The manuscript for Original Pippi, spring 1944.
Artist, Secretary, and Businesswoman
The clean manuscript of the literary work we now call Original Pippi was finished at the end of April 1944, and it testified to the thirty-six-year-old author’s three fundamental, still developing guises: the artist, the secretary, and the businesswoman. While still on her sickbed she’d had the bright idea of sending a copy of Karin’s birthday present to Bonniers Förlag, a major publishing company, mailing the manuscript on April 27. A few weeks later, the handmade book, 8¼ by 10¾ inches format, featuring on the cover the author’s hand-drawn illustration of a thin, spindly-legged Pippi, was ready to be presented to Karin. Writing in her war diary on May 21, 1944, Astrid remembered to list all the birthday gifts and well-wishers, but only after expressing her concerns that “neutral” Sweden was apparently beginning to trade with Adolf Hitler:
Today Karin turned ten, her fifth birthday celebrated during wartime. . . . In this country we’re at peace, thank God, although things got dicey in the spring. The Allies were most displeased, and probably still are, because we’re exporting ball bearings to Germany. . . . To return to Karin’s birthday, we celebrated in the usual way. She got the Folkskolans läsebok [primary school reader] in three parts, a Peter No-Tail book, plus the manuscript for Pippi Longstocking in a nice black binder. She also got a blue swimsuit, white slip-ons with wooden soles, fabric for a blouse, books from Viridén and Gullander, as well as money from Grandpa plus both Grandmas.
Pippi’s public debut was still some way off, but the little girl with superhuman strength was already an institution within the Lindgren family. Moreover, Astrid’s stories about her didn’t find an audience just in Karin; they were also a hit with her friends Matte and Elsa-Lena, and with her Småland cousins Gunvor, Barbro, and Eivor, who loved hearing Aunt Astrid update them on Pippi’s escapades when the Lindgren, Ericsson, and Lindström families got together in Stockholm, Furusund, or Näs. It all began, however, at home by Karin’s bedside: “My mother began telling me about Pippi Longstocking in the late winter of 1941, when I was sick with something pneumonia-like and had to lie in bed for ages, because in those days children were on no account allowed out of bed if they had the least hint of a fever, nor for several days after it had gone. So I demanded extra entertainment to relieve my boredom. She had to read aloud or tell stories—ideally improvised ones.”
From the first, it was Pippi’s boundless energy that bewitched her young listeners. It was shocking yet infinitely liberating, wrote Karin Nyman in the preface to Original Pippi, to hear about a young girl doing something as daring as jumping from pew to pew in a church while loudly calling the pulpit a nest box. She was thinking of a scene from one of the first Pippi stories, though it never became anything more than an oral narrative. In one of the Astrid Lindgren Society’s newsletters from 2011, Gunvor Runström recounted the unforgettable moment when Aunt Astrid launched into a story about the anything-but-pious Pippi before an audience of Vimmerby children that included not just Gunvor and Karin but also eight or ten children from the three farming families living in the Ericssons’ old red house at Näs:
I remember one time I was afraid that Grandpa—Samuel August, a churchwarden—would come in and listen. Astrid very vividly described Pippi attending a service at Vimmerby Church, hopping around on the pews then catching sight of the priest in the pulpit and saying in astonishment, “There’s a funny old bird in that nest box—what is it?” The very first Pippi spoke with a Småland accent, and we thought it was hilarious! But also a bit alarming that somebody should dare make fun of something so solemn as a priest in Vimmerby Church!
Original Pippi’s Roots
It’s often been said that Pippi Longstocking would never have become the Pippi we know today if it hadn’t been for the debates about childhood education in Sweden in the 1930s, a decade when countless new psychological and pedagogical theories were introduced. This is true enough, but the inspiration for the character of Pippi didn’t just come from A. S. Neill’s philosophy of freedom and Bertrand Russell’s theories about children’s will to power. It also came from fairy-tales, from myths and legends in literary history and interwar popular culture, from literary classics like E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Strange Child (Das fremde Kind) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs and L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Additional influences came from 1930s films and comics, which were full of preternaturally strong characters like Tarzan and Superman.
Superman first set foot on Swedish soil in the early 1940s, initially as part of a comic called The Titan from Krypton (Titanen från Krypton), which came to be better known as The Man of Steel (Stålmannen). A pacifist with superpowers, he makes an unexpected appearance in the shorthand manuscript for Original Pippi. Among the pages of mysterious stenographic symbols preserving the first written stories about the world’s strongest girl, an unusually muscular and disconcerting version of the superhero crops up as a pencil drawing, which Karin Nyman will neither confirm nor deny is her mother’s. What is he doing there? We don’t know, but Astrid Lindgren acknowledged Superman as a partial inspiration for Pippi in an interview with the Svenska Dagbladet in December 1967: “Pippi was a stroke of inspiration, not a carefully considered character from the start. Although, yes, she was a little Superman right from the word go—strong, rich, and independent.”
However many sources of inspiration one can identify for Pippi Longstocking’s appearance, powers, personality, and behavior, there is no more important basis for the stories than the misanthropic, emotionally stunted age in which Pippi originated and developed. Original Pippi, which today is safely preserved in a case at the National Library—embalmed in shorthand—wasn’t just a finger puppet for psychological or pedagogical philosophies. She was a cheerful pacifist whose answer to the brutality and evil of war was goodness, generosity, and good humor. When someone approached Pippi aggressively or threateningly—whether it be hooligans, social authorities, police officers, burglars, or a circus ringmaster and his strongman—she instinctively believed they wanted to play, dance, or fight just for fun.
The reader is introduced to Pippi Longstocking’s resistance to all forms of physical violence in the second chapter of Original Pippi, where an unpleasant boy called Ove (renamed Bengt in the 1945 book) repeatedly mocks the girl. Each time Pippi reacts in the same peaceable way: she smiles broadly and obligingly, but says nothing. Her body language speaks for itself; she’s neither fearful nor tentative. When Ove, provoked by her calm and passivity, yanks her braids, she gives another friendly smile and pokes Ove gently with her right index finger, sending him tumbling to the ground. Instantly a warlike glint appears in the boy’s eyes. In the violent confrontation that follows, Lindgren pits blind strength—of which the world saw so much in the early forties—against gentle, nonviolent Pippi-power:
“What do you think you’re doing, you bumpkin,” he shouted, and flung himself at Pippi with clenched fists. So Pippi took care of Ove. Grabbing him around the waist, she threw him high up into the air. But since she was a good girl who didn’t want to hurt nasty little boys, she grabbed him again as he came tumbling down, catching him before he hit the floor, then threw him up again. . . . When he came down the final time, she gave him a teasing little shove, sending him into a ditch. She was still smiling a friendly smile at him.
Pippi Longstocking’s first appearance as a figment of Astrid Lindgren’s imagination occurred during one of the Second World War’s most critical periods for the Allied Powers: spring 1941. Germany was preparing to invade both England and the Soviet Union, and the Nazi plan to wipe out all of Europe’s Jews was entering an increasingly purposeful phase. Clippings and handwritten comments in Astrid’s war diaries from 1941–43 indicate that Pippi was a response not just to the war but also to the people behind its lunacy. In several passages, the diarist developed small-scale psychoanalyses of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussoli
ni, probing the personalities of the three despots until she reached the darkest corners of human nature, where instincts like the will to power and the urge to destroy and terrorize lurk. In 1945’s Pippi Longstocking, there’s a moment when Bengt and his little mob of bullies surround Ville and unleash the forces of darkness upon the smaller child: “On him, boys, so he daren’t show his face on the street anymore!” Just as little Ville is frightened of the bigger, stronger boys, Astrid was frightened of the bigger, stronger military aggressors in the 1940s. At first it was Stalin who alarmed her, even more than Hitler. On June 18, 1940, she wrote in her war diary:
The worst thing is that one hardly dare wish for Germany’s defeat any longer, because now the Russians have begun to stir again. Over the past few days they’ve occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania on various pretexts. And a weakened Germany can only mean one thing for us in Scandinavia—we’ll be overrun with Russians. And I think I’d rather be saying “Heil Hitler” for the rest of my life than have that happen. It’s scarcely possible to imagine anything more terrible. . . . Dear God, don’t let the Russians come over here!
Yet as the Nazis’ territorial demand for “Lebensraum” turned eastward and the Swedes began to fear that their country might be the site of a final showdown between the world’s most powerful tyrants, Astrid Lindgren’s interest in and fear of Hitler’s character and psyche grew. She began calling him “Adolf,” just as she had called Mussolini “Musse”; Stalin, meanwhile, always remained Stalin. More and more newspaper clippings about Hitler were pasted into the diary as she tried to understand his persecution of a single ethnic group. On May 10, 1940, for instance, when German troops had crossed the border into Holland and Belgium, Astrid noted in her diary that Germany most of all resembled “some malevolent beast, rushing out of its cave at regular intervals to pounce on a new victim. There must be something wrong with a people who alienate the rest of humanity at approximately twenty-year intervals.” And in her comments on a longer clipping pasted across several spreads in the diary, which showed a picture of Hitler and reprinted his victory speech in the German Reichstag on July 19, 1940, she reached for a biblical image: “The lord of the world—the wild beast in Revelations—once an unknown little German craftsman, restorer of his people and (in my and many other people’s opinions) a destructive, culturally corrupting force—what will he end up being? Will we ever find ourselves saying, Sic transit gloria mundi?”
Astrid, Lasse, and Karin celebrated New Year 1943 at Näs with the other Ericssons. The snow was piled heavily outside, and the ice on Stångån, a nearby river, was thick enough to skate on. As in previous years, Samuel August and Hanna gave their four children one thousand kronor each as a Christmas present.
One of Astrid’s early stories about the “world’s strongest girl” seems to draw on her fear and hatred of Hitler, along with her fascination with him, reading him as a parody of the world’s strongest man. “Pippi Goes to the Circus,” as the story was called in the Original Pippi manuscript in 1944, isn’t as radical and sustained a caricature as Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator (1940); nonetheless, the hot-tempered, aristocratically dressed ringmaster, who wields a sinister power, is almost as comical.
Schtrong Adolf
A blaring march, animalistic forces, uniformed circus folk, a German-accented ringmaster with a whip, and a large, responsive audience are the main ingredients in Astrid Lindgren’s Hitlerian satire, whose dramatic arc is punctuated by a series of tests of strength. The ringmaster competes with Pippi, who is among the spectators. Initially he’s presented as the vigorous, controlling ruler of his distinctive world. He sets himself apart from his uniformed and tutu-clad subordinates by wearing full evening dress, lending him an aristocratic air. He’s also equipped with a whip, a symbol of absolute power, and the reader is repeatedly reminded that the ringmaster “cracks” and “smacks” it as he wields his power. He holds the audience in the palm of his hand too, at least at first.
Pippi’s increasingly flagrant disruptions of this dictatorial order begin when she leaps onto the back of a horse in the ring—inelegant and un-princesslike—and clings to the divinely beautiful Miss Carmencita, who normally balances on the horse’s back by herself. The audience thinks she’s one of the acts; the ringmaster is furious, but keeps himself in check. The circus assistants are called out to stop the horse and get rid of Pippi, who gets her first glimpse of the ringmaster’s true, choleric nature, as do the audience and the reader: “‘Horripple girl,’ hissed the ringmaster between his teeth. ‘Ged auddoff hier before zere iss an eksident!’—‘There’s already been an eksident,’ said Pippi. ‘I saw the horse doing something awful in the sawdust a minute ago.’”
The horse dung Original Pippi so cheerily mentions had been swept up and removed from the circus chapter by the time the first Pippi Longstocking book was published in 1945. Lindgren chose to retain the line about the ringmaster “hissing between his teeth,” however, which reveals that the great ringmaster is actually full of nothing but angry hot air. Things get worse still when Miss Elvira, a tightrope walker who is also the ringmaster’s daughter, tries to bring serenity and order back to her father’s world. Again Pippi upsets the balance of power: leaping up onto Miss Elvira’s tightrope, she plays a quick game of tag, then starts swinging on it. As a grand finale, she drops down and lands on the ringmaster’s back. Having been made to look ridiculous, he retreats to “drink a glass of water and tidy his hair.”
Why this specific detail? Perhaps because most people who’d seen film clips of the Führer in Swedish movie theaters couldn’t help but be struck by the man’s vanity, especially when it came to his hair. The dictator was constantly touching his pomaded side parting and adjusting the long hair that kept falling across his forehead while he gave his speeches.
When the freshly combed ringmaster returns to the ring, and to the audience he now has to win back, he plays his final, strongest card, which he presents in resounding circus German: “Laydeess und chentlemen! In a mowment you schall see ze grrreatest vunder off zis age, ze schtrongest man in ze vorld. Schtrong Adolf, whom no one hass effer defeated! Laydeess and chentelment, I giff to you: Schtrong Adolf!”
In a letter dated April 27, 1944, sent to Bonniers Förlag with a copy of the Original Pippi manuscript, Astrid Lindgren seems to hint that the chapter about Pippi’s skirmish with the ringmaster and his strongman parodied Nazism and its false gods. She mentions nothing about “Schtrong Adolf,” but she does use the word “Übermensch.” The letter includes the following passage:
Herewith I enclose a children’s book manuscript, which I confidently look forward to having returned at your soonest possible convenience. Pippi Longstocking is, as you will discover if you take the trouble to read the manuscript, a little Übermensch in child form, set in a very normal environment. Thanks to her superhuman physical strength and various other circumstances, she is completely independent of adults and lives her life exactly as it suits her. In confrontations with adults she always gets the last word. In a book by Bertrand Russell (On Education, Especially in Early Childhood, page 85), I read that the most prominent instinctive trait in childhood is the desire to be grown-up, or perhaps more precisely the will to power, and that a normal child will fantasize about things that involve the will to power. I don’t know whether Bertrand Russell is right, but I’m inclined to believe it, judging by the almost obsessive popularity of Pippi Longstocking for a number of years among my own children and their friends of the same age.
Even in 1944, big publishers preferred their prospective authors to be humble in their initial approaches. For this reason alone, Astrid Lindgren’s sharp and lively presentation of her work must have attracted attention at Bonniers Förlag, which officially accepted the manuscript for consideration on April 30. Deliberations lasted longer than usual, perhaps because some people at the publishing house may have felt upset by the unknown author’s use of such an inflammatory, adult, Nazified word—“Übermensch”
—to describe her main character, a child. Especially so in the spring of 1944, when the horrifying master plan behind such fundamental Nazi slogans as “the final solution,” “Lebensraum,” and “blood and soil” had finally become apparent to the rest of the world. The letter, which ended with the cheery hope that the publisher wouldn’t alert social services, is of literary-historical interest, because in it we learn from Astrid Lindgren’s own pen that philosophy and psychology are indeed part of Original Pippi’s DNA.
“Übermensch” was a central term and concept in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. Originating in Also sprach Zarathustra (1885), in the 1930s it was thoroughly appropriated by the program of National Socialism. The result was a distortion of Nietzsche’s vision, which Astrid Lindgren was (maybe) parodying in her circus chapter, bringing the term back to its original Nietzschean meaning through the competition between the imagined Übermensch (the ringmaster) and the genuine Übermensch (Pippi Longstocking): the Übermensch as an ungovernable, impulsive being who wishes to be neither master nor slave but adheres to her own system of values and primarily uses her power for good.
A Bombshell on the Home Front
Summer 1944 proved to be anything but idyllic for the two adults in the Lindgren family. The fate of the Pippi manuscript was still uncertain, and while Sture and Astrid vacationed on wet and chilly Furusund, the bombshell dropped. One evening in early July, Sture stepped onto the balcony and made an announcement: he was in love with another woman, and had been for a while. It came as a shock to Astrid, and over the following weeks she was inconsolable, bereft of all energy and drive. On July 19, she tried to write about it in her diary:
Blood is flowing, people are mutilated, misery and despair are everywhere. And I don’t care. Only my own problems interest me. I usually always write a little about what’s happened since last time. Now I can only write: my life has been caught in a landslide, and it’s left me alone and shivering. I shall try and wait for better times, but imagine if better times don’t come! Despite everything, I shall try and force myself to write a little about what’s happening in the world. The Russians are advancing most alarmingly; they’re already in the Baltic states, which the Germans are probably intending to give up. The Russians are on the East Prussian border. In Normandy things won’t be quite as quick, but they’re progressing there too. Representatives of the Finnish government have been to see Ribbentrop and further sealed their allegiance with Germany. The USA has therefore broken off diplomatic ties. I’m not up to remembering any more right now. I’m suffering the most dreadful pangs, my heart aches so much—how will I find the strength to go back to the city and pretend to live a normal life?