Strindberg and religion

Strindberg and religion




Was Strindberg religious? Yes and no and yes! That is, like practically all Swedish citizens at that time he was brought up in the Lutheran faith. The church and the state were not separated until the year 2000, we had our Church of Sweden, like England still has its CofE. Right up until the late 1950s all schoolchildren had a religious morning assembly and about six hours of religious instruction a week. That would include comparative religious studies as well, as you got older. The result was that you knew the stories from the Old Testament, you knew your catechism and the basics, at least, of the New Testament. That, in turn, meant that you could relate to the classics, you could spot the allusions to the Bible and you had a foundation on which to stand on when it came to education.

Many writers, including Strindberg rebelled against Christianity and the power of the Church at the end of the 19th century. Working class people often felt marginalised and discriminated against by the church.

Strindberg went through an atheistic phase in the eighties. It went hand in hand with anti-Establishment ideas and a radical outlook. This didn’t stop him from baptizing his children, however, although his keen criticism of the church was very apparent in his play The Father.
After two failed marriages he was living in Paris when, in the mid 1890s he went through a religious crisis, which he later called his Inferno, and after that he called himself a Christian again.

His second wife, Frida Uhl, had been a non-practising Catholic but her family were all devout Catholics and Strindberg was deeply influenced by them, even after the break-up from Frida.

‘I am not a Catholic,’ he wrote in his essay ‘Religion’, published in Stridsskrifter, ‘but after spending seven years in Catholic countries and having Catholic relations I discovered that the difference between the Catholic and the Protestant doctrine is non-existent, or simply superficial; and that the break that happened once (The Reformation) was simply political or it may have been about theological issues that don’t really adhere to religion. Hence my tolerance towards Catholicism, especially in Gustav Adolf (a History play).’

He blames Darwinism for a general feeling of hopelessness. He cites the preposterous unfair idea that the stronger should be eligible for supreme power merely because of his strength. He sees the evil of capitalism as a direct result of this teaching. ‘Everything that is contrary to charity, compassion, fairness are the consequences of Darwinism.’

He goes on to say that Darwinism is the philosophy of the upper classes, it is conservative, anti-people, the opposite of socialism.

Strindberg claimed that without religion there is no honour, no faith, no sacrifice. People can’t trust each other because they are without faith. That is the victory of science over compassion.

Strindberg was not a church-goer, at least not while he was living in Sweden, but he knew his Bible and he read it and quoted from it throughout his life. He preferred the stern God of the Old Testament to the meek Saviour of the New Testament, but his Chamber plays which were written towards the end of his life all have a Christian message.

Strindberg battled with his God, as with everything else, but after his Inferno period in Paris he announced that from 1896 he considered himself a Christian.


When he died he had the Bible on his bedside table and he had given instructions about his grave where he wanted a simple wooden cross raised, with the inscription: Ave crux, spes unica. Hail the cross, my only hope.

Strindberg, the Berliner

One of the most popular meeting  places in Berlin in the 1890s was a wine cellar called 'Turkes', better known as 'Zum Schwarzen Ferkel', a name that Strindberg invented in reference to the sign above the door. 'The Ferkel' functioned as a delicatessen and off licence, with a couple of rooms set aside for customers who wanted to drink on the premises. The landlord, Gustav Turke, was said to have kept 900 varieties of liquor in stock. Strindberg was a frequent visitor and quickly gained a reputation as a prodigious drinker. He would also entertain the company by playing the guitar and singing songs that he had composed himself.
The 'Ferkel's' popularity may have had something to do with the fact that Herr Turke offered his customers generous credit and would sometimes take a work of art in lieu of payment. He accepted one of Stridnberg's paintings and promptly displayed it on the wall of the bar for many years.
The bohemian set gathered at the 'Ferkel' was headed by the temperamental Polish writer and womanizer Stanislaw Przybyszewski and the German poet Richard Dehmel, known as the 'wild man'.
Other writers in the circle included Adolf Paul and Karl August Tavastjerna from Finland and Holger Drachmann from Denmark. It was here that Strindberg first met the Norwegian painters Edvard Munch and Christian Krogh. Munch was another  'wild man' and just before he met Strindberg he had had an exhibition in Kristiania (Oslo) that had been forced to close because his avant-garde paintings had so shocked the visitors. Berliners were similarly shocked when the exhibition opened in their city but at least the authorities were tolerant enough to keep it open.
Munch encouraged Strindberg to paint and  became an important influence in his life.
Both Krogh and Munch painted portraits of Strindberg during this period. Ibsen bought Krogh's painting at an exhibition in 1895. 'It is really a portrait of Strindberg,' he wrote to his wife, Suzannah, 'but Sigurd calls it 'The Revolution' and I call it 'Madness Breaking Out.'
When Strindberg died Munch gave his portrait, which he had never sold, to the
Swedish Mational Museum. 'To be honest,' he wrote to them at the time, 'it feels empty in the room where Strindberg has been hanging for twenty years. To me, the picture is the incarnation of those two remarkable years in Berlin.'

Translating the untranslatable

When it comes to translation it is not always words and phrases which cause the biggest problems, but a cultural concept. I have yet to see a satisfactory rendering of Midsummer Eve in an English production of Fröken Julie, for instance.

Still, it is quite clearly stated in the script how Strindberg intended the scene. The peasants enter the kitchen, sing an ambiguous - but not obscene - song, dance around and leave.

Clearly, this pagan festival has given rise to all kinds of sexual fantasies when English directors have staged the play. Why is that, I wonder? Where do the huge phallus symbols come from, where the simulated sex scenes in the kitchen? ‘Peasants shag like rabbits, don’t they’, seem to be the general assumption.

I have shown my students these particular scenes from various English TV productions and compared them with Alf Sjöberg’s film from the 1950s and the students are invariably shocked and annoyed at the misrepresentation of Strindberg and can’t understand why the directors have chosen this coarse interpretation.

But what do you do when you have to translate something quintessentially Swedish as Midsummer, Lucia celebrations - and Walpurgis night with its bonfires, singing and undergraduates’ white caps. And the yearning for the countryside or the sea from the month of May onwards is a fever with no recognizable equivalent in England.

When Strindberg refers to autumn already in August it is hard for most Europeans to understand why, since August often is the main summer holiday month south of Scandinavia. But keep in mind that Swedish children go back to school after the middle of August when daylight hours are shrinking fast and you realise that the arrival of the lamplighter at that time, as in Strindberg’s Thunder in the air (Oväder) really means that the first signs of autumn have appeared. All this is very difficult to put across to any audience south of the Baltic. August - autumn? August, the foremost holiday month?

Another concept which is practically untranslatable is ‘innanfönster’ which is a very important word in Strindberg’s The Father. Double glazing and secondary glazing conjure up quite different ideas. What Strindberg is referring to is the extra windows that you can hook onto the window frames on the inside and keep in place for the length of the winter months. They helped to keep the cold out and the heat in before the days of universal double glazing. Taking them away in the spring became a symbolic act of saying farewell to winter. You could then open the window again and let in the air, sounds and scents of spring. Because spring had, indeed, arrived.

When Bertha in The Father makes her strong and passionate statement about her father by saying that when he comes home it is like taking away the inner windows on a spring morning, it is a beautiful and moving declaration of love - but it is untranslatable. If we use words like double glazing or secondary glazing they would refer to a 1960s suburban middle-class home. And that misses the point completely. So, as a translator, you have to find another expression, another way of putting Strindberg’s message across. It is not always easy or possible. As George Barrow, the English 19th century linguist, put it:’Translation is at best an echo.’

Strindberg's revolutionary play

Mäster Olof

My first encounter with Strindberg on stage was at Gothenburg Civic Theatre in 1958. They were showing Mäster Olof - which is translated as Master Olof but I would prefer to call it Father Olof, since it is about a monk who breaks away from the Catholic church and follows in Luther’s footsteps.
It is a play which has been revised endlessly and Strindberg wrote three different versions of it. The prose version, which is perhaps considered the best, was finished in 1872. Two years later he wrote another version which is partly in verse, and in 1876 he finished the verse drama on the same character. It took nine years before the play was produced on stage in Sweden. The cast list is huge and I can understand why foreign companies shy away from a production for that reason, but it is fascinating play of ideas in Ibsen’s and Schiller’s vein, and it works on two levels. On the one hand it is a play about the priest Olof who studied under Martin Luther in Germany and who returned to Sweden in 1518 with revolutionary ideas about the church. He wanted to fight ‘the spiritual death and corruption in the Catholic church’. With the help of the king, Gustav Vasa, he brought about the Reformation in Sweden. At the time when Strindberg started work on this play there was another strong movement gathering momentum in Europe and, undoubtedly, Strindberg was referring to the rise of Socialism in Mäster Olof. Like Luther, Olof falls in love with a nun and marries her, thus breaking the law of celibacy. Olof’s wife, Kristina, is portrayed as an unusually gentle and yet strong woman. She stands by her husband, but at the same time, she points out the importance of appreciating flowers and birds. The lofty ideals must not eradicate the real values in life. She represents a kind of Francis of Assisi in her naivety and all-embracing love.

KRISTINA:
Are you too grand to look at a flower or listen to a bird? Olof, I put the flowers on your table for you to rest your eyes on , but you ask the maid to take them away because they give you a headache, you say. I wanted to break the silence when you were engrossed in your work so I offered you birdsong, but you call it shrieking. I asked you to come in for dinner a short while ago, but you didn’t have time. I wanted to talk to you, but you don’t have time. You despise this small reality and yet you have placed me in it. You don’t want to elevate me, but then spare me your contempt at least. I shall remove everything that might disturb your thoughts. I shall leave you in peace and keep myself and my rubbish away from you. (She throws the flowers out of the window, takes the birdcage and is about to leave the room)
OLOF:
Kristina, my child, forgive me! You don’t understand!

The play lasts for six hours if performed in its entirety. It took Dramaten another nine years before they put it on. They chose the verse play. In 1887 while the Strindbergs were living in southern Germany August asked his brother Axel to sell the original manuscript. It brought in a much needed 500 kronor and Strindberg wrote to his brother in a desperate but jocular tone:
‘Well, now I have sold everything that can be sold. The only thing remaining is my corpse (and above all the skull) which I donate to Medical Science.’
But soon after he sat down to write his most popular novel, The People of Hemsö, which became a huge success.

Strindberg and Music

Strindberg and Music

Strindberg came from a musical family. Two of his siblings. Axel and Anna, became professional musicians although his sister gave up her career when she married Hugo von Philp. Axel later set to music several of August’s poems and was the key player during the so-called Beethoven evenings towards the end of his life when a group of friends gathered in his apartment at Drottninggatan to play music and enjoy a late supper.

 Strindberg did not have any formal musical training, unlike the rest of his siblings, but he managed to teach himself to play several instruments:  piano, flute, mandolin, guitar, cornet.

During his many travels he would bring his guitar and sing at social gatherings.

While he was still living at home his favourite composers were Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart. Later on, while he was living in Berlin at the beginning of the 1890’s he also came to love Chopin and Schumann  who were introduced to him through the Polish writer and amateur musician Prsybyszewski. Schumann’s rousing piece, Aufschwung, became a favourite of his. 

During his more melancholy years in Paris leading up to his ‘Inferno crisis’ music became his greatest comfort and one of his friends has told us how Strindberg used to visit another Swedish expat, fru Sophie Kjellberg, who lived in Montparnasse. She would play Bach, Grieg and Sinding for him and often Strindberg would turn up before Sophie had cleared away the dishes after dinner. Strindberg was so keen to start the musical enjoyment that he would volunteer to dry the dishes to speed up proceedings. Algot Ruhe writes: ‘He sat on a wicker chair without a back rest in the middle of the floor and undertook his chosen task under bizarre monologues. When it was all done, fru Kjellberg went over to her pianino which almost occupied the whole of one of the small rooms. On the other side of the wall, behind the pianino, there was a small sofa and in the corner of that sofa Strindberg would sit for hours, alone in the dark, listening to the music.’

As soon as he had put down roots in Stockholm again in 1899 Strindberg hired a piano and started his ‘Beethoven evenings’ which continued until a few months before his death in 1912.

Even though his brother Axel and his new friend Tor Aulin, the composer, tried to introduce him to different composers Strindberg was not very keen on Brahms and he hated Wagner whom he called ‘the musical representative of Evil’.  The music should be emotional, passionate, stirring. Purely romantic music did not cut any ice with Strindberg.

Music plays an important role in Strindberg’s later dramatic works. In fact, The Chamber Plays have borrowed their title and format from chamber music. It is significant that all his wives and his last love, Fanny Falkner, were very good pianists. After the divorce from Harriet he asked his sister, Anna, to come and play for him. Music had a soothing and healing effect on Strindberg. It was almost a religious feeling. When Tor Aulin and Axel three months before Strindberg’s death  played The Eroica and Schumann’s third symphony for him, Strindberg commented on that evening in a birthday card to Aulin  with immense gratitude:  ‘From Saul to David’.

Strindberg and others: Strindberg raped

Strindberg and others: Strindberg raped: Mies Julie I have just been to see the much praised South African production of Mies Julie, set in a desolate farmland district in Sou...

Strindberg raped

Mies Julie

I have just been to see the much praised South African production of Mies Julie, set in a desolate farmland district in South Africa with a black John and a white Julie. Christine is John’s mother in this production and there is also an old woman with her face painted white, walking around and making some exotic Xhosa sounds with an instrument similar to a mouth organ. She represents ‘Ancestor’.

The bare stage, apart from a rather tatty kitchen table and chairs, a bucket and a whole row of dirty wellies lined up at the back, invoked an unglamorous hard-working farm.

Hilda Cronje, who plays Julie, circles around John and Christine, at a loss what to do, angry, dishevelled even from the beginning of the play and gives the impression of a cat on heat.

The plot has been adapted to suit South African circumstances and the resentment between John and Julie  works very well, but the director - who also calls herself the writer of this piece - has done away with all subtleties, which means that the flirtatious scenes at the beginning of the play are gone and the eroticism has been replaced by brute force. The simulated rape scene, which took place in front of the audience, was almost unbearable to watch. After that drawn-out violent scene Julie puts her hand on her crutch and produces a bloody hand which is supposed to indicate that she was a virgin. She spits in John’s face, he handles her physically like a slave and she brandishes a sickle which she finally uses in order to miscarry.

I walked away thinking Strindberg had been raped as well. Everything except the violence had been peeled away and what was left was a brutal, unsubtle, but maybe truthful picture of South Africa during and after Apartheid. I doubt that Strindberg would have approved, though, but, on the other hand, it is remarkable that this play still manages to engage and shock. I think where it failed, as far as I am concerned, is that Julie was never the lady in this production. She looked like a wayward child, picked up from the gutter. The problem with that is that she had nowhere to go. There was no real fall. The count was never a threat either. His riding boots with spurs had been abandoned and John was polishing some sturdy shoes instead. No bell announced the count’s arrival at the end and that, in turn, meant that there was no urgency to get away or commit suicide. Here, Julie produced a bucket full of  ‘blood’ when she stuck her sickle up her vagina. To underline the message Christine then turns up with a bucket of blood as well which she pours into the drain. Julie’s dog had also miscarried.

The production was very bleak, and black and white in more than one sense.