Vilhelm Moberg

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Vilhelm Moberg, 1967.

Vilhelm Moberg (born August 20, 1898 in Moshultamåla , Småland , † August 8, 1973 in Grisslehamn ) was a Swedish writer .

Monument in Växjö
Emigrant monument in Karlshamn

Life

Vilhelm Moberg was born in Moshultamåla ( Emmaboda municipality ), where he grew up. His father was a divided soldier and later a small farmer. Moberg began to work as a child, when he was eleven years old a. a. in a glassworks, where he came into contact with the labor movement and socialism , which he was skeptical about later in life. The new educational pathways that the labor movement created enabled him to pursue further education, and eventually he became a journalist and worked for several local newspapers in the years that followed. He also started writing folk plays.

The literary breakthrough came in 1927 with the novel Raskens , in which the life of a family of soldiers in the countryside between 1870 and shortly after 1900 is depicted. He processed the stories of his grandfather and his comrades and described a milieu that he knew from his own experience. The next novels Långt från landsvägen (1929) and De knutna händera (1930) also take place in a rural setting and depict the struggle between tradition and change.

The second half of the 1930s was dominated by a trilogy of novels with an autobiographical impact. Sänkt sedebetyg 1935, Sömnlös 1937 and Giv oss jorden! 1939 describe the life of Knut Toring , who comes to town as a farmer's son to work as a journalist, but finally returns to the country disappointed and disaffected to run a farm. The greatest success of the 1940s was the historical novel Rid i natt! from 1941, the description of the struggle of Småland peasants against the oppression by a German nobleman, which clearly shows time-related features and calls for resistance to National Socialism . Moberg's books were then banned in the German Reich.

During the Second World War his anti-militaristic and again autobiographical novel Soldat med brutet gevär was published , but without building on the success of Raskens . With the story of the soldier's son Valter Sträng , who rose from a child laborer in a glassworks to a member of a left-wing socialist youth organization and later became a politician, Moberg apparently didn't hit the nerve of the times: Sweden had one foot in the war against the German Reich, many young men had volunteered for military service in the Finnish, British or American military.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Moberg's main work was published, an epic about emigration in the second half of the 19th century , when a quarter of Sweden's population emigrated to the USA . In this tetralogy, which consists of the novels Utvandrarna (1949), Invandrarna (1952), Nybyggarna (1956) and Sista brevet till Sverige (1959), he described the fate of several emigrants who left Sweden around 1850 and after a comprehensive study of the sources eventually settle in Minnesota . The success was enormous, not only in terms of the number of copies and translations. The epic was filmed by Jan Troell and made into the musical Kristina från Duvemåla in 1995 . Although the series surpasses many works of international migration literature and was selected by the Book of the Month, the books themselves were only a moderate success in the USA. One reason was that Moberg did not want to imagine participating in the commercial launch.

In the 1950s, Moberg also appeared as a harsh social critic in the public debate about the rottenness of the legal system . The 1957 drama Domaren (The Judge) took up a contemporary legal case. In his last project, Moberg tried to describe Swedish history from below. Min svenska historia (My Swedish History), the first two volumes of which appeared in 1970 and 1971, deliberately takes an oppositional stance on academic historiography. But this project was beyond Moberg's powers, and no more volumes followed.

Moberg's contributions to literature and public debate repeatedly depict the conflict between individualism and collectivism and clearly show Moberg as a clear opponent of totalitarian ideas, but also as a sharp critic of Swedish social democracy and its idea of ​​the “ strong state ”.

In 1973 Vilhelm Moberg committed suicide .

Social issues

In 1913 Moberg became a member of a young social democratic club. In his works he often expressed a republican (anti-royalist) point of view, often based on the facts that emerged in the Kejne affair and the Haijby affair , in which Moberg played an active role.

From the 1950s onwards, Moberg took part in debates on the Swedish monarchy, bureaucracy and corruption , devoting a lot of time to helping individual citizens who had suffered injustice. Similar to other of his generation of working-class Swedish authors such as Ivar Lo-Johansson , Harry Martinson and Moa Martinson , Moberg described the lives of the dispossessed, their traditions, customs and everyday struggles. His novels are important documents of social history and trace the influences of various social and political movements in Sweden.

Works (selection)

Novels
  • Raskens . 1927.
    • German: Comrade Wacker. Novel by a Swedish peasant soldier . Zsolnay Verlag, Berlin 1935.
  • Långt från landsvägen . 1929.
    • German: Far from the country road . Zsolnay Verlag, Berlin 1937.
  • De knutna händera . 1930.
    • German: The hard hands . Zsolnay Verlag, Berlin 1935.
  • Mans kvinna . 1933.
    • German: Wife of a man. An 18th century novel from Sweden . Zsolnay Verlag, Berlin 1936.
  • Knut Toring's trilogy.
  1. Sinks sedebetyg . 1935.
    German: Knut Toring's Metamorphosis . Zsolnay Verlag, Berlin 1936.
  2. Solemnity . 1937.
    German: Sleepless . Zsolnay Verlag, Berlin 1938.
  3. Giv oss jorden! . 1939.
  • Rid i natt! . 1941.
    German: Riding tonight! Bermann-Fischer Verlag, Stockholm 1946.
  • Soldat med brutet gevär . 1944.
  • Utvandrarna -Tetralogy.
  1. Utvandrarna . 1949.
    German: The emigrants . Claassen Verlag, Hildesheim 1993.
  2. Invandrarna . 1952.
    German: In the new world . Claassen Verlag, Hildesheim 1993.
  3. Nybyggarna . 1956.
    German: The settlers . Claassen Verlag, Hildesheim 1993.
  4. Sista brevet till Sverige . 1959.
    German: The last letter to Sweden . Claassen Verlag, Hildesheim 1993.
  • Din stund på jorden . 1963.
    • German: Your moment . Claassen Verlag, Hildesheim 1992.
Plays
  • Cash register . 1925.
    • German: The deficit. Comedy in three acts . Merlin Verlag, Vastorf 1970.
  • Marrow juice . 1929.
  • Vår ofödde son . 1945.
  • Domars . 1957.
Non-fiction
  • Min svenska historia .
  1. Från Oden till Engelbrekt . 1970.
  2. Från Engelbrekt till och med Dacke . 1971.

Film adaptations

  • 1960: The judge (Domaren)
  • 1971: Emigrants (Utvandrarna)
  • 1971: The New Land (Nybyggarna)
  • 1977: The soldier with the broken rifle (Soldat med brutet gevär)

Referencing

Kristina, the main character in the novel The Emigrants, brings apple seeds from her parents' garden in Sweden to the USA and sows an apple tree which, like its apples, is called or is called Astrakan and awakens memories of the old homeland. Bear this name:

  • the production company Astrakan Films (Santa Monica, California) with an apple tree in the logo,
  • the Astrakan sailing car , built in Sweden in 2012 and driven in Nevada , USA.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Vilhelm Moberg. July 6, 2009, accessed May 13, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Translated by Walter Hjalmar Kotas
  3. ↑ Translated by Werner Arpe
  4. ↑ a b c d Translated by Dietrich Lutze
  5. ↑ Translated by Inge Barnutz
  6. ^ Translated by Kirsten Hausen-Appel
  7. ↑ http://astrakanfilms.com/intro/about.html Astrakan Films, About, accessed October 6, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Moberg, Vilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swedish writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 20, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Moshultamåla, Småland
DATE OF DEATH August 8, 1973
Place of death Grisslehamn