Astrid Lindgren and the Second World War
In September 1939 The Second World War broke out. Astrid Lindgren decided to document the war and started cutting out articles as well as beginning her ‘war diaries’ that commented on both her day-to-day life and the events of the war.
In total, there were 17 diaries, which not only provide a unique picture of an ordinary family's life in Stockholm during the war years, but also came to encompass the years when Astrid Lindgren began inventing stories for her daughter Karin — stories that, shortly after the end of the war in 1945, became a sensation in book form as Pippi Longstocking. Above all, the war diaries are a deeply personal portrayal of how dramatic world events affect us all. The texts are charged with great sorrow and dismay.
Mixed with Astrid Lindgren’s own notes, the diaries contain numerous clipped articles from Swedish newspapers, which she comments on. The war diaries were kept in a laundry basket in Astrid Lindgren’s home on Dalagatan in Stockholm until 2013, when her family decided they should be published. In 2015 they were released in book form and received widespread international attention. In 2025 a German documentary about the war diaries was released: A World Gone Mad (Die Menschheit hat den Verstand verloren).
Astrid Lindgren's War Diaries begin:
1 September 1939
Oh! War broke out today. Nobody could believe it. Yesterday afternoon, Elsa Gullander and I were in Vasa Park with the children running and playing around us and we sat there giving Hitler a nice, cosy telling-off and agreed that there definitely was not going to be a war – and now today! The Germans bombarded several Polish cities early this morning and are forging their way into Poland from all directions. I’ve managed to restrain myself from any hoarding until now, but today I laid in a little cocoa, a little tea, a small amount of soap and a few other things.A terrible despondency weighs on everything and everyone. The radio churns out news reports all day long. Lots of our men are being called up. There’s a ban on private motoring, too. God help our poor planet in the grip of this madness!
English translation: Sarah Death
'The Dirty Job'
In the summer of 1940, Astrid Lindgren was contacted by her former employer Harry Söderman ('Revolver-Harry') and offered top-secret work in the intelligence service’s postal censorship division, which she later referred to as “the dirty job,” since many of the letters contained private material. Together with colleagues, among them her childhood friend Anne-Marie “Madicken” Fries, Astrid secretly read letters to and from foreign countries as well as military mail. The letters and the work gave her significant insight into the suffering caused by the war. She also understood - earlier than many others in Sweden - the extent of what was happening to the Jews under the Nazi regime.
7 May 1945
It’s VE Day! The war’s over! The war’s over! THE WAR IS OVER! At 2.41 p.m. (I think), the surrender was signed in a little red schoolhouse in Reims, for the Allies by Eisenhower (Bedell Smith), for the Germans by Jodl, under the terms of which all German forces in the whole of Europe capitulated. Norway’s free now, too. At this very moment, a wild sense of jubilation is spreading across Stockholm. Kungsgatan is ankle-deep in paper and everyone seems to have gone crazy. We sang ‘Ja, Vi Elsker’ [the Norwegian national anthem] at work after the radio broadcast at 3 o’clock. Sture isn’t in for dinner this evening, but he sent home a bottle of sherry so we could celebrate the peace. They’re playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ on the radio at the moment. I’ve been drinking sherry with Linnéa and Lars and feel a bit giddy. It’s spring and the sun is shining on this blessed day and the war is over. I wouldn’t want to be German. Just think, the war’s over, Hitler’s dead (there’s shouting and cheering on the radio now; Stockholm has completely taken leave of its senses).
English translation: Sarah Death
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