Sweden, Migration, and the Emigrant Novels of Vilhelm Moberg
Between 1845 and 1930 1.2 million people left Sweden and emigrated to America. This corresponded to one fifth of the whole population, making it proportionately the largest exodus of people to the United States from any single country. It was also mainly young people who left home – farm labourers and the urban working class – fleeing hunger, poverty, religious and civil persecution. This was the case as well in Ireland and Norway, two countries that experienced similarly high levels of emigration to America.1 The sense of separation and loss resulted in something of a collective trauma both among those who left and those who stayed behind. The disappearance of a whole generation of family and friends who never saw one another again felt like a premature death. While the progress of American capitalism was given an enormous boost by the influx of so many millions of young workers, the impact on the countries they left behind was devastating. In Sweden for example the development of modern industry was delayed until well into the 20th century. Even today in Sweden there is a sharp discrepancy between town and country in which the process of urbanization has left a long trail of slowly dying villages, especially in the north. The population of ten million people remains also small for such a big country. Timber is still the country’s most important export product and has been since the 19th century.
In this article I want to discuss the question of emigration from and immigration to Sweden, both past and present, using the series of four novels written by the working-class writer, Vilhelm Moberg (1898-1973), as a literary point of departure in order to examine in more detail the personal experience of leaving one’s homeland and moving to another. I have chosen Moberg’s novels since they represent a unique attempt to both document and dramatize this critical aspect of Swedish society that still resonates in the public discourse. Moberg’s work remains therefore relevant in resituating the debate about migrants in Europe today within the context of the mass emigration that occurred in Sweden in the past. This is clearly something that I’m sure Moberg himself would have welcomed, since he regarded his novels not only as a project that was firmly based on archive research both in Sweden and America that took 12 years to complete. He also saw them as an attempt to, as he himself said, “bring history close to the living [and] the living close to history.”2
Another reason for my choice of literary sources is that Moberg’s novels about Swedish farm labourers moving to America clearly caught the imagination of Swedish readers in ways that no other fictional work has managed to do, either before or after. Since their publication, the four novels have sold more than a million copies each in Sweden and have been described by critics as representing the greatest epic of modern Swedish literature. The volumes have also been successfully filmed by Jan Troell in 1971 and translated into several languages, including English. It is to these English translations I will refer here (the year of the original publication is included first): Utvandrarna (1949), (The Emigrants 1951); Invandrarna (1952), (Unto A Good Land 1954); Nybyggarna (1956), (The Settlers 1961); and Sista Brevet till Sverige (1959), (The Last Letter Home 1961). All four of the novels were excellently translated into English by Gustaf Lannestock, who worked in close collaboration with Moberg himself, and remain still widely in print today.
Moberg’s own biography is also relevant in this context since it connects not only to his personal ties with Swedish emigration to America, but also to his radical commitment to the cause of marginalized groups, not least migrants, who remain among the most vulnerable in class society. In the first comprehensive biography of Vilhelm Moberg, Mannen i skogen (The Man in the Woods), Jens Liljestrand shows how the idea of emigration was a defining one in Moberg’s life. Most of his family and relatives moved to America. It was only because his ageing mother couldn’t bear to be left behind alone in Sweden and begged him to stay that Moberg himself remained. Liljestrand sees this decision as resulting in a shared sense of bereavement with his mother for absent relatives and a profound feeling of lost personal opportunity that marked him for the rest of his life: “The journey that nearly happened would echo in him as a what if, a recurring fantasy of a life that could have been. It would haunt and one day catch up with him”.3 In the small rural community of Småland where he grew up, over one hundred thousand people left for America. Throughout the rest of Sweden there was similar ruinous depletions in population. It also created, in Moberg’s view, a democratic deficit: those who were on the receiving end of these dramatic historical forces had important stories to tell, but few were ever recorded. This became the fundamental source of inspiration for Moberg’s later political radicalism and campaigning drive to make these groups of people heard. In his introduction to The Emigrants, Roger McKnight notes: “A man of humble origins but immense ambition and strong opinions, Moberg spent his entire literary life championing the rights of the common people.”4
Moberg became not only Sweden’s most read novelist, he was also one of its most combative and influential political journalists, writing throughout his career as a radical socialist, anti-militarist, anti-fascist, anti-royalist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist. He never forgot his peasant roots however and the experience of working on the land as a farm labourer. This formed the basis of his first literary success with the novel Raskens (1927), which was very much the story of his own family who had subsisted on a small patch of stony ground in Småland. It was also a social realist depiction of peasant life that set the tone for a whole generation of Swedish working-class writers that emerged later in the 1930s: Ivar Lo-Johansson, Moa Martinson, Harry Martinson, Eyvind Johnsson, Artur Lundkvist, Josef Kjellgren, Erik Asklund and Gustav Sandgren. According to Magnus Nilsson, they succeeded together in creating a “golden age for Swedish working-class literature – a decade when this literature has its definitive breakthrough and working-class writers dominated the nation’s literary life.”5 The novels of Vilhelm Moberg were at the core of this unique rise of working-class fiction in Sweden.
Moberg’s first big political battle came with the outbreak of the Second World War when the Swedish social democratic government (SDP) adopted a collaborationist policy of support for Hitler’s nazi regime. Not only did Sweden continue the export of both vital supplies of iron ore for the German steel industry as well as granite stone for Hitler’s construction of monumental public buildings. Even more controversially, the government signed a three-year agreement to allow the rail transport of German troops through Sweden for the occupation of Norway. Moberg was horrified by this capitulation to nazi Germany, which meant a complete betrayal of the socialist ideals of the SDP. In 1941 he published his novel, Rid i natt! (Ride Tonight!), which was set in the 17th century and depicted the resistance of the peasantry against the power of German landlords in Sweden. It was however clearly meant to be read as an allegory attacking nazi Germany and was interpreted as such by the thousands of people who bought or borrowed the book. This tale of popular resistance to class oppression was made even more accessible when it was turned into a film a year later. Moberg himself travelled all around the country speaking at meetings to promote the anti-nazi struggle. He was to remain a thorn in the side of all subsequent SDP governments that ruled Sweden. Like Jean-Paul Sartre, Noam Chomsky and Günter Grass, Moberg became something of an intellectual conscience of the nation in the post-war period, both through his novels and plays, but also his engagement, not least on radio and television, for a range of radical causes – the abolition of the monarchy, the anti-Vietnam war movement and the conditions of Roma people in Sweden. This latter issue touched directly upon the status of migrants and remains still relevant to the rights of refugees throughout Europe today.
In the 1960s Sweden was being transformed into a modern welfare state, based on the corporatist accommodation between the SDP government, the trade union bureaucracy and the concentrated wealth and power of the 15 capitalist families that dominated Swedish industry, from Volvo to IKEA. This collaboration enabled Sweden to emerge as a successful export-driven economy that also financed the reformist social program of the SDP. However, despite the official SDP slogan of creating ‘a home for the people’, there were always glaring gaps in this ideological self-image of a ‘third-way society between capitalism and communism’. One such sensitive point was the existence of Roma people, who had lived in Sweden since the Middle Ages. Not only were they a chronically neglected group within the Swedish welfare ‘model’, but were actively persecuted by SDP governments. Things came to a head in 1969 when a campaign was launched to stop the forced deportation of Roma refugees to France, many of whom had escaped the Holocaust in Germany. Once again, Moberg went on the road around Sweden to gather support for their cause, not least by reminding the prime minister, Olof Palme, of the controversial expulsion by a previous SDP government of Baltic refugees who had fled from the Soviet Union at the end of the war and then forcibly returned. Despite its progressive reputation, there is a long history of racism in Sweden that goes back to the colonization of the Sami people’s land in the north and the attempt to eradicate their life style, language and culture. It should also be remembered that the very first state-funded Institution for Racial Biology was founded in Uppsala in 1921 and existed until 1958.
Today the conditions of poverty-stricken Roma people from Romania and Bulgaria are a democratic gauge of how the European Union (EU) behaves towards its ethnic minorities. Roma people have the formal right to live wherever they wish within the EU, yet in Sweden, as elsewhere, they are continually harassed by local authorities who destroy their camps and clear them off. Moberg would be pleased to know that in contrast to the above, there is generally a sympathetic attitude to Roma people in Sweden, who find that they and their families at home can at least survive on the donations they receive from passers-by in the street.
The refugees that came to Europe in the wake of the ongoing neocolonial wars in Afghanistan, Irak, Syria and Libya, were met in Sweden by a broad popular mobilization of help when these people arrived in large numbers at railway stations and ferry terminals. It came as a revelation to see all the spontaneous assistance given in the form of food, water, clothes and blankets. It was as if the heartbreak of emigration that Swedish people had themselves endured had resurfaced at the sight of these refugees, recalling the dark images of the diaspora of 19th and early 20th century Sweden. This reaction can in part also explain the enduring appeal of Moberg’s emigrant novels in keeping their testimonies alive. It is pertinent therefore at this point to return to this previous migrant story, as retold by Vilhelm Moberg, in order to elicit more specifically what might signify the continuing relevance of his work.
The conflict of Moberg’s four emigrant novels is that between freedom and necessity. The freedom that America seemed to represent, but also the necessity of having to leave home and cut the ties with family and friends, language and traditions. There is a growing sense of regret in the story, personified in particular by Kristina, the wife of Karl Oskar, the young couple that is the focal point of the whole narrative of departure, arrival and settlement. Outside of the House of Emigrants, a museum in Växjö, Småland, that now contains Moberg’s original manuscripts and papers, one can see a statue of Kristina and Karl Oskar, where the husband has his eyes firmly fixed on the west, while his wife looks back over her shoulder at the home they are leaving.
Moberg was keen to assert that his novels were all factual, based on emigrant newspapers, diaries, letters and oral testimonies, all of which gave his account a historical accuracy down to the detailed descriptions of the seasonal ploughing, sowing and harvesting. The work of the women is also depicted with equal concern for their daily round of cooking, cleaning and childrearing. However, not satisfied with only reproducing a naturalistic record of social conditions, his other main ambition was to explore the psychological and emotional tensions that affected these migrants and the personal cost it meant to break up from their traditional communities and move to another continent. The strains of separation are shared unequally however by Karl Oscar and Kristina, whose existential crises of hope and despair recur throughout the novels. While Karl Oscar expresses a practical and political rationalization to justify their move, Kristina is more fatalistic and broods over her doubts that their sacrifices are not worth the material gains of the new land they have come to cultivate. For Karl Oskar, leaving Sweden means not only leaving behind the famine that took the life of their little daughter, Anna, it also involves breaking with the traditions of servility among those who were forced to work for the gentry:
At home, people struggled to get ahead of each other until they were full of evil wounds that never would heal; their minds grew morbid, festering boils corroded their souls; they went about bloated by grudges and jealousy. Most of them were afraid, bowing in cowardice to the great lords who sat on high and ruled as they saw fit. No one dared decide for himself, no one dared walk upright; it was too much of an effort, their backs were too weak. They dared not to be free, were incapable of freedom. That required courage, entailed responsibility and worry as well; anyone trying to decide for himself in the old country was derided, mocked, slandered, pushed out.6
This stubborn individualism is contrasted to Kristina’s fears of severing their connection with a community that cannot be recovered in America. The small group of emigrants end up scattered about the area in Minnesota where they have decided to settle and each one struggles to subsist on what they can hunt and grow. For Karl Oskar, America is a space that allows for his own personal initiative, while for Kristina it results in rootlessness and a lack of any feelings of real entitlement. It’s as though the long and arduous voyage across the Atlantic and then overland to Minnesota has trapped her in a condition of spiritual exile. For her the place they left was a source of social identity, cohesion and collective practices that helped overcome the vicissitudes of living off the land. Home is where the heart is and Kristina has clearly left hers behind in the old country. This existential slippage between past and present, appearance and reality, is poignantly captured in her growing confusion about where they really belong:
Now they were at last settled, now they would stay here forever, at home on Lake Ki-Chi-Saga, as Karl Oskar put it. So strange it sounded, to have her home linked to that name. She was to be at home here for the rest of her life – but she wasn’t at home. This house was her home, but it was so far away…
Here was away for Kristina – Sweden was home. It ought to be just the opposite: the two places should change position. She had moved, but she could not make the two countries move, the countries lay where they had lain before – one had always to her been away, the other would always remain home.
And she knew for sure now, she had to admit it to herself: in her heart she felt she was still on a journey; she had gone away but hoped one day to return.
Home – to Kristina, this encompassed all that she was never to see again.7
The fate of Karl Oskar’s brother, Robert, also exposes the illusory lure of the land when he returns from the California goldfields thinking that he is a rich man who can transform all their lives with his money. It turns out that he has in fact exchanged the gold he found for counterfeit dollars, a shock that drives him to suicide. It is also the symbolic death of a pioneering American dream since it was Robert who first suggested to Karl Oskar and others in the village that they should emigrate to America – a name he always pronounces in Swedish as ‘mer rika’, meaning
‘more rich’. It was a disillusionment that Moberg experienced in part himself when he finally came to America in 1947 to research and write his emigrant epic. For a radical socialist like Moberg, the prospect of America in the throes of the Cold War and the paranoia of the McCarthy anti-communist crusade left him profoundly dismayed about the progressive society he had always admired. This political alienation is also found in the novels, particularly in the depiction of the conflict between the settlers and the American Indians.
While their lives are dedicated to making their farms flourish, the real challenge is shown to be more of a moral than a material one in the growing realization that they have built a new life at the expense of the Indians whose land they now occupy. In the final volume of the series, The Last Letter Home, Moberg places his group of Swedish migrants in the middle of the Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862, which he describes as “the bloodiest Indian war in North America” where more than a thousand settlers died and thousands more Indians were killed or taken prisoner.8 It was not common at the time to portray the Indians so sympathetically as Moberg did, especially when he declared that the genocidal treatment of Native Americans was “one of the most reprehensible deeds in world history.”9 Also unusually at this time, he allows the Indians to speak for themselves in the novels, such as when the Sioux chief, Red Iron, tells Alexander Ramsey, the governor of Minnesota:
My people do not own this land and therefore we cannot sell it to your people. We have only granted your people the right to use this ground and live on it […] We cannot survive in this country without food. Without food we shall perish. As deer in the forest and fish in the lakes diminish and disappear, so our people will disappear and die.
We have surrendered our hunting grounds and our fathers’ graves. Soon there will be no place in this land where we can bury our dead. We have no land left for our graves. Your people have taken our land and will not give space even for our dead bodies. 10
These words echo back to a conversation Karl Oskar had with another Swedish settler who says that all their land has been stolen from the Indians. Typically, Karl Oskar defends himself by saying that the Indians were lazy since they did not cultivate the soil. As with everything, he views the world through his own settler ethos. “Only weeds grew here when I came! What grows here now? Crops to nourish us as well as others! I didn’t get anything for nothing. I earned my land when I cleared it and broke it!”11 It is instead Kristina who recognizes the guilt that the immigrants share, a fact that should concern them all:
Kristina said nothing. After all, there was some truth in Samuel Nöjd’s words, and she realized that that truth remained with Karl Oskar and disturbed him; they were intruders in this country. Other people had been driven away to make room for their home.12
Moreover, for Kristina, this moral dilemma began not when they arrived in America but when they left Sweden.
The emigrant novels end on a note of personal tragedy for Karl Oskar. Since most of the group who came to America together have been killed by the Indians and his own wife has died also prematurely after a miscarriage, he is left alone in the house he built for her and his children. They are however soon grown up and are beginning to lose the habit of speaking Swedish, as even he himself does. Since he never really learned English properly, he finds it increasingly difficult to communicate with them. The parting words he had with his father in Sweden about losing their common future also come back to haunt him: “Karl Oskar, you have not only dragged my family out of the country […] You take with you also coming generations and decide their fate; you decide for both the living and the unborn.”13 Ironically, the only person that seems to thrive in the new world is Ulrika, a woman who was ostracized by everyone back home as a prostitute, but who has now managed to marry a Baptist pastor and become respectable in America. This is even more ironic since she was hounded out of the village by the local Lutheran priest. As an anonymous gift, Ulrika later sends a silver bridal crown to Sweden, which she asks to be worn by every young girl who marries in the church that once closed its doors on herself:
She thought for a few moments, then she added that she was only grateful to Sweden that she had gotten away from that country in order to live the life of a human being in America. At home she had been sold at auction when she was four, and raped by the farmer who bought her when she was fourteen. She had frozen and had been hungry, and had been unable to nourish her children at her breast; three of them had died and for this people had spit after her and hated her […] Now her dream has come true, in the guise of another woman; she has exacted payment for the life she had been denied. Every time a young bride wears her crown in Ljuder church, Ulrika is indemnified.14
This emblematic return to the old country is not only an act of personal retribution, but also an attempt to exorcize the emotional pain that has remained deep within her throughout their journey to America. Ulrika has her final revenge when the gift is accepted gratefully by the members of her old parish. For Karl Oskar, the ghosts of the past are materialized in a similarly tangible way in the form of an old map of the county where he and his wife grew up. By tracing his finger along the pathways they walked together in their courting days, he returns in his mind’s eye to the lost world of their youth that was still so full of promise. It is the final image of the migrant whose body has been displaced but whose thoughts wander back and forth between two worlds, no longer at home in either.
In 2015 Sweden opened its borders to thousands of refugees that were fleeing to Europe in the wake of the war in Syria. 40,000 people arrived every month and were greeted with open arms both by the SDP government and by ordinary Swedes. It seemed that this expression of basic human sympathy and help would finally lay to rest the moral shortcomings and betrayals of the past. In the ensuing political debate, politicians pointed out the practical benefits of this influx of new citizens: that it would help to redress the ageing imbalance of the Swedish population, that country villages could be rejuvenated again and that many of these refugees already had much needed skills as electricians, plumbers, doctors, nurses and teachers. When temporary accommodation became scarce, people opened their own homes to the newcomers. Then, to everyone’s complete surprise and consternation, the government made another abrupt political U-turn. From initially implementing a most generous refugee policy, Sweden suddenly adopted some of the most restrictive immigration rules within the European Union. This led to a public outcry and demonstrations with the slogan ‘No one is illegal!’ The government tried to excuse itself by saying that the situation had become chaotic and there were no similarly open borders within the EU, which had become instead ‘fortress Europe’. The press quickly followed suit and began playing instead upon growing fears about refugee smugglers, drug gangs and human trafficking. The racist metaphors of “floods,” “waves” and “invasions” of immigrants, all borrowed from the Sweden Democrats, started to appear in the mainstream debate. This reactionary populist party had won 12% of the votes in the 2014 general election, mainly at the cost of the other conservative parties. In the wake of this new refugee ‘crisis’, however, the media coverage of the party increased disproportionately, their leader being interviewed on radio and television at every turn. This latest political capitulation of the SDP also allowed the poison of racism to seep into the workers’ movement with one quarter of trade union members voting for the Sweden Democrats in the 2018 general election, which increased its vote to 17%. Clearly, conciliation towards racism only produces more racists.
Migration is the modern condition. The endless wars that imperialism wages around the world drive more and more people from their homes. Now there are similar numbers of migrants on the move in Europe as there were in the 19th century. The lessons of the past need therefore to be recovered. Moberg would not have been surprised by this latest political betrayal by the SDP government. He would however have once again reminded people that Sweden also went through the trauma of mass emigration and could share similar painful memories of mutual loss. Thus, as his biographer noted, the Swedish emigrants in Moberg’s novels are “representatives of a collective experience. They could be emigrants from other parishes, provinces or parts of the world, they could be from a thousand years ago or yesterday, your or my forefathers and foremothers, you or I.”15 As I have tried to show, Moberg’s writings can still help us appreciate the profound personal sacrifice and determination of today’s migrants as well as respond to the challenges of international solidarity and support their demand: Ingen människa är illegal!
1 On the Titanic for example, the Swedish passengers in third class (where most people died) who perished, made up the second biggest number after the British. The Irish were the third largest group to die on the ship.
2Vilhelm Moberg, A History of the Swedish People (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 5.
3Jens Lilestrand, Mannen i skogen (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2018), 45. My translation.
4 Roger McKnight, Introduction to the Emigrant Novels, in Vilhelm Moberg, The Emigrants (St. Paul: Borealis Books, 1995), ix.
5 Magnus Nilsson,ʻThe Making of Swedish Working-Class Literature’ in J. Lennon and M. Nilsson eds., Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and International Perspectives (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2017), 103.
6 Vilhelm Moberg, Unto a Good Land (St. Paul: Borealis Books, 1995), 225.
7Unto a Good Land, 248. Kristina’s last words on her deathbed, “Our apples are ripe. I’m home…,” are triggered by the taste of an apple, the seeds of which came from her childhood home in Sweden. The Last Letter Home, 146.
8 Vilhelm Moberg, The Last Letter Home, 151.
9 Quoted in Roger McKnight, Introduction to The Last Letter Home, xxiii.
10 Vilhelm Moberg, The Last Letter Home, 106-7. In his address, “Why I wrote the novel about Swedish emigrants,” Moberg recalled being criticised for his sympathy for the Indians: “Several letter-writers complained about my description of the Indians in my novel and thought I had presented these people in a wrong way as too kind and good.” Published in The Swedish-American Historical Quarterly. Vol. 17, no. 2, 1966, 70.
11The Last Letter Home, 53-4.
12 Ibid., 54.
13 Ibid., 210.
14The Last Letter Home, 190-1.
15 Jens Liljestrand, Mannen i skogen, 392. My translation.