Mikaela Blomqvist reads Per Wirtén’s book about Elin Wägner

REVISION. The form of the biography is often simple: someone is born, lives, and dies. The events depicted are primarily taken from this person’s private or professional life and the light in which they are portrayed is generally overlooked and clarified. Man, on the other hand, is a composite puzzle, so gender is misdirected to catch her. To the merits of By Wirténs book about Elin Wägner“Europe, constantly this Europe” hears that he manages to preserve part of the chaos and contradiction that comes with a life.

It is largely a matter of rhythm. In just over 300 pages we can follow Wägner from 1921 when he is 38 years old, to 1924 when he turns 42 years old. It is a short but decisive period in Wägner’s life: he separates from marriage with the critic John Landquist, joins and forms the Fogelstad group, becomes adoptive mother of the nephew Giovanni and we erected the rural place Lilla Björka where he will later live.

However, these events are not very prominent in “Europe, constantly this Europe”. Instead, Wirtén focuses on the political development of the occupied Rhineland and Ruhr region in western Germany after the Versailles peace. Wägner makes several trips there, as a journalist and intellectual committed to peace. During one of the trips, a love story begins with the German nationalist. August Knight of Eberlein. He is a lieutenant commander who runs an intelligence operation in Palatinate, she is a convinced pacifist who believes in a united Europe.

The subtitle of the book “Elin Wägner’s Lost Love” gossips about how things are going, but should probably be read as ambiguous. Almost love, me Søren Kierkegaards The consequences, which Wägner wants to practice, change according to Wirtén after World War II in disillusionment and rigid misanthropy. In a more personalized prologue and epilogue, it is based on his last and abandoned years of life. It is a sad ending, and Wirtén defends herself by writing at Wägner’s 20 years as if the events she is facing are still ongoing and undecided. It gives the book a strange nerve and has moral implications for the reader. Wirtén seems to want to remind us that we are all constantly involved in shaping history.

We see here the dangers that threaten all intellectuals.

In this regard, Wägner seems tireless, despite the disinterest and resistance he encounters. DN stops buying his items because he is too critical of France, the discreet political novel “The Nameless” is misinterpreted as an interpersonal drama in the setting of Småland’s homeland and the report book “De Sena, Rin y Ruhr” it hardly receives diffusion.

In addition, friends of the Fogelstad group demand that Wägner make himself available to the organization and take responsibility for the weekly magazine “Tidevarvet”. In the end she finds her. We see here the dangers that threaten all intellectuals: loyalties (towards organizations and individuals), tendencies and poverty.

“Europe, constantly this Europe” is loving and detailed. Sometimes I think Wägner disappears a lot among all the material, and the love story with Eberlein, which is announced on the back, is not much to be expected. Whoever expects a great romance will be disappointed, the material consists of his letters and his clues. Instead, the value of the book lies in how Wirtén capitalizes on developments in Wägner’s thinking, and how this thinking is largely shaped by the realities in which he resides.

Individual life is understandable only if we understand the historical events that surround and permeate it. I like to read more biographies like this.

By Mikaela Blomqvist

Per Wirtén is an employee of the Expressen cultural site. Therefore, his book is reviewed by Mikaela Blomqvist, critic in the Gothenburg Post.

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