During her trip Astrid not only gave readings and chatted with her readers but visited various booksellers, schools, and care homes for children injured in the war. On her last evening in the city, Louise Hartung took the Swedish author on a secret sunset mission. They drove across the as yet unguarded border between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic into the old, bombed-out districts of the East, where as a young, talented singer Louise had given concerts, made records, taught photography, and until 1933 lived something of a bohemian lifestyle with such artistic souls as Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Immediately after arriving home on October 28, 1953, Astrid sat down and told Hanna and Samuel August about Berlin: “It was one of the most dismal things I’ve ever seen. I saw the place where Hitler’s bunker was—it’s just a ruined heap, and everywhere the streets are lined with ruins, ruins, and ruins. It was like being on another planet. On the few undamaged houses the Russians have put giant flags and painted incomprehensible slogans. Poor Louise Hartung went around crying. It was once the grandest part of Berlin, and she didn’t even recognize her city. She had to read the street signs to find out where we were.”
This tour through the streets where Louise had lived as a young woman—where she had survived the battle for Berlin in spring 1945, where only months before Astrid’s visit Soviet tanks and troops had beaten down the first people’s uprising in the GDR—was the beginning of a long, sensitive, and intellectual friendship. As Karin Nyman recounted: “I remember Astrid coming home in 1953 and being fascinated by this German woman who had experienced the war firsthand, who took her on secret excursions into the East and told her about the social situation for children after the war in Germany and about ‘die Halbstarken,’ gangs of criminal teenagers who, according to Louise, had seen their mothers raped. Louise was a highly gifted woman, passionate about culture, and she showed a strong interest in Astrid Lindgren’s books. Astrid found her positive and insightful criticism productive. But also a bit exacting.”
The two women managed almost six hundred letters in eleven years, before Louise Hartung died in 1965, shortly after Astrid Lindgren had visited her on Ibiza. It was the highly emotional Louise who wrote most and longest, but Astrid kept up her end, considering the colossal number of letters she produced during those years, both in private correspondence and in her capacity as an editor. She wrote approximately 250 letters to “Louisechen,” spread evenly from 1953 to 1964. The first were in German, then a few in English, but the rest in Swedish, once Astrid discovered that Louise—who wrote only in German—was able to read Strindberg in his own language. From the first, Astrid addressed her as “Louisechen,” a diminutive of Louise, which over the years came to be inflected with affectionate humor: “Louisechen mein Freundchen,” “Louise meinchen,” “Louisechen Hartungchen Berlinchen,” and—when the space race began at the end of the 1950s—“Louisechen, mein Satellitchen, Sputnichen.”
In the vacuum after Sture’s death, Astrid’s friendship and correspondence with the gifted and cultured Louise Hartung was an intellectually challenging window onto another, bigger world than the one in which Astrid moved day to day in Stockholm. The women exchanged huge numbers of literary tips, as well as opinions about authors and their work, from the youthful passions of Goethe to the lusts of the aging Henry Miller. “What are you reading at the moment?” Louise asked at regular intervals, and Astrid would tell her about all the books she dreamt of wedging into her packed schedule. There were times when her work as a writer and editor hemmed her in, spiritually as well as temporally. In a letter written on New Year’s Eve 1958, she aired her frustrations: “I have so little time, and such a great hunger to read, yet I simply can’t manage novels any longer, apart from a few old classics I reread. But I prefer to read history, philosophy (although I’m horribly unversed in that department), poetry, biographies, and memoirs. Nothing gives me deeper satisfaction than philosophy and poetry, I think. Have you read any Swedish poetry?”
From their first long letters in 1953–54, there existed a colossal openness and intimacy between them. Neither of them seemed afraid to speak honestly about herself, and Astrid’s concluding words in a letter dated February 22, 1955, were illustrative of the mode of dialogue they sought and found. The two women genuinely spoke on the page, often as though they were sitting at some café in Berlin, Budapest, or Vienna. Their letters were never hermetically self-involved, but engaged inclusively and curiously with the other correspondent. In February 1955, Astrid wanted to hear Louise’s opinion on the meaning of life and existence: “Sometimes I wonder why I’m alive, why people are alive in the first place. But I only say this to you—I don’t go round hanging my head so other people see it. If you know why people are alive, then write and tell me.”
The year before, on April 30, 1954, in the series of letters that were becoming increasingly like self-portraiture, she had compared herself with her German pen friend, who wrote such wonderfully original, profound letters and was generally one of a kind, unlike the uniformly dull and ordinary Astrid: “I’m simply as ordinary as one can be, utterly normal and well balanced, albeit a little melancholy, which those around me probably never notice. I’ve probably never had much zest for life, although I can be very jolly when I’m with other people. I’ve had to carry this little melancholy since I was young. I was really happy only as a child, and maybe that’s why I’m so fond of writing books where I’m able to reexperience that wonderful state.”
Over the following years Astrid added more strokes to her tepid portrait of herself: as a person who was often sad, with an enormous need to “sit completely alone and stare at my navel.” She also told Louise about her stressful editorial job, where she was pushed and pulled in all directions, and on February 13, 1957, she described a recurring dream about being transformed from a person in the big city into a solitary little animal far out in the woods: “I lay awake at night, coming up with a terribly beautiful poem that began like this: ‘Oh, but she who / could be allowed to be / a lonely little animal in the woods . . .’ No, this doesn’t mean I always want to be mit mir allein. It just means I’ve had a difficult time with people who are fighting with each other and constantly want me to take sides.”
Among the many things she shared about herself and her personality, things that clearly originated in a remote, deeply private space far away from her daily life in Sweden and her family and friends, Astrid also mentioned her exaggerated loyalty, which she called “a streak of madness in myself.” Loyalty was a virtue, of course, but it could also be a yoke, and had often proved such in several of Astrid Lindgren’s close friendships. She never found a solution to this problem, as Karin Nyman recalls: “Her devotion to her friends was huge. Astrid cherished strong feelings for people. But she had friends whom she felt pressured by, tired by, because they were so pushy and demanded so much validation, wanting ‘sole rights’ to her time and attention. What Louise was for her, I think, was above all a person she relied on when it came to judging what she wrote, the only one, as far as I know, that she really consulted for advice. And she was totally fascinated by Louise’s life story, by everything she told her about the war and postwar period in Berlin, and a specifically ‘European’ identity.”
Advances
If Astrid hadn’t noticed during her first hectic visit to Berlin in October 1953 that Louise was more attracted to her own gender than to the opposite sex, she swiftly realized once back in Stockholm. It wasn’t just the emotional, romantic letters from Louise that tipped her off; she also began to receive a stream of packages from Germany, containing everything from bouquets, flower bulbs, books, and gloves to chocolate, jellies, bowls of fruit, and a plane ticket to Berlin. Louise was doing her best to capture Astrid’s heart, although she already had a girlfriend in Berlin: Gertrud Lemke, a doctor with a practice in Bundesplatz in Wilmersdorf, where the plaque on the door read “Psychotherapist.”
As spiritually liberating and intellectually compelling as their correspondenc
e was initially, it rapidly took an exhausting turn. Especially after the two women met on Furusund in July 1954, when Louise parked her car outside Astrid’s red wooden house on her way to Lapland. The trunk was full of Berlin bulbs and roots that could be planted in Astrid’s garden. Three days of long hikes and German conversations followed. These conversations were so many and so long that Astrid jokingly began to call Louise “Scheherazade.” But Louise’s heart harbored love as well as stories, love of the idealistically romantic kind. Gertrud Lemke described her girlfriend’s ten-year infatuation in a letter dated July 1, 1965, when she returned Astrid’s letters after Louise’s death: “Louise created a kingdom out of you and around you, beaming all her powers of imagination into it and shielding it from all banalities and pedestrian facts. You were the right person to awaken this fascination and fulfill its expectations. Yet she intended something else, too, beyond perceiving you simply as this ‘queen of closed boxes, of blissful dreams, of unfulfilled longings, of unnamable blisses.’”
Although Astrid regularly made the boundaries of their friendship clear, Louise’s infatuation was a sore, largely unspoken point throughout their correspondence. After Louise left Furusund for Lapland and the Arctic Ocean on July 16, 1954, Astrid wrote her a letter: “Louisechen, Louisechen, I’m really not as wonderful as you believe, and you mustn’t be so completely devoted to another person—not to me and not to anybody—because it makes you defenseless and leaves you at the mercy of someone else’s caprice. I’m so very fond of you, and we shall be friends all our days, but you mustn’t idealize me at the expense of the other people I know need you as a tonic and source of strength.”
Louise in her youth. She was the eighth child in a family that lost four sons in the First World War. Louise was considered something of a wunderkind, she later recalled. As a child she was able to play Schubert’s “Die schöne Müllerin” on the flute, and as a young woman in Paris and Berlin she tried to make a living as a concert singer, making a record she later played for her Swedish friend.
Astrid’s protestations usually fell on deaf ears, and it rapidly became apparent that she would have to be clearer, without hurting her friend and pushing her away: “You say I’m ‘playing with fire.’ What fire? And how would I behave if I weren’t playing with fire? Liking another person and being friends with her, is that playing with fire?”
Yes. When the other person was Louise Hartung, it was. The stream of affectionate letters and fresh flowers continued—roses, tulips, irises, and pinks, all ready to put in a vase. Then, at Christmastime in 1954, Astrid suddenly received a thick letter from Germany with a plane ticket to Berlin and a fairy-tale about a lizard and an oyster, written by Louise. It was a love story, the product of many hours spent wondering how to make Astrid open up (“Astrid zum Reden bringen könnte”). The answer came quickly, in the form of a fairy-tale about an ungrateful and anxious oyster “who got too much affection from too many people and shut herself into her shell.” Astrid’s fairy-tale was about all the people at home in Sweden who projected their needs and desires onto her, among them a male lizard who was apparently willing to abandon his lizard wife and lizard children for her and who threatened to commit suicide if he didn’t get his oyster: “But she still didn’t want to share her oyster bed with him, because she had such a need for solitude. She wouldn’t share her inner self and her oyster bed with anyone. There were other lizards too, male lizards and female lizards, and all of them demanded they be the one the oyster liked best. That made the oyster very anxious, and she said: how can I choose a single one and say ‘nur du und ich’ [just you and me]?”
Having laid out her increasing struggle to honor the various expectations placed upon her by men and women demanding love and friendship, Astrid then brought Louise into the fairy-tale. She took the form of a vivacious female lizard from the banks of the river Spree, who also laid claim to the much-sought-after oyster up north:
The oyster was so fond of her and wished she could be happy. But the way was so long and the water between them so deep, and the oyster thought: “Kleine süsse Eidechse [Sweet little lizard], find yourself an oyster on the banks of the Spree, an oyster who can make you as happy as you deserve. Es gibt für alles Grenzen [There are limits to everything]. You can’t sit there far away on your bank and call to me, because I can’t come to you or you to me—the water that separates us is too deep. . . . Don’t ask too much of me, kleine Eidechse, because I’m an oyster who’s locked herself in her shell. I’m sitting here on my oyster bed, watching life go by.”
Not even this heavy hint discouraged Louise’s efforts. In fact, the number of letters and packages increased steadily throughout 1955 and 1956, and the following winter Louise launched a new verbal offensive. This time she skipped the fairy-tale and expounded her belief that genuine closeness in a friendship between two women rested on “körperliche Vertrauenheit.” In other words, being not just spiritually but physically intimate. On February 13, 1957, Astrid Lindgren replied categorically:
All kinds of love have a right to exist. But if someone—like me—is absolutely heterosexual and not even remotely bisexual, you can’t be gripped by “love” for a person of the same sex, if by love you mean “Komm in meine Arme” [Come into my arms]. But I can definitely feel a deep sense of intimacy and admiration, or whatever you want to call it, for a woman, as I do for you. Much of what you think is strange about me is because I think it’s a bit difficult to understand why you’re so devoted to me, and that I can’t really live up to your expectations. You can never be satisfied with giving love and only getting friendship in return.
Here the stream of letters and gifts might have ended, but it didn’t. The two women kept seeing each other at least once a year, either in Stockholm or in southern Europe, often at secret meeting places in Germany or Switzerland. They were worried that if the Oetingers in Hamburg found out about these visits, they might rope their star Swedish author into doing extra publicity in Germany. Astrid enjoyed these getaways, although Louise could be a chore. When she returned home after a brief visit to Stockholm in April 1957, Astrid cried crocodile tears, and wrote in a letter to Elsa Olenius: “The next day The Great Trial broke out, in the form of Louise Hartung, who is the world’s most intense person, and she talked for hours without stopping. She asked if she could stay here and I couldn’t bring myself to say no, because she offered me room and board when I was in Berlin. But by the end I was absolutely dizzy and my poor head was fit to burst. I’ve never felt greater relief than when she left to make her flight. . . . I lay straight down to sleep and realized all the German words were seeping out of my tormented head.”
Yet the fact remained that Louise and Astrid had inspiring conversations about art and literature for adults and younger readers. Both women worked in the field, after all; and being a shrewd, cultured reader, Louise Hartung proved an ideal sparring partner, consultant, and adviser on Astrid Lindgren’s work and the European fate of her books. Particularly on the lucrative German market, where Astrid Lindgren’s work shored up the Oetingers’ finances in the 1950s, saving the publishing house just as the Pippi books had saved Rabén and Sjögren.
Louise Hartung loved getting involved in questions of translation. In 1955, for instance, she became incensed on the author’s behalf when she saw how many editing changes Friedrich Oetinger wanted in Mio, My Son, given the sensitive German children’s book market during the traumatized postwar period. On November 24, 1955, a grateful Astrid wrote to Louise, “Ah, you’re so active when it comes to my books. . . . You really are a force of nature.” In subsequent years she often announced how glad she was to have Louise’s thorough and authoritative judgment of her manuscripts: “You’re the only person who can give me a proper, honest assessment. . . . I bow completely to your opinion, but to no one else’s.”
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Astrid sparked many inspiring discussions by sending copies of a manuscript or book to her fellow reader in Berlin. Louise was ent
husiastic about Mio, My Son (1954), Karlsson-on-the-Roof (1955), and Rasmus and the Vagabond (1956). But then came Rasmus, Pontus, and Toker in 1957, which triggered a crisis in their friendship: The book’s shabby villain is the sword-swallower Alfredo, who speaks circus German, likes beer, and calls the book’s two blond boy-heroes “verdammte little louts.” Alfredo vividly describes his straggling central European family, which included a mother with small, iron fists she used assiduously on her eighteen children and an uncle who was an anarchist and ended up blowing himself to bits.
This was a bridge too far for the sensitive Louise. She felt deeply hurt, and accused Astrid of “Nationalhass” (national hatred), at a time when the German people needed trust and tolerance. When Astrid read Louise’s indignant letter, she also felt hurt, but as an artist in a country that permitted freedom of expression:
The two letter writers liked to surprise each other with different perspectives and funny anecdotes. In one of Astrid’s letters from Furusund in the summer of 1958, she reported a broken left foot in a rather original way, arranging the text around a drawing of the foot and assuring Louise that she’d planted all her bulbs and roots.
Louisechen . . . you are the most intelligent person I know, and I thought you knew me. Yet you think I have “tief eingewürzelte Abneigungen gegen alle Deutsche, gegen alles fahrendes Volk und gegen alle Ausländer” [deeply engrained animosity against all Germans, against all traveling folk and against all foreigners]. This was harsh and bitter to hear for someone who abhors all forms of nationalism as deeply as I do. I thought you knew that. I thought you knew I hate every form of human classification by nationality or race, all forms of discrimination between black and white, between Aryans and Jews, between Turks and Swedes, between men and women. Ever since I was old enough to start thinking independently, I’ve loathed that blue-and-yellow greater-Swedish adulation of the fatherland. . . . It seems as repulsive to me as Hitler’s German nationalism. I’ve never been a patriot. We’re all people—that’s always been my particular way of putting it. So it hurts me more than I can say that you read the polar opposite in the Rasmus manuscript.