When Anders Ehnmark turned 75 years old on 2 June 2006 he was hailed with a bouquet of short articles written by the kulturchefer he had fell during his five-decades-long Expressenhistoria.
Bo Strömstedt then told us about how he once on the lawn outside the Anders Ehnmarks and his wife Annika Hagströms torp in Taxinge seen the values involved in what appeared to be an animated conversation with Jan Myrdal. It was the most He was animated. To the last shot Ehnmark still a question. A upset He cried: ”Here I am in the middle of a discussion, and you interrupt me.”
on Jan Myrdal, but maybe also something about Anders Ehnmark. He took rarely great location. It carefully surveyed kortformatet, the journalistic sonetten, was his specialty as a writer. But as Strömstedt has pointed out, he knew the art to interrupt, to ask the question as did the monologue.
Anders Ehnmark was a writer and a journalist. This ”and” was glib, not distinctive. Throughout his writing life he was, with the exception of an excursion to the exotic Thus, in tabloid Expressen faithful. It was explained well in part by personal ties: In the dawn of time had he and the magazine’s future editor-in-chief Strömstedt been companions in a palace coup within the arts. They took the power and split it. Strömstedt was Sweden. Ehnmark the rest of the world.
Read more: Author and journalist Anders Ehnmark has died
But the loyalty with the tabloid was also due to where the could journalism without shame naked its literary nature: Dramatic peripetier (”dream fishing trip became a nightmare”). Hard-boiled prose. Storytelling. One of Anders Ehnmarks earliest teraphim was Ernest Hemingway. In the post-second world war start-up tabloid melted the hemingwayska stilidealen together with the antinazism Ehnmark been shaped by growing up in a anglofilt läkarhem.
was, however, never blind. Ehnmark made his debut as a novelist in 1976 with the ”Karamellkoket”, the funniest and meanest redaktionsskildring written in Swedish. Another Swedish author, Per Olov Enquist, heard quickly, and together they wrote since the satirical teaterstycket ”Chez Nous”, on the dialectics between truth-seeking and cynicism in the easily recognizable kvällstidningsmiljö. It was the beginning of a wonderful friendship, and a fruitful literary cooperation.
In a vänbok to the P O Enquist from 1994 told Anders Ehnmark about how the two, although geographically separated, Ehnmark in Sörmland and Enquist usually in the rest of the world, worked closely together. ”What happens today then? The short news conference by telephone. Yesterday we said to Expressen become fpu-ers Sargassohav, where they like eels returning to die. Should be used somewhere. The question is where. We left it open until further notice.”
funny. It is, perhaps, what I now would prefer to recall. Roligheten was also the ideal he carried with him from his childhood in a home where the british humor held high. P G Wodehouse remained a stylistic source of inspiration. Like all really original writers customers Ehnmark very well to flick an ingenious formulation. The captain had a very even temper. He was always furious. See where a phrase with only small changes could turn into a characteristic of any senior administrator of the Swedish politicians.
It was also in this, in the style rolighet, the policy manifested itself. It had the freedom to do, and with ease, the wonderful ease. Anders Ehnmark is usually described as the ”left”. An accurate description, it will probably say, but it must be specified. Freedom was his major subject; how to reach it, how to prevent the liberation will be the prologue to a new repression?
Italienkorrespondent he reported on the 1960s on the befrielserörelserna in Africa. It resulted in reportageböcker. In the winter of 1969/70 subscribed he the strike in the iron ore fields, the miners ‘ manifestation for freedom and dignity. It was one of his intellectual life paradigmatic experiences, and coincided with the beginning of a lifelong marriage with her colleague Annika Hagström.
Anders Ehnmark has a own village, or a private kingdom, where the wood is split with the same ease and freedom of hand as arguments.
Then came the groundbreaking suite idépolitiska books of essays: ”Power secrets” 1986, ”the Castle” In 1990, ”The secret” 1999, ”A city of light” in 2005. Machiavelli, Toqueville, Geijer, Gramsci; the four companions.
Machiavelliboken did a few years Anders Ehnmark to a celebritetsintellektuell, quoted by all. But my own favorite books are the autobiographical: the ”Legacy” from 1983 and ”realm of Freedom” from 2001. The latter has an explanatory tilläggstitel: ”If it’s fun”. It is what everything is really about, the fun part: the writing, cigarillröken that winds around the call after a long dinner, swim, rocket salad, murklorna, cranes, vedhuggningen.
constantly wood. It had with a pie in the sky to make. In ”Inheritance”, he talks about how his mother, the bourgeois seminarieutbildade läkarfrun, 1940 he put in a big green stove in the dining room at Hvitfeldtsplatsen in Gothenburg, sweden. She is solid wood and fired, and ”the smoke and the glow transformed patriciervåningen to high-quality.” Of the wood built her a village. Rättsinnighetens village, where life was lived the right way. It was Håvberg and low in finnmark. The family came from there, but the mother had never lived there. It was an imaginary village, a liberty reserve.
Anders Ehnmark has a own village, or a private kingdom, where the wood is split with the same ease and freedom of hand as arguments. Ehnmark is romantic as the apostle of enlightenment, upplysningsmannen as romantics. It is his finest paradox. You can think of his texts as a formfulländad, nysvärtad and gleaming gjutjärnskamin. Inside crackles and snaps and warms the wood that comes from, that is, the which the village, there where the kingdom. Freedom village, the realm of freedom.
was framed by illness and convalescence. He wrote very little, But in the archive can I find a nice little text published in the Express newspaper in april 2013. It is all about the fun: ”In a södervänt ditch, we find the nettle. We follow the Apicius, a roman cookbook from the time of the birth of Christ. Cuts and boils. Spiced up with a lot of garum, which will stricken with scale-rot fish. Then, make an omelette and put the nettles in the middle. Spring is here.”
Per Svensson is the political editor at the daily News, and was during the 2002-2008 Expressen’s director of cultural affairs.
