4.0
War Diaries, 1939–1945
ByPublisher Description
Before she became internationally known for her
books, Astrid Lindgren was an aspiring author living in Stockholm with her family at the outbreak of the Second World War. The diaries she kept throughout the hostilities offer her unique perspective—as a civilian, a mother, and an aspiring writer—on the devastating conflict.
Lindgren emerges as a morally courageous critic of violence and war, as well as a deeply sensitive and keen observer of world affairs. We hear her thoughts about rationing, blackouts, the Soviet invasion of Finland, and the nature of evil, as well as of her personal heartbreaks, financial struggles, and trials as a mother and writer.
Posthumously published in Sweden to great international acclaim, these diaries were called in the Swedish press an "unparalleled war narrative," "unprecedented." and a "shocking history lesson." Illustrated with family photographs, newspaper clippings, and facsimile pages, Lindgren's diaries provide an intensely personal and vivid account of Europe during the war.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesWar Diaries, 1939–1945 Reviews
4.0
“Seems like currently we are still in 1939.
I have a lot to say and they I don't know to put in the words, so I just leave a few quotes from the book here.
Finland has appealed to the League of Nations but Molotov refuses to take part in any sort of conference. Russia isn’t at war with Finland, the dear little man insists, they’re simply liberating the Finnish people, who are being pig-headed and refusing to let themselves be liberated.
- 85 years later and Russia still the same.
It wasn’t easy to experience the beginning of a new year. The future looks so hopeless, so menacing. Nobody can feel glad.
There’s something so odd about the spring this year: one can’t help being cheered up by it but at the same time it feels even more unbearable to think of people killing each other with the sun shining and the flowers budding.
Germany is like some malevolent monster that emerges from its cave at regular intervals to pounce on a fresh victim. There has to be something wrong with a people that finds itself pitted against the rest of humanity every 20 years or so.
- I know one other country it also applies to.
I’ve been working my way through some general history here in Furusund and it makes for dreadfully depressing reading – war and war and war and suffering for humanity. And they never learn but just carry on drenching the planet in blood, sweat and tears.
Looking back over the war, we can detect different phases in people’s way of reacting: after the dreadful despair one felt at the very beginning there was a long spell of relative indifference, only interrupted by violent shocks like the occupation of Norway, the defeat of France etc. And now the real war-weariness is setting in: people are so tired of the war that they simply don’t know what to do, it’s all so depressing.
Peace, when it comes, might not be anything to rejoice about but just the opposite. By then, many of these poor little countries will have had to give up their freedom to live in eternal slavery.”
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