Hammarskjöld: A Life

2. Steep Swedish Hills

2 Steep Swedish Hills I n nearly every young life the essential escapes. Family, education, friends, influences, and incidents can be documented. But the gifts and purposes deeply native to the person remain at least partially undisclosed until they deploy in the life and begin their work. This is obvious, hardly worth stating. But in the context of Dag Hammarskjöld’s earlier years it bears repeating. The conditions of his early life, though materiallycomfortable,sociallyprivileged,andeducationallyelite,should have defeated him. There were enough confusing psychological crosscurrents to generate sterile excellence and recurrent personal misery, and no more than that. But within the visible matrix of opportunities and obstacles, there was an imperceptible: the person himself, the kernel of individuality. In time he broke through to become an authentically great human being, respected by millions and for good reason. Some deep discomforts have the blessed effect of keeping one awake, of turning life into an inquiry. In the “steep Swedish hills” of his youth—the words are from one of his late haiku poems1 —and in the corridors of power in Stockholm during the first decades of his public life, Dag Hammarskjöld consolidated enough well-being, and enough love of the world, to go on. A few weeks before the fatal air crash of September 1961, Hammarskj öld wrote a satisfyingly ironic and entertaining letter about autobiography to Jytte Bonnier, the wife of Sweden’s major publisher, to whom he may have sent the draft of an indirectly autobiographical essay he had been working on that summer. Most autobiographical literature, in which the author forces himself to get over the natural inhibitions about personal matters, has the same theme: “Love me, and love me as I am”; therefore this urge to truly humiliating honesty, short of which the absolution would be without value. This was the old prayer of any honest man to his God. Now it is a prayer to public opinion, und der Teufel steckt darin. (An alternative explanation may, of course, be that the author considers himself such an important figure that the public is entitled to know all about him, but I doubt whether there have been many cases of such truly Promethean hubris).2 Steep Swedish Hills 17 In this chapter and several to come, the project is to gain enough familiarity with the earlier years in Sweden to ground our understanding of Hammarskj öld’s mind and methods. His contributions are not bound to his era and circumstances, but they root there and that needs to be acknowledged. Light and warmth Four buildings, richly symbolic, look at each other across the compact center of Uppsala, the Swedish university town where Hammarskjöld grew up and acquired much of his education. The massive sixteenthcentury Vasa castle, rebuilt after a fire in the eighteenth, occupies a low but commanding hilltop some ten minutes by foot from the university. It is said to have been sited on higher ground than the nearby cathedral to teach the clergy a lesson. The Brick Gothic cathedral, seat of the Church of Sweden and its presiding archbishop, rises above the narrow , cobbled streets of the university quarter. Burial place of kings and queens, it is both grand and modest. While it doesn’t aspire to compete with Chartres, it has the tangible self-respect and solemnity of centuries of use. The third structure, the Gustavinium, is one of the most eccentric and beautiful academic buildings in Europe. The remarkable feature is a rooftop addition sponsored by a seventeenth-century physician, Olof Rudbeck: a windowed, lantern-like structure housing one of Europe’s earliest anatomical theaters, where the new demands of medical science were met by dissecting cadavers for an audience of medical students and courageous others. Balanced above this practical space is an oddly captivating , large copper sphere set on a narrow stalk, a Copernican statement about the world seemingly intended to teach a scientist’s lesson to the cathedral’s heaven-seeking spires. Inscribed with the hours and serving as the university sundial, the sphere is Time resolutely facing Eternity. These buildings talk with one another. Not far from the Gustavinium is the university library, known as Carolina Rediviva (Carolina Revived), a graceful foursquare nineteenth-century building replacing an earlier one, hence its charming Latin name. This is a peaceable structure: its design and placement teach no evident lessons apart from solidity and inevitability. These buildings within sight of each other—the seats of secular power and religious authority...