Interlude: Winter in Uppsala, Sweden

Time, Place

Some 40 miles north of Stockholm, Uppsala is the ancient university town, and residence of generations of Swedish rulers, where Dag Hammarskjöld was raised and educated. A place of great charm with a jewel-like university center, this year it is having a rough, old-fashioned winter. The charm is somewhere under the snow, more indoors than out. Hammarskjöld truly belonged to Uppsala; he spoke of it with warmth and pride. ‘At their best,’ he once said, ‘the representatives of this legacy show the quiet self-assurance of people firmly rooted in their own world, but they are, at the same time and for that very reason, able to accept and develop a true world citizenship’ (PP III, On the Uppsala Tradition). These few words capture his insight into our current, simmering global/local dilemma. What is the place of original identity in a globalized world? He makes it sound easy—and it isn’t that difficult—to resolve.

This week’s edition is an interlude. The photos are all fresh as a daisy: late January in Uppsala.

Proof positive concerning winter 2010 in Uppsala.





The Gustavianum, Uppsala University’s oldest building, houses in its wooden superstructure one of Europe’s first anatomical theaters. The sphere with its brilliant band of numbers is a sun dial. Two branches of science—medicine and cosmology—face the ancient cathedral in the compact university center.



A late 13th-century foundation, rebuilt many times, Uppsala’s cathedral is the seat of the Church of Sweden and the site of Dag Hammarskjöld’s state funeral in September 1961. Organ concerts here shake both the cathedral and the listener.



The floor of a peace chapel in the cathedral recalls Hammarskjöld’s words in Markings: ‘Not I, but God in me.’ DH in turn is echoing a line in St. Paul.



Dag Hammarskjöld’s grave lies beneath the snow in this image of the family burial ground in Uppsala’s old cemetery. As in all proper cemeteries, people walk their dogs, jog, and in all ways live in this one, even in the depths of winter. Swedish burial custom often refers back to the Norse past, to endless time and unbroken connection. Hence the massive, nearly uncarved block, like an ancient stele, bearing the name of Hammarskjöld’s father. A young woman walking her dog noticed me trail-blazing through a foot of snow to reach this gravesite. ‘That’s the one,’ she said.



The sun low in the south at 3 PM in Uppsala. A phenomenon: the sun’s disc, partially visible between two strips of cloud, throws a vertical streak into the sky above. Recalling Hammarskjöld’s words: ‘Blood, grime, sweat, earth—where are these in the world you desire? Everywhere—the ground from which the flame ascends straight upwards’ (Markings, 1954, 99).

◊ ◊ ◊

Objective, impartial—neutral? (2)

Time, Place

We began to engage in last week’s edition with a spectrum of values—objectivity, impartiality, neutrality—that mattered enormously to Dag Hammarskjöld as secretary-general, and always matter in political processes where force and influence compete with facts. This week’s edition looks further into Hammarskjöld’s understanding of these terms and their place in politics and diplomacy. ‘The Secretary-General,’ he said in 1954, ‘must not only be impartial, he must appear to be impartial. That means that situations may develop in which he has to move with considerable caution.’ At that time, many such situations lay ahead.

A note to friends of this site: owing to travel, the next edition will appear in early February.

Dag Hammarskjöld returned often to this topic. It was a responsibility of his office to keep key values of the United Nations in front of the public, but he doesn’t seem to have been simply meeting a responsibility: he was deeply interested and always learning more. Here are several of his returns:

Is it not the duty of the Secretary-General, to all the extent that he can, and it is difficult sometimes, to be objective—not impartial, for that is a kind of rather sterile and neutral word. And being objective means necessarily to try and explain the viewpoints as well as one can and as deeply as you can understand them, and to explain them in all directions.
(PP II, 5 May 1955, 483)

We are coming very quickly to, so to say, the free-lance part of the press conference. That is all right. For my own part, I think that neutrality may be moral, that neutrality may be immoral, that lack of neutrality may be moral, that lack of neutrality may be immoral—it all depends on factors which are not strictly linked to the definition.
(PP III, 22 June 1956, 170)

At a press conference this morning I was asked—by the way, by a very famous journalist—a question which, frankly, was outside the framework of a press conference. He asked me what we would do about the underlying differences in the hearts and in the souls of men. He said, ‘It is all right what you are doing in the political field, but what does it matter if back of it all there is deterioration of this type?’ My reply was the only possible one. It was that I felt that he should, as far as the Secretary-General was concerned, make a distinction between the officer of the Organization and the man. The officer of the Organization should not and could not be a preacher of moralism. The man had the duty of every man to fight against those very tendencies the journalist had in mind, but in doing so, he did it as a man and not as a functionary of the Organization.
(PP III, 19 June 1957, 622)

Whether a certain action is justified as self-defense or not is something which under United Nations legislation can only be decided by the Security Council. I may have my views on the concrete cases, but they would not be binding on anybody. They would just be my private views, and from that point of view they may be of interest but not of significance.
(PP III, 7 June 1956, 133)

In his periodic, often harsh encounters with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, Hammarskjöld once managed to use a witty toast to make the point that as secretary-general he served the United Nations and its member nations without bias toward one or another. The incident is well told by Joseph Lash, a UN journalist and Hammarskjöld’s first biographer:

With characteristic agility, Hammarskjold lifted his glass. He drew a comparison with Soviet Russia’s ‘famous Sputnik,’ observing: ‘True, I was launched in Sweden, but once in orbit I do not come close to any country.’
(Lash, 167)

◊ ◊ ◊