Pippi Longstocking would not have existed without the Second World War. This is one of the assertions made in Wilfried Hauke’s remarkable new feature documentary, A World Gone Mad, that received its world premiere in Lübeck this week.
The film, sold by Berlin-based Rise and Shine World Sales, tells the story behind the wartime diaries of world-famous author Astrid Lindgren, the creator of Pippi Longstocking. As we discover, the much-loved fictional character with the freckles, dimples and red pigtails was conceived by Lindgren at a time of stress and angst in her life.
Lindgren dreamt up Pippi partly to help her daughter deal with illness when she was off school during WWII. They may have been living in “neutral” Sweden but the author was fully aware of what was happening in Germany.
The author was a far more political figure than her fans realised. She understood absolutely how the Nazi regime was terrorising Europe.
“Pippi is a child of the war who came to the Lindgren family during this time – and she never moved out,” the director notes of how Lindgren’s life came to be defined by her most famous fictional creation. “Let me say in another, metaphorical way, this little Pippi becomes a star after the Second World War in Sweden and Germany because the readers could feel there is a humanistic, moral power integrated in this figure of Pippi which is, of course, against the ugly power of dictators and their authoritarianism.”
Three generations of the Lindgren family are involved in the documentary. The daughter Karin, now in her 90s, features, as do her children and grandchildren.
“To make a documentary is always a dynamic process. There are a lot of changes along the way,” Hauke observes. At the outset, he didn’t even consider the possibility that all these family members would agree to take part in his film. However, after long and open discussions with the author’s descendants, Hauke convinced them that the film would add a new dimension to fans’ understanding of Lindgren. They would realise that she wasn’t just a brilliant writer of books for kids.
“She also was, from the beginning, a very tough, analytical, political, deep thinking human being.”
The diaries consist of seventeen small handwritten schoolbooks. These were found in the Stockholm apartment where Lindgren lived throughout much of her adult life – and where she wrote the Pippi novels. In these private notebooks, Lindgren was able to jot down her innermost thoughts, sorrows and yearnings.
“Then, afterwards, she began to write children’s novels, let’s say as a metaphor for the transformation of her political thinking – without putting all the political things in her children’s books, of course.”
The Lindgren family “step by step” gave Hauke the chance to make a film about the wartime diaries. “They gave me the rights for the war diaries – but only the war diaries.”
For Hauke, the challenge was how to come up with a structure for a feature. The film has three key components – the material with the family including the author’s daughter Karin, now 91, discussing Lindgren; the often-harrowing wartime archive footage; and the dramatic reconstruction in which the brilliant Swedish actress Sofia Pekkari plays the author.
“After they [the family] agreed they would have these conversations about the war diaries in front the camera, I said to them ‘I need an actress.’”
The family agreed to this but made it clear to Hauke that he had to stick to the “raw text” of the diary, and that they didn’t want him to add any of his own speculations about what Lindgren might have been feeling.
Hauke chose Pekkari after an extensive audition process in Stockholm, To his delight, the family agreed she was the best choice. It was a challenging assignment. She is the narrator of the documentary. At times, she is required to become very emotional. The diaries were written during a period when Lindgren’s marriage was breaking up. She was horrified by what she was learning about the war and the Holocaust. However, at times, as she writes about the political situation, she is also detached and incisively analytical.
Editing was a Herculean challenge. “It was not so easy,” the director says with evident understatement. In effect, he was making both a documentary and a dramatic movie.
Hauke pays tribute to his collaborators, including Swedish filmmaker Magnus Gertten, who watched the material and gave him constructive feedback.
All the archival material is intended to reflect events that Lindgren had read about or had seen pictures of. She obviously wasn’t at the Battle of Stalingrad and hadn’t visited Auschwitz, but she was fully aware of the fighting, deaths and wartime atrocities at the time she was writing the diaries. It was also in 1944, just as she was starting to work on the first Pippi novel, that Lindgren’s husband told her he had another woman and wanted to leave.
At times, the tone of The World Gone Mad grows very dark. However, Hauke also shows summer in the Stockholm Archipelago, where everyone is relaxed and happy. “For Astrid, there was rain, ugly weather and an ugly atmosphere, but she wanted to have good times too…”
The world premiere screening sold out within 15 minutes of the tickets going on sale – clear evidence of Lindgren’s enduring appeal. The film is expected to screen at “some really big festivals” in Scandinavia, and TV buyers are already swarming around the film. Hauke has German distribution already in place, through Berlin-based Farbfilm, planned for January next year.
The director predicts that the interest in the film will grow and grow because “its relevance for our life today is so amazing…We are watching the wars around us, and authoritarians like Putin and Trump.”
Hauke is drawn back to his core premise, that Pippi was a child of war, even 80 years ago. “She was born in 1941 when Astrid began to tell her little daughter, Karin, about this red-haired, very strong child – and she started to write the first book in 1944…and she did it alongside writing her war diary. For me, it is absolutely clear that if we had not had this terrible war…the creation of Pippi never would have happened.”
A World Gone Mad was made through IDA Film & TV Produktion with co-producers Auto Images and Neue Lloyd Filmdistribution, and with support from nordmedia – Film- und Mediengesellschaft Niedersachsen/Bremen, Deutscher Filmförderfonds, Creative Europe Media, MOIN Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein, Film i Skåne NDR / ARTE, SVT, and NRK.
