You can, as the author, relate to the truth in several ways. You can write to investigate the truth. You can write to tell the truth. You can write to get around the truth. And you can lie, that is to say, find on the. The novelist, find at. People tend to write around the truth. We leave them. Remains of the survey and the date of the notice.
The one who proclaims the truth has already at the start understood what it is all about. The survey is so to say finished. Questions have been asked, the answers are already available, the author’s mission consists on the best ways to convey the message to the reader. In the pamphlet, the volumes of debate, väckelseskriften is nothing to discover, nothing to try, an entire readership to win. The view is in the centre, finished and self-evident, and of such importance that the truth must sometimes be a spouse. It is the book as an alarm clock, the scripture as subversives.
Lars Jansson’s ”Multiculturalism or welfare,” ”proven” fifteen years ago, that immigration has brought Sweden to the brink of ruin, and now it was the swedes who were discriminated against. It was a strong contributor to the sweden democrats ‘ first parliamentary success. (Get debate books have, over the past twenty years has had so much political influence; yet so little debated.)
You can take more housebroken example, a few books, which gained fame and fortune.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem – which during the second world war, recruited muslims to the SS and sent from Berlin to a Morfar Ginko, who just happened to meet Hitler once. In Magnus Lintons ”Dope. A Swedish history,” turned into a Nils Bejerot, in my eyes, a hero, to Herman Lundborg, who is leading a conspiracy against the Swedish people. In Fatima Bremmers ”fucking sunshine”, which, although it is a biography, but in which the author’s infatuation with the object set to it, invents the Ester Blenda Nordström, the investigative reporter in Sweden; maybe she also invents the modern Swedish children’s book.
Stig Dagerman. Photo: Malin Rosenqvist/Novellix
When the questions have already been answered, the opinion is strong as holy water, since the case is good, the author’s mission heroically, risking the author to ignore distractions the whole, that is to say, the message. Therefore, discussing Gardell is not anti-semitism in the muslim world, rather than being mocked those who brought it on the speech. Therefore, I have at Linton not been able to find any reasoning about the strange fact that narkotikadödligheten in Sweden is not pulling away in 1986 or 1996, but 2006. Bremmer skip the reportagets pioneers that existed prior to Ester Blenda Nordström in Sweden, hiding in addition Margaretha Ståhls solid doctoral dissertation ”the Signature Bansai” among fotnötterna. The case can certainly be important – islamophobia or narkotikadödlighet or female pioneers – but the author’s self-imposed mission, obstructing the view for the reader.
Personally, I try to write in order to discover the truth. I don’t write reports, I find the story – to paraphrase Pentti Saarikoski The reality is not one and indivisible, for every opinion there is an opposite, yesterday’s winner become today’s loser. To try to put into words observations, are forced to formulate experiences, also others, makes the visibility clearer, clarifies the idea. The reporter’s uncertainty in the face of the mission, the nervousness and maybe even fear in there, get the right managed an asset.
It was the first time in 1947 and has since been printed in seven editions, been translated into fifteen languages last I counted. Thus, written over seventy years ago, in a special historical situation that quickly started to change, has rather little to do with today’s political situation – and yet so alive! The most dated of his books have proven to be perhaps his most timeless. I myself have used the ”German autumn” repeatedly in a författarklass consisting of twenty – to trettiofemåringar, always a success. They like it, it inspires them. What is the secret?
Why is the ”German autumn” so popular?
Dagerman’s style means a lot – factual yet sensitive, restrained yet full-on, lingering still driving – but the style is also in other of his books, which, in my opinion, does not hold in the same way. The tone at Least is easy to recognize, but we are also in several of his short stories. His literary technique is impressive, take for example his way of handling the contrasts: already on the first two pages he turns and twists on the words ”unimportant” and ”important,” ”despite” and ”because of”, ”speak” and ”pronounce”, ”hateful” and ”welcome”, ”distrust” and ”despair,” and so he continues. He wanders through Germany’s ruins, with a woman, the author’s guide, an ardent anti-fascist who passiviserats and now belongs to the ”Germany’s most beautiful ruins.” His repetition is never tiresome, on the contrary. He joins together events so that the boundaries of what is non-fiction stretch to the breaking point. His metaphors are never worn. For all who want to learn the art of letters is the ”German autumn” of a university.
with it elsewhere: in Stig Dagerman’s approach, his approach to the mission he receives from Expressen in the autumn of 1946: go to Germany, write as you yourself perceive it, leave between six and ten articles, this is the amount of the advance (which was generously sized). After two months on the road, he comes home with a surprise, he comes home with a story about losers. The winners filling usually the columns, the winners wrote the other reporters; Stig Dagerman interest for those who no longer want to know and want to know of them it is to mock them. He goes even further than that: he suffers with them, ”therefore”, he writes, ”that it förskyllda suffering is just as heavy to bear as it is gratuitous, it feels just as much in the stomach, in the chest and the feet”. Stig Dagerman shows an extremely courage, a rare luxury, by doing so here. In addition: we are all losers, ultimately, perhaps, therefore, we can recognise ourselves in a story as his, even if the circumstances are different.
Still, the author has no mission, no matter preying on people. It is no controversial novel he had written. He simply want to know how it is. He takes out of it. He writes in a letter home that have been sad in Hamburg, alone in Berlin, frozen in Hanover, afraid in Dresden, tired in Cologne … He sees the ruins wherever he looks. He climbs down into the water-filled cellars where the children cough adult and tuberkulöst, some frozen potatoes boiling in a pot, it is cold and smoky and wet, and we are downstairs with him, the images he conveys remains in memory by its level of detail. Each statement is supported in the thing. Each of the general reasoning will be manifested. And Stig Dagerman is rarely simple.
In fact, it is blackmail to analyze the hungriges the policy without at the same time analyzing hunger
the rise of the nazi henchmen, ”with singular sharpness, gives a picture of the state during the Hitlertiden”, but he conveys as the scenes that seems right, hopeless, right, stupid, a comedy. Bavaria was Hitler’s starting point, bayrarna send back all the evacuees to their hometowns, bayrarna feel no affinity with the rest of Germany, still – out Least – there were a not insignificant passive resistance to nazism right here. The germans seem to nothing is learned of the war, they say it was better in the old days, and the world shall melt; Dagerman: ”in fact, it is blackmail to analyze the hungriges the policy without at the same time analyzing hunger.”
in other words: Surprise the readers. Provide a place for losers. Look around you, listen. Simplify not.
the Text is based on a speech held during a symposion on the non-fiction and the dissemination of knowledge in Uppsala on January 8, 2019: ”Who is responsible for the public discourse?”