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From novelists Moberg to Mankell: the muscle and bone of Swedish History-first posted Aug. 20, 2009
The Road Less Traveled
...Two roads diverged...and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
-- Robert Frost
Some novels work like the muscle on the bone of history. Take Vilhelm Moberg, born in Sweden in 1898 and Henning Mankel, writing today.
Muscle first: Moberg’s The Emigrants and Mankel’s mysteries bookend 160 years of Swedish life, a journey from poverty to capitalism to socialism to varying degrees of socialism and capitalism. These two writers capture the zeitgeist of those years as newspaper accounts and history texts cannot.
In The Emigrants Karl Oskar and his wife Kristina emigrate to America in the 1850s because of famine in Sweden. Through extraordinary hard work they become wealthy in Minnesota but suffer the loss of roots, family and faith.
At the start of the story, in rural Sweden, they face a brutal winter following a poor harvest,
“Kristina baked famine bread; when the rye flour did not suffice
she added chaff, beechnuts, heather seed and dried berries of the
mountain ash. She also tried to grind acorns...however much they
stretched and added, all the bins...would be empty long before the next
crop was ripe.”
After much soul searching Kristina and Karl Oskar emigrate to America. But their homeland is always with them. In The Last Letter Home, Karl Oskar writes a poignant letter to his sister living in Sweden:
“My thoughts often wander to the Place where I was born and where
kind Parents helped me grow up. Sometimes I think I would like to go
back for a Visit. But I could not see Father and Mother in Life, only
their Tombstones.”
When Kristina was dying, she tastes an apple planted with the seeds she
brought from Sweden, and says, in her last breath,
“Our apples are ripe. I’m home...”
Fast forward to the 1990s, to Henning Mankell’s homicide detective stories featuring Detective Kurt Wallander who lives in a now prosperous Sweden. In Sidetracked, Wallander ponders:
“What kind of world was he living in?...He decided they were living
in the midst of an era that could be called the Age of Failure.
Something they had believed in and built up had turned out to be
less tenable than expected. They had thought they were building
a house, when in reality they were busy raising a monument to
something already gone and half forgotten.
Now all of Sweden raged around him...People lived so they could
forget, not remember. Houses were hiding places rather than cozy
homes..”
Mankel describes a fellow detective in One Step Behind:
“Martinsson walked over and stood by the window. Wallander could
see how shaken he was. Once upon a time, he had been an eager
young recruit with all the best intentions--and at a time when
becoming a police officer was no longer seen as something noble.
Young people seemed to despise the profession, in fact. But
Martinsson held fast to his ideals and genuinely wanted to be a
good policeman. It was only during the last few years that
Wallander had noticed his faith starting to slip. Now Wallander
doubted that Martinsson would make it to retirement.”
Detective Wallander is a divorced dad of a floundering but talented daughter, has a 10-year old car, a ho-hum apartment, diabetes, a senile father. He navigates a complex police bureaucracy and barely copes at times, plagued by the pettiness of communal washing machine rules, family and job responsibility and elusive affairs of the heart that can gut the soul.
Now the bones:
The Swedish model - Washington Times
More Than Just a Saab Sister
August 2009 by Richard Rahn
STOCKHOLM
Do you think America would be better off with a Swedish-type welfare state? This question tends to evoke strong reactions from both left and right, yet few understand Sweden’s economic history and the revisions it has been making to its welfare-state model in recent years. Sweden was a very poor country for most of the 19th century.
The poverty of those years caused many to emigrate from the country, mostly to the U.S. Upper Midwest. Beginning in the 1870s, Sweden created conditions for developing a high-growth, free-market economy with a slowly growing government sector. As a result, Sweden for many years had the world’s fastest-growing economy, ultimately producing the third highest per capita income, almost equaling that in the United States by the late 1960s. Sweden became a rich country before becoming a welfare state.
Sweden began its movement toward a welfare state in the 1960s, when its government sector was about equal to that in the United States. However, by the late 1980s, government spending grew from 30 percent of gross domestic product to more than 60 percent of GDP.
These policies and outcomes greatly diminished the incentives to work, save and invest. Economic growth slowed to a crawl. Other countries that avoided the excess spending, taxing and regulation of Sweden grew more rapidly, leaving Sweden in the dust. Sweden is still a prosperous country, but far from the top, and its per capita income has fallen to just about 80 percent of that in the United States.
Most Americans know of Swedish socialist policies. But Sweden’s economic success was achieved with a capitalist model. Sweden has vacillated between the two for the past 70 years
The Keynesian model of big government appeared in Sweden during the Depression, like the United States, and planted the seed of the Swedish Model or the Middle Way, mixing a robust private industry with an large strata of publicly funded social services.
Sweden today has one of the highest tax rates in the world, starting at 57% on very low incomes. Until 2007 it exported half of what’s produced. But like the rest of the world Sweden’s suffered steep decline since 2008. Sweden voted against linking their currency to the euro in 2003.
Sweden’s population is just over 9 million. Its the 88th largest country. The U. S. population is 307, 212,123 and is the 4th largest country in the world, according to the CIA World Factbook.
The Road Less Traveled
...Two roads diverged...and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
-- Robert Frost
Some novels work like the muscle on the bone of history. Take Vilhelm Moberg, born in Sweden in 1898 and Henning Mankel, writing today.
Muscle first: Moberg’s The Emigrants and Mankel’s mysteries bookend 160 years of Swedish life, a journey from poverty to capitalism to socialism to varying degrees of socialism and capitalism. These two writers capture the zeitgeist of those years as newspaper accounts and history texts cannot.
In The Emigrants Karl Oskar and his wife Kristina emigrate to America in the 1850s because of famine in Sweden. Through extraordinary hard work they become wealthy in Minnesota but suffer the loss of roots, family and faith.
At the start of the story, in rural Sweden, they face a brutal winter following a poor harvest,
“Kristina baked famine bread; when the rye flour did not suffice
she added chaff, beechnuts, heather seed and dried berries of the
mountain ash. She also tried to grind acorns...however much they
stretched and added, all the bins...would be empty long before the next
crop was ripe.”
After much soul searching Kristina and Karl Oskar emigrate to America. But their homeland is always with them. In The Last Letter Home, Karl Oskar writes a poignant letter to his sister living in Sweden:
“My thoughts often wander to the Place where I was born and where
kind Parents helped me grow up. Sometimes I think I would like to go
back for a Visit. But I could not see Father and Mother in Life, only
their Tombstones.”
When Kristina was dying, she tastes an apple planted with the seeds she
brought from Sweden, and says, in her last breath,
“Our apples are ripe. I’m home...”
Fast forward to the 1990s, to Henning Mankell’s homicide detective stories featuring Detective Kurt Wallander who lives in a now prosperous Sweden. In Sidetracked, Wallander ponders:
“What kind of world was he living in?...He decided they were living
in the midst of an era that could be called the Age of Failure.
Something they had believed in and built up had turned out to be
less tenable than expected. They had thought they were building
a house, when in reality they were busy raising a monument to
something already gone and half forgotten.
Now all of Sweden raged around him...People lived so they could
forget, not remember. Houses were hiding places rather than cozy
homes..”
Mankel describes a fellow detective in One Step Behind:
“Martinsson walked over and stood by the window. Wallander could
see how shaken he was. Once upon a time, he had been an eager
young recruit with all the best intentions--and at a time when
becoming a police officer was no longer seen as something noble.
Young people seemed to despise the profession, in fact. But
Martinsson held fast to his ideals and genuinely wanted to be a
good policeman. It was only during the last few years that
Wallander had noticed his faith starting to slip. Now Wallander
doubted that Martinsson would make it to retirement.”
Detective Wallander is a divorced dad of a floundering but talented daughter, has a 10-year old car, a ho-hum apartment, diabetes, a senile father. He navigates a complex police bureaucracy and barely copes at times, plagued by the pettiness of communal washing machine rules, family and job responsibility and elusive affairs of the heart that can gut the soul.
Now the bones:
The Swedish model - Washington Times
More Than Just a Saab Sister
August 2009 by Richard Rahn
STOCKHOLM
Do you think America would be better off with a Swedish-type welfare state? This question tends to evoke strong reactions from both left and right, yet few understand Sweden’s economic history and the revisions it has been making to its welfare-state model in recent years. Sweden was a very poor country for most of the 19th century.
The poverty of those years caused many to emigrate from the country, mostly to the U.S. Upper Midwest. Beginning in the 1870s, Sweden created conditions for developing a high-growth, free-market economy with a slowly growing government sector. As a result, Sweden for many years had the world’s fastest-growing economy, ultimately producing the third highest per capita income, almost equaling that in the United States by the late 1960s. Sweden became a rich country before becoming a welfare state.
Sweden began its movement toward a welfare state in the 1960s, when its government sector was about equal to that in the United States. However, by the late 1980s, government spending grew from 30 percent of gross domestic product to more than 60 percent of GDP.
These policies and outcomes greatly diminished the incentives to work, save and invest. Economic growth slowed to a crawl. Other countries that avoided the excess spending, taxing and regulation of Sweden grew more rapidly, leaving Sweden in the dust. Sweden is still a prosperous country, but far from the top, and its per capita income has fallen to just about 80 percent of that in the United States.
Most Americans know of Swedish socialist policies. But Sweden’s economic success was achieved with a capitalist model. Sweden has vacillated between the two for the past 70 years
The Keynesian model of big government appeared in Sweden during the Depression, like the United States, and planted the seed of the Swedish Model or the Middle Way, mixing a robust private industry with an large strata of publicly funded social services.
Sweden today has one of the highest tax rates in the world, starting at 57% on very low incomes. Until 2007 it exported half of what’s produced. But like the rest of the world Sweden’s suffered steep decline since 2008. Sweden voted against linking their currency to the euro in 2003.
Sweden’s population is just over 9 million. Its the 88th largest country. The U. S. population is 307, 212,123 and is the 4th largest country in the world, according to the CIA World Factbook.
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