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the ethics of dag hammarskjöld
to his understanding, only be met through self-denial and a
concomitant resistance towards all temptations to choose the
easier way out. So, subjected to the most dramatic and demanding
trial in all his years of service to the United Nations,
he simply had no choice but to – in his own words – ‘stay on’
and ‘resist’. Being aware of the events that followed this acute
controversy in the General Assembly we might add: stay on
and resist until the bitter end.
We have arrived at the point where the most delicate of all
questions arising from the study of Dag Hammarskjöld’s life
and work has to be answered: to what extent did he acquire
his unique position in the collective memory of the organisation
he served due to the tragic end of his service in the air
crash in Ndola, at the very peak of the Congo crisis, on the
18 September 1961? Undoubtedly the tragic end was felt as a
significant exclamation mark after a career which was in itself
remarkable. But the enigmatic fascination with the fate and
the personality of Dag Hammarskjöld would probably – or
almost certainly – have faded away if it had not been for the
publication of his posthumous papers, which Gustaf Aulén
aptly called the White Paper on his unfinished dialogue with
God. No other prominent leader or civil servant in the 20th
century, and most certainly no other Secretary-General of
the United Nations, has left behind texts comparable to Vägmärken,
or Markings (as Falkman rightly suggests, ‘Waymarks’
would have been a more precise translation, as the word has
a hidden reference to Jeremiah 31, verse 21:
Set thee up waymarks, make thee high heaps; set thine heart
toward the highway, even the way which thou wendest.
And probably no other literary work has provoked a comparable
amount of confusion and misunderstanding among its readers.
Confronted with the astonishing fact that the always immaculately
dressed diplomat, to his fingertips correct in his public
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