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the ethics of dag hammarskjöld appearance and with the reputation of having an immense and quite extraordinary working capacity, enabling him during periods of crisis management to work up to 20 hours a day for weeks – that this most public person in the whole world, alongside this extremely demanding life had lived a secret life of his own, with God as his only counterpart and dialogue partner, and with his diary as the only witness to what he himself called ‘a sort of white book concerning my negotiations with myself – and with God’ , many critics simply gave up the attempt to find a way out of their state of shock. To many of Dag Hammarskjöld’s contemporaries, especially to those who had their intellectual roots in the same corner of Europe where Hammarskjöld had spent all the formative years of his life, the publication of Vägmärken was an event almost as shaking as a medium-sized earthquake. They simply refused to accept what their eyes read, and ran away through the first and best emergency exit available. Some, felt the author of Vägmärken must have suffered from a serious mental disorder – suggestions covered a wide field of psychiatric diagnoses from an extreme kind of narcissistic egocentricity via general megalomania to the more specific type: a fully-fledged Messiah-complex. Some critics even went so far as to suggest that his universe of insane religious ideas had completely captured Hammarskjöld and, towards the end of his life, had made him so obsessed with the idea of his personal martyrdom that he had no choice but to plan for it and to stage it in a suitable way, sensational enough to serve the purpose. The air crash in the jungle on 18 September 1961, where altogether 15 lives were lost, would according to this interpretation have been the inevitable outcome of the Secretary-General’s obsession with his own messianic role. Extreme interpretations like these are obviously – quite literally – nonsense. In a note dated 1951, which may have escaped the attention of many of his critics, the author of Markings makes a most appropriate comment: ‘My friend, 24
the ethics of dag hammarskjöld the Popular Psychologist, is certain in his diagnoses. And has understood nothing, nothing.’ (Markings, p. 73). It remains important, however, to find an answer to the question of why so many readers were led astray by Dag Hammarskjöld’s ‘white book’. Admittedly the literary form may represent a challenge: philosophical and theological reflections, frequently expressed in a condensed, aphoristic form which makes them difficult to understand. The poems, a substantial number of them in the Japanese haiku form, might be even more inaccessible. And then the bewildering ‘You’, over and over again explicitly addressed as an everyday dialogue partner and throughout implicitly present in the mind of the lonesome author. Strange and confusing to a modern reader the numerous references may be – references to the classical, medieval tradition of Christian mysticism, represented by authors like Meister Eckhart, St John of the Cross and Johann Tauler, and, during the later part of Hammarskjöld’s years as Secretary-General of the United Nations, more and more frequently to the Bible, with a special preference for the Book of Psalms, usually quoted from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. In 2005 Mads Svegfors, in his sober and very readable biography, presented Dag Hammarskjöld as the first modern Swede (Dag Hammarskjöld. Den første moderne svensken). To most of his contemporary readers the author of Vägmärken was felt to be anything but modern. To them Hammarskjöld’s white book belonged, rather, to the kind of literature that Friedrich Nietzsche called Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (views out of tune with the times). The stumbling block, which many contemporary readers were not able to overcome, was obviously the contrast with, and tremendous distance from, all their notions of modernity and the modern world. They were quite simply unable to understand how a top diplomat and cosmopolitan political leader, with the reputation of being an outstanding intellectual, with a scholarly training 25
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