‘The Antithesis of Nazi Ideology’: How Pippi Longstocking was Born to Stand Up to Hitler | film

SIt’s the mischievous little Swedish girl with red hair and pigtails. Since 1945, this motherless vagabond has rarely been on bestseller lists, and continues to inspire musicals and films. Heyday Films, the company behind Paddington and James Bond, is developing an English-language adaptation of its stories.

What is not generally known outside her native Sweden are the circumstances under which writer Astrid Lindgren created the character Bibi during the darkest period of World War II, under Hitler and Stalin.

“Having worked for many years in film production, I am absolutely clear that Bibi is a child of war,” Wilfried Hauck, the veteran German director who directed the new docu-drama A World Gone Mad – Astrid Lindgren’s War Diaries (which will have its international premiere early next year), tells me: “Having worked for many years in film production, I am absolutely clear that Bibi is a child of war. She would never have existed if it were not for these terrible times.”

His film features three generations of the Lindgren family – the author’s daughter, Karin Niemann, granddaughter, Annika Lindgren, and great-grandson, Johan Palmberg. It also has reconstructions in which leading Swedish theater actress Sofia Beccari plays the author, but its executors made sure that every word she spoke was taken exactly from what Lindgren actually wrote or said.

In 1939, Lindgren was living a quiet, middle-class life in Stockholm. She was a housewife in her early 30s with two young children. Her husband, Sture, had a well-paid job at the Swedish National Motorists’ Association and did not spend much time at home.

Sweden may have been one of the few European countries to remain politically neutral during World War II, but Lindgren was an ardent anti-Nazi and a news junkie. She searched through the papers for accounts of the war, cut them out and pasted them into her notebooks. She was an excellent writer, and soon obtained a secret wartime job at a postal control center, opening and reading private and military letters.

From reading her letter, Lindgren realized that Jews were being sent to death camps. In her memoirs, which she began writing around this period, she made frequent references to the plight of refugees in wartime.

Like many Swedes, Lindgren had grown up with a respect for German literature, culture and philosophy, but now she was poring over private correspondence detailing Nazi atrocities. In May 1941, she wrote that she learned that 1,000 Jews a day were being “forcibly transported to Poland in absolutely appalling conditions… It is clearly Hitler’s intention to turn Poland into one big ghetto where the poor Jews will die of hunger and misery.”

She added: “As long as you just read about it in the newspaper, you can kind of avoid believing it, but when you read it in a letter… it suddenly brings it home, very horrifyingly.”

“You could see that the memoir was becoming more and more sentimental. I felt that this was now the beginning of the end of this old idea of ​​European culture,” says Hook.

Lindgren’s diaries consist of 17 small handwritten textbooks. It was discovered in the Stockholm apartment where the author spent much of her life, and was published in 2015, more than a decade after her death. Hook sees them as an introduction to her children’s stories, which wouldn’t exist without them.

The name “Pippi Longstocking” was coined by the author’s daughter, Karen. Lindgren invented tales about the character to distract Karin during her recurring wartime illnesses. Then, in 1944, when she injured her ankle in a fall and was bedridden for three weeks, she began working seriously on writing and editing Baby’s first stories.

Creating Pippi Longstocking was her way of dealing with the darkness seeping into her life. Her marriage was falling apart. She discovered that Storr was dating another woman and wanted a divorce. This was a “landslide that swept away its existence.”

“But then she felt like she had something special about her writing. That made her strong again and helped her get through this crisis,” Hook suggests.

One of her obsessions even at that time was educating children – how to raise children, in the director’s words, “not to be mentally ill like Hitler or tyrants or dictators and so on.” Reviving Pippi was part of this mission. The director believes that “there was a lot of her personality” in the character. Like her most famous fictional creations, she was a free-thinking individualist with endless resources of resilience and humour.

Lindgren’s grandson, Johan Palmberg, rights director of the family company Astrid Lindgren Aktibolag, was 11 when the author died at age 94 in 2002. He has fond memories of her and told me he was still amazed by her instinctive way of connecting with children.

“She was very unique in that sense. And that ties into why she was such a good children’s book author. She had this ability to go back in her own way to how she felt as a child — and she could relate to children on their own terms. She didn’t ask boring questions for adults. She asked interesting questions for children.”

He believes that Baby’s commercial appeal in 1945 lay in its cheerful individuality. “The world has been in this terrible situation for so many years, and she has come as such a breath of fresh air. She is the antidote to the authoritarian regimes of Germany and the Soviets. She has all the characteristics of independence, free-thinking and kindness that are the antithesis of Nazi ideology.”

Pepe’s 80th anniversary is now being celebrated with all the fanfare you might expect. “We’ve had birthday parties all year, in one form or another, and I think we’ll continue to celebrate her because she’s such an important person, especially with the world looking the way it is now,” says the author’s grandson. “Her independence, kindness and generosity are needed more than ever.”