Birger Sjöberg

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Birger Sjöberg
Birger Sjöberg's grave in Helsingborg
Birger Sjöberg's birthplace
Frida statue in Vanersborg

Birger Sjöberg (born December 6, 1885 in Vänersborg , † April 30, 1929 in Växjö ) was a Swedish poet and writer.

Life

Birger Sjöberg was born in Vänersborg , a small town in western Sweden. His parents owned a small clothing store. When Birger Sjöberg was 13 years old, his parents' business went bankrupt. Since then, the family - Birger Sjöberg had two brothers - had to struggle with economic difficulties.

Birger Sjöberg only performed poorly at school. He had to leave high school without a degree, which was always a trauma for him. After leaving school, he trained as a photographer. After a few years in which he found his way through as a shop assistant, Birger Sjöberg moved to Stockholm in 1906 , where he got a job as a journalist through the mediation of his brother Gösta Sjöberg. A year later he moved to Helsingborg (southern Sweden), where he also worked as a journalist. After his book success in the early 20s, he gave up his position and lived as a freelance writer. Birger Sjöberg died in 1929 of pneumonia.

Birger Sjöberg had great acting and parodic talent and knew how to entertain people brilliantly. At the same time he was a shy and shy person. He remained a bachelor throughout his life, and it is not known whether he ever had a fulfilling love affair.

plant

As a teenager, Birger Sjöberg began to write songs that he set to music himself and performed with great success among friends and acquaintances. In many of these songs he sang his hometown as Lilla Paris (Little Paris). With his songs, Birger Sjöberg took up a specifically Swedish tradition going back to Carl Michael Bellman (1740–1795): songs that are catchy and popular, but are literarily ambitious and artistically demanding.

It was not until 1922, after intense pressure from his friends, that Birger Sjöberg published his songs in the volume Fridas bok (Frida's book). The songs describe life in a small Swedish town and the lyrical self's love for Frida with affectionate irony. It is still not clear whether there was a real role model for Frida.

The apparent lightness of the Frida songs sometimes makes one forget how artfully they - in this connection with Heinrich Heine - balance between naivety and irony, between real feeling and parody of this feeling, between seriousness and joke.

Fridas bok was a great success. Birger Sjöberg went on tour all over Sweden with his songs. Although Birger Sjöberg suffered from severe stage fright, the tour was a veritable triumph. To this day, many of Birger Sjöberg's Frida songs are popular in Sweden and are often sung.

In 1924 Birger Sjöberg's novel Kvartetten som sprängdes (Das sprengte Quartett, 1925, German by Gustav Morgenstern ) was published. The novel ties in with the small town idyll of the Frida songs and soon became a success similar to that of Fridas bok . Despite the high-spirited narrative joy and the brilliant humor of the author, fear and uncertainty can also be felt in the novel.

When Birger Sjöberg's next volume of poetry, Kriser och kransar ( Krisen und Kränze ), came out in 1926 , the audience was shocked: Instead of popular catchiness, bold expressionistic language had taken the place, the harmless idyll of small towns displaced by haunting depictions of fear, despair and loneliness. Birger Sjöberg was of the opinion that his previous literary successes had been acquired too cheaply and that he had betrayed his own artistic standards. He was relentlessly settling accounts with himself and the world. Kriser och kransar stands - alongside Pär Lagerkvists Ångest  - at the beginning of modern poetry in Sweden. Formally, the poems mostly follow traditional patterns, for example with regard to metrics or the use of rhymes. The language, however, which is characterized by bold new word formations, surprising word compositions and astonishing metaphors and does not shy away from violating grammatical and syntactic rules, points far into the future in its immense concentration and density.

Kriser och kransar encountered complete incomprehension among contemporary readers and critics. This rejection made the sensitive Birger Sjöberg difficult and certainly contributed to his early death. Gradually, of course, the critics came to appreciate Kriser och kransar . Birger Sjöberg was awarded an important literary prize for this as early as 1929. The news of this did not, however, reach the terminally ill. Today Kriser och kransar is counted among the most important Swedish poetry collections of the 20th century.

Birger Sjöberg's estate contained countless other poems, some of which were published posthumously with great success: Fridas andra bok (Frida's second book, 1929), Minnen från jorden (memories of the earth, 1940), Syntaxupproret (syntax turmoil, 1955), Fridas tredje bok (Frida's third book, 1956).

Literature and CD notice

  • Johan Svedjedal, Skrivaredans - Birger Sjöbergs liv och diktning , 1999, ISBN 91-46-17378-1 (biography in Swedish)
  • 15 melodier ur Fridas visor , Mikael Samuelson (vocals) and Mats Bergström (guitar), Musica Sveciae, catalog no. MSCD 625 (CD with 15 Frida songs, detailed booklet in Swedish and English)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Sjöberg, Birger
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swedish poet and writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Vanersborg
DATE OF DEATH April 30, 1929
Place of death Vaxjo