No abstract

”How about a drink together, before the ship sinks?” Fact and Fiction in Erik Pallin’s Kaparkaptenen på Emden The First World War gave rise to a surge of war novels, many of which were aimed at a young audience. These novels can be characterized as adventure stories with boys as their main target group. Swedish author Erik Pallin’s Kaparkaptenen på Emden: Romantiserad skildring från det stora världskriget 1914 (The Privateer Captain of Emden: Romanticized Depiction from the Great World War in 1914) was published in December 1914. It is not only one of the first Swedish youth novels about the war, but also one of the most intriguing as the tension between reality and fiction is particularly strong in Pallin’s novel. It tells the story of the German cruiser Emden whose raids in the Indian Ocean attracted much attention from journalists and authors. The article investigates how Pallin depicted the war for his young readers, focusing on the relationship between fact and fiction. The analysis shows that Pallin, much like the journalists reporting on Emden, transforms Emden’s warfare into heroic adventure tales and portrays Emden’s captain as a charismatic hero who symbolizes the male ideal of the time. The analysis concludes that Kaparkaptenen på Emden to some extent can be considered a “newsreel novel” (Paris), but that Pallin also romanticizes Emden’s warfare to appeal to his young readers. Rather than depicting the atrocities of real-life war, Pallin presents the war as an adventure with idyllic, romantic, and comical elements. The novel’s happy ending, with the war coming to an end, suggests that Pallin wished to take a stance against the war, but it can also be read as a strategy used to appeal to his young audience by offering them a story of hope.

No abstract

»All Pedagogical Art is Bad Art – and All Good Art is Pedagogical.« Lennart Hellsing and Swedish School Broadcasting Lennart Hellsing has often been regarded as one of the modernists of Swedish children’s literature. He distanced himself from art that primarily was didactic: »All pedagogical art is bad art – and all good art is pedagogical,« as he once declared in a famous statement. All the same he made a lot of pedagogical works of art himself: in the 1950s he wrote eleven programs for the Swedish School Broadcasting. This article tries to explain how this was possible – and it will also discuss the result: can his pedagogical programs really be regarded as »bad art« in Hellsing’s meaning of the word? One of his programs, We are building a house, a »musical fairy tale« from 1953, written in cooperation with the composer Lille Bror Söderlundh, is chosen as an example. This program does not only teach the pupils in Swedish schools how to build a house, it also mirrors (and supports) the modernization of Swedish society. One of its intertexts appears to be a song play by Paul Hindemith, one of the most famous composers of the German »neue Sachlichkeit« in the 1920s. However, Hellsing did not only want to teach, it is obvious that he also tried to create what he called »good art,« art that stimulated children’s imagination and made them feel happy. His program is full of (in some cases very modernistic) aesthetic devices, activating the listening children at the same time giving them aesthetic experiences. The reports from the schools also show that the pupils were fascinated by the program: it made them happy and full of joy – just as Hellsing thought »good art« should work. Hellsing should therefore perhaps revise his aphorism; We are building a house seems to show that also pedagogical art can be good art – and that it is possible to combine learning with pleasure.

No abstract