Stig Halvard Dagerman was a Swedish journalist and writer.
Background
Stig Dagerman was born on October 5, 1923 in Älvkarleby, Uppsala Lahn, Sweden. Dagerman was the illegitimate son of a career worker and telephone operator. He was raised in poverty by his grandparents on his paternal line on a farm northwest of Stockholm, and although he sometimes saw his father, he did not meet with his mother until he became an adult.
Education
Stig Dagerman studied at the University of Stockholm, and then received a Bachelor of Arts degree.
At nineteen, he became the editor of "Storm", the youth paper, and at twenty-two, he was appointed the cultural editor of Arbetaren ("The Worker"), then a daily newspaper of the Syndicalist movement. In the intellectual atmosphere of the newspaper world, he met fellow writers and developed a taste for polemical writing. In addition to editorials and articles, Dagerman wrote more than a thousand daily poems, many highly satirical, commenting on current events. He called "Arbetaren" his "spiritual birthplace."
Dagerman's horizons were greatly expanded by his marriage in 1943 to Annemarie Götze, an eighteen-year-old German refugee. Her parents, Ferdinand and Elly, were prominent Anarcho-Syndicalists, and the family escaped Nazi Germany to be at the center of the movement in Barcelona. When Spanish fascists brutally crushed the Anarcho-Syndicalist social experiment there, the Götzes fled through France and Norway, with Hitler's army at their heels, to a neutral Sweden.
In 1945, Stig Dagerman at age twenty-two published his first novel Ormen (The Snake). It was an anti-militaristic story with fear as its main theme, channeling the war-time zeitgeist. Positive reviews gave him a reputation as a brilliant young writer of great promise. He left "Arbetaren" to write full-time. The following year, Dagerman published De dömdas ö (The Island of the Doomed), completed over a fortnight during which, he says, it was as if he "let god do the writing." Using nightmarish imagery, this was an allegory centered on seven shipwrecked people, each doomed to die, each seeking a form of salvation.
In the course of five years, 1945-49, he enjoyed phenomenal success with four novels, a collection of short stories, a book about postwar Germany, five plays, hundreds of poems and satirical verses, several essays of note and a large amount of journalism. Then, with apparent suddenness, he fell silent. In the fall of 1954, Sweden was stunned to learn that Stig Dagerman, the epitome of his generation of writers, had been found dead in his car: he had closed the doors of the garage and run the engine.
During his university years, Dagerman became involved with a type of socialism known as anarcho-syndicalism, in which the freedom of the common worker was deemed paramount.
Views
Dagerman's works deal with universal problems of morality and conscience, of sexuality and social philosophy, of love, compassion and justice. He plunges into the painful realities of human existence, dissecting feelings of fear, guilt and loneliness. Despite the somber content, he also displays a wry sense of humor that occasionally turns his writing into burlesque or satire.
Dagerman believed that even though society was uncaring, hypocritical, and often absurd, a person should confront his fears and remain morally strong.
Quotations:
“But then comes a time when forgetting isn't possible. And I do mean a particular time when no amount of dreaming, not then and maybe not ever, can change how naked and unimportant we become in our own eyes.”
“I received in inheritance neither god nor a given spot on earth from where I can draw the attention of a god: no one either legated me the well disguised fury of the skeptic, the Sioux guiles of the rationalist or the burning innocence of the atheist. So I dare not throw the stone neither at the one who believes in things which inspire me only doubt, nor at the one who cultivates his doubt as if it was not, just as well, surrounded with darkness. This stone would hit me myself because I am well certain about one thing: the need of consolation that dwells within the human being is impossible to satisfy.”
Connections
Stig Dagerman was married to Anita Bjork who was an actress and they had a daughter.