Karin Nyman<\/a>, granddaughter, Annika Lindgren, and great-grandson, Johan Palmberg. It also has reconstructions in which leading Swedish stage actor Sofia Pekkari plays the author but her executors have made sure that every word she utters is taken exactly from what Lindgren actually wrote or said.<\/p>\nIn 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 Association of Motorists, and didn\u2019t spend much time at home.<\/p>\n
Sweden may have been one of the few European nations to remain politically neutral during the second world war, but Lindgren was an ardent anti-Nazi and a news junkie. She scoured the papers, looking for accounts of the war, which she cut out and stuck in her notebooks. An excellent typist, she soon landed a secret wartime job at the postal control centre, steaming open and reading private and military letters.<\/p>\n
From her letter reading, Lindgren realised that Jews were being sent to death camps. In the diaries she started keeping in this period, she frequently referred to the plight of wartime refugees.<\/p>\n
Like many Swedes, Lindgren had grown up with a reverence for German literature, culture and philosophy \u2013 but now she was vetting private correspondence detailing Nazi atrocities. In May 1941, she writes that she has learned that 1,000 Jews a day are being \u201cforcibly transported to Poland in the most shocking conditions \u2026 it is apparently Hitler\u2019s intention to make Poland into one big ghetto where the poor Jews are to perish from hunger and squalor.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAs long as you\u2019re only reading about it in the paper you can sort of avoid believing it but when you read it in a letter \u2026 it suddenly brings it home, quite terrifyingly,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
Astrid Lindgren, 1977. Photograph: AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Hauke says: \u201cYou can see that the diary became more and more emotional. She felt this was now the beginning of the end of this old idea of European culture.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lindgren\u2019s diaries consisted of 17 small handwritten schoolbooks. These were discovered in the Stockholm flat in which the author spent much of her life \u2013 and were published in 2015, more than a decade after her death. Hauke sees them as the forerunner to her children\u2019s stories, which would not have existed without them.<\/p>\n
The name \u201cPippi Longstocking\u201d was coined by the author\u2019s daughter, Karin. Lindgren invented tales about the character to distract Karin during her frequent wartime illnesses. Then, in 1944, when she hurt her ankle after a fall and was bedridden for three weeks, she began to work in earnest on writing and editing the first Pippi stories.<\/p>\n
The creation of Pippi Longstocking was her way of dealing with the darkness seeping into her life. Her marriage was breaking down. Sture, she discovered, was seeing another woman and wanted a divorce. This was the \u201clandslide that engulfed her existence\u201d.<\/p>\n
Karin Nyman next to her mother\u2019s desk in 2015. Photograph: Jessica Gow\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
\u201cBut then she felt she had something of her own which was her writing. This made her strong again and helped her go through this crisis,\u201d Hauke suggests.<\/p>\n
One of her obsessions even then was children\u2019s education \u2013 how, as the film-maker puts it, kids could be brought up \u201cnot to be psychopaths like Hitler or authoritarians, dictators and so on\u201d. Bringing Pippi to life was part of this mission. The film-maker believes that \u201cthere was a lot of herself\u201d in the character. Like her most famous fictional creation, she was a free-thinking individualist with endless resources of resilience and humour.<\/p>\n
Free-thinking, kind \u2026 Inger Nilsson as Pippi in the 1968 film version. Photograph: Jacob Forsell\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Lindgren\u2019s great-grandson, Johan Palmberg, rights manager at the family company Astrid Lindgren Aktiebolag, was 11 years old when the author died aged 94 in 2002. He has very fond memories of her and tells me he still marvels at her instinctive way of communicating with children.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was very unique in that sense. It\u2019s related to the reason why she was such a good children\u2019s book author. She had this ability to go back in her own way to what things felt like as a child \u2013 and she could communicate with children on their own terms. She didn\u2019t ask boring grownup questions. She asked interesting child questions.\u201d<\/p>\n
He believes that Pippi\u2019s commercial appeal in 1945 lay in her cheery individualism. \u201cThe world had been in this terrible situation for many years and she comes as this fresh breath of air. She\u2019s the antidote to the authoritarian regimes of Germany and the Soviets. She has all these characteristics of independence, free-thinking and kindness which is the antithesis to the Nazi ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pippi\u2019s 80th anniversary is now being marked with all the fanfare you might expect. \u201cWe\u2019ve had birthday parties all year, more or less, and I think we are going to keep celebrating her because she is such an important character, especially with the world looking how it does,\u201d the author\u2019s great-grandson states. \u201cHer independence, kindness and generosity are needed more than ever.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She\u2019s the mischievous little red-haired Swedish girl with the pigtails. Since 1945, this waif with no mother or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185938,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-185937","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}