide with the fast moving truck, but the driver managed to push hard on the break and avoid that. When the driver opened the doors letting the passangers out, they reacted by running towards the danger and not away from it. But somehow during the attack there are some indications that our definition of the tribe also expands.

We have had lots of Romani beggers and they have been so hated and inhumanly treated in recent years, that it is a shame for me to say it. One of them, an elderly woman, sat outside one of the shops on Drottninggatan and got hurt by one of the lions Jersey barriers you can see to the left. In an interview, she said that she thought no one would care about her and on contrary to one of the Swedish politicans who seemed appalled by that comment on Twitter, I am not at all surprised. (If you are in a country where you are openly hated and someone has thrown acid on you, you probably do not hope for too much...) But two men had come and carried her to safety. We have also collectively mourned the poor dog that was killed

Messages from people from all around the world.

But not only during the attack, I think the biological tribal instincts I think have been evident. The Swedes have embraced the new reality caused by the terror attack showing each other love, comfort and compassion. We are reaching out for each other and have become more united over the past week than I thought we have been for a long time. Our tribe was hit, but we are boncing back together and I really think that we have become stronger by it.

I talked a little about how it was an attack on the multicultural society and not on an ethnical pure Sweden and the victims are spookily symbolic for this as well. They were one Belgian woman who had worked for the Belgian Migration Board. One British man who worked for Spotify, a multinational company with its roots in Sweden. One Irish rescue dog who had come to a Swedish family and therefore become Swedish. One Swedish woman working for Amnesty and one innocent Swedish 11-year-old girl. Thinking about it, it is a bit creepy.

The sign put up at Åhléns where they need to repair the damage of the truck
hitting them last Friday. It says: "Now we are reparing. Thanks to everyone
who keeps Stockholm city open. Our love to everyone involved.
From us working at Åhléns."

Quote by August Strindberg on Drottning-
gatan, with track marks running over it.
It is from his play Ett drömspel (A Dream
Play) and can be translated as:
"I feel sorry for the humans!"

 I often go on and on about the concept of the Nation State and how it is a social contruction of the 19th century and also how it limits life in the global community we have today, but at the moment I am perfectly fine being part of a community (or a tribe really!) where I still belong without having met all of the members.

A non-Swede I know, who have lived in many countries, once said that the Swedes national identity is different from all other nationalities. Our national identity is not really based on patriotism, but rather on realism. He also said that we might be introverted, serious and careful, but we have a strong sense of solidarity and humanism, that he has never encountered before. Watching my country come together in grief over the past week, I think I finally understand him. It seems like we, as soon as the attack occured really, made an unspoken social contract to each other to get through this using love and compassion. We may be a little beaten down at the moment, but we are not broken and I do have real hope that we will rise again, stronger and better than ever. This is how Swedes mourn and we do it together with love and compassion and with the intent on coming out of it stronger and better than ever.

One thing all antidemocratic movement has in common is a belief that a free, open society is weak. I know better! An open society may have weaknesses, but it is based on a foundation of trust. It is often say that the evil will never understand love, but it does not really understand trust either. The immense love. comfort and compassion I have felt for my countrymen and the authorites this past week have reestablished my trust in my country and I feel safer than ever. The Swedish word for trust is TILLIT. It is a palindrome. Because it goes both ways...

"Nu gungar glädjelampor över havet var man ser. Nu tröstar vi varandra och är aldrig rädda mer." ("Now the lamps of happiness are swinging across the ocean everywhere you see. Now we comfort each other and are never afraid anymore.") 

~ Tove Jansson, Vem ska trösta knyttet?/Who will comfort toffle? 

PS. Stockholm's City Museum and Stockholm's County Museum are looking for stories, conversations on social media and/or pictures from the terror attack. See more here (in Swedish).

A billboard that normally shows adds, now shows love for Stockholm.

Thoughts and Feelings about Stockholm

Stockholm in pictures

Yesterday my country was attacked when a lorry drove into a crowd at Drottninggatan in central Stockholm and this is what I wrote on Tumblr, but I thought I should publish it here as well.

I started off being completely terrified, but everyone has handled it extremely well. I have been worried that if a terror attack (If it really was one. Most things point to it, but we can’t really say for sure yet.) occured here everyone would panic and everyone “would just run around like dizzy hens“ (to use a Swedish expression). And that was pretty much one of the worst places in Stockholm for it to happen. Especially on a Friday afternoon, when people have finished work.

This makes me think we got quite lucky. Do not misunderstand this now! It is horrible that 4 people died and 15 were injured, but based on where it happened and when, it could have ended up as a massive bloodbath. But in the middle of all chaos, I think people have actually handled it very well. The authorities have been great in all of this really. The emergency services seem to have been there straight away and they are giving out what information they can and also make request that people keep calm. The government has also been great and collected in their statements and so has the Swedish Television and the Swedish Radio. This made me feel calm and safe. Like: “It happened, it was shocking and terrifying, but we got this! We are here for you.”

Kristina Gyllenstierna who defended
Stockholm when it was under attack
by the Danes in 1520

And I have to say that I am unbelievably proud of my countrymen. Because everything shot down and there was no way out of Stocholm besides walking really, people and work places took to social media offering shelters for the night, driving them somewhere and/or if they just needed a shoulder to cry on. Preschools and schools were kept open until the children to those stuck in Stockholm could be picked up and some grocery stores and restaurants also said they would provide children being alone at home with dinner for the same reasons. It gives me a hope in humanity, which I thought I lost. I saw a photo of people walking on Västerbron (The Western bridge) in the suset and it was so powerful. It’s not far from thinking about refugees when you see things like that. Also it is worth stressing that this did not happen to an “ethnical pure” Sweden! Hearing eye witnesses giving interviews in broken Swedish makes it clear that it was an attack on the multicultural, open Sweden and this is very much worth pointing out because if we close our minds and hearts, there is really no way out of it and the society will totally collaps because of all the hate and I am proud that we stood unified against all of that yesterday. And it makes me proud to be Swedish today.

Andreas Bruce

From time to time as you study history, you stumble upon pretty cool people and Andreas Bruce is definitely one of them.

I watched an episode of a Swedish TV show called Nationen (the Nation) recently. The series is all about telling Swedish history from new perspectives. It uses different hosts for every episode to tell stories about issues which concern them. I do not intend to discuss the show or the episode in itself, but Andreas's tale is just so amazing that it needs to be told. There is a book about him and I intend to read it, but have not been able to do so. Therefore this entry is based on facts from the TV show, Wikipedia and from interviews from Sveriges radio P4 Gotland.

28th December 1808 the noble valet de chambre Adam Bruce and his wife Fredrica Charlotta Wijnblad had a child who was named Christina Therese Isabelle Jeanette Louise Bruce. However, little Therese grew up envying her brothers feeling like one of them (among other things she wants to wear trousers) and she was called "Lilla fröken herrn" (Little Miss Mister) by the family.

At first the family does not seem to found of the idea of treating Therese as a boy (especially not her father) and at the age of 16, she runs away from home dressed as a man. The family was devastated and thought Therese had killed herself, but one of her brothers found her after a couple of days to everyone's great relief.

After this, Adam Bruce took his daughter to doctor Hagströmer who classified Therese as a hermaphrodite and from this day she came to live the rest of her life as a man. The family, even the father, also seems to have accepted the fact that they now had another son and Adam gives him the family name Andreas and Therese renames herself as Ferdinand Andreas Edvard. As the sex resassignment became known it however caused a scandal and a conflict with the family as a result of it. Because of this, Andreas moved to Gotland to live a more secret life in 1829.

On Gotland, he got a position at the ship builder and merchant Jacob Dubbe at Rosendal in Follingbo. There he seems to have lived quite a normal life with Jacob being the only person to know that he is what we today would call a transsexual. However he encountered an inspector named Lars Nyström who got to know about his secret. What happens next is hard to know and Andreas is quite vague on the subject in the autobiography he wrote during the 1870's. The result of his encounter with Lars Nyström was quite evident though. Andreas became pregnant and considered suicide.

In July 1838 the daughter Carolina was born and was first left to a foster family, but Andreas quit his job and moved, together with his lover Maria Lindblad and her daughter to Öja. The church refused to marry them and when it was revealed that he was Carolina's biological mother, he was also expelled fom church for ten years. He died in 1885.

I find Andreas's story very interesting and it is amazing that he could live his life as a man and at least at times was accepted for the one he was. His story can also work as a witness for showing that transsexuality is not a "modern trend". Transexuals (just like other types of LGBTQ+) have always been there and it is about thime that we acknowlegde this.

Andreas's autobiography was published with the title Therese Andreas Bruce - en sällsam historia från 1800-talet by Inger Littberger Caissou-Rousseau in 2013 and the play Jag vet vem jag är which was played on the regional theatre on Gotland last year, directed by Swedish comedian Babben Larsson is based on his life as is the play I am not a girl played in Umeå in 2014.






Photo of Andreas was borrowed hereand of the book here.