Читать книгу Character is Destiny - Pehr Gyllenhammar - Страница 11

Heritage (n): c. 1200, “that which may be inherited,” from Old French iritage, eritage, heritage “heir; inheritance, ancestral estate, heirloom,” from heriter “inherit,” from Late Latin hereditare, ultimately from Latin heres (genitive heredis) “heir” (see heredity). Meaning “condition or state transmitted from ancestors” is from 1620s.

—Oxford English Dictionary

On a brisk day in October in the year 1658, a fleet of forty-five Swedish warships sailed south from Stockholm toward the narrow Oresund Sound on Denmark’s northern coast. Aboard one of the ships was a middle-aged peasant farmer named Mans Andersson—a man I know virtually nothing about other than the fact that he left his home in Smaland to fight the Danish on behalf of the Swedish crown, and that he would become the first of my ancestors to have the Gyllenhammar name joined to his own.

Sweden’s national registry and genealogical records are among the most comprehensive of any nation, and like many old families, the long line of my Gyllenhammar ancestors is well documented. Occasionally I am asked if I feel a sense of identification or commonality with these earlier generations. My first inclination is to dismiss this kind of personal identification with one’s ancestors as a flight of fancy. Nonetheless, it is impressive to contemplate the collective scope of the Gyllenhammars’ work and accomplishments. One common thread in the family is extensive military service, and other Gyllenhammar vocations over many generations include tanner, legislator, farmer, hunting master, carpenter, police inspector, painter/sculptor, pastry chef, railway engineer, pharmacist, dentist, and composer. This speaks to a broad array of sensibilities from the artistic and intellectual to the athletic and mechanical. It’s now generally accepted that there is a genetic factor at play in determining whether one will excel at music or math, or whether one will be drawn to mechanical disciplines or agriculture. According to some studies, there is even a link between genes and the tolerance (or lack thereof) of dishonesty. So, I suppose I could say that I identify with my ancestors indirectly, through the catholic scope of their qualities, and for the integrity implicit in their inclination toward service of their country.

As a child, I was aware—through various anecdotes and family lore recounted by my parents—of having come from a definitive place, and of roots that were clearly identified in well-documented family trees. My mother was Jewish, the child of Russian-born Mathias Kaplan and Sara Friedman Kaplan, who emigrated to Sweden from Frankfurt. Most of my maternal grandmother’s relatives remained in Germany, where it is believed they were virtually eradicated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. I was very aware of and influenced by all three of those cultural distinctions in my household—the Swedish, Anglo-Scottish, and Jewish. My mother’s sister Irma had traveled to Berlin in 1933 and during her visit there she understood what the future in Hitler’s Germany held for Jews. I have no memories of my Aunt Irma talking to my parents about the signs of impending catastrophe that were plain for anyone to see in Berlin, but I do know that both of my parents were deeply affected by and fearful of what Irma told them.

I don’t recall my mother often speaking of her lost family in later years after the war, but the importance of keeping their memories alive was understood. If we did not remember, who would? Many years later when I was an adult, I wrote to the German Federal Archives (or Bundesarchiv) seeking information about my mother’s family. In due time I received a reply in the form of a list. There were my mother’s family’s names, one after the other, each name followed by categorized listings for “Deportation,” “Date of Death,” and “Place of Death.” From that document, I learned that almost all of them lost their lives in one of three concentration camps: Theresienstadt, Dachau, and Auschwitz. What was accomplished by my obtaining this chilling and meticulously recorded postmortem? The finality and validity of those names, those details cataloged with such clinical precision. To have that small reckoning, to see each name, each year, each place. So that they are not forgotten.

On my father’s side, several branches of our family originated in Scotland, including the Setons and the Erskines. They were an esteemed set. The Highland Seton Clan boasted a royal connection by virtue of Alexander, Lord Seton, who married the sister of King Robert the Bruce. The Gyllenhammars are also kin to the Bruce-allied Clan Erskine, whose noble origins dated back to the thirteenth century, and whose fortunes failed in the eighteenth century with the fallout caused by John Erskine’s participation in the Jacobite uprising. One of the disgraced Erskines was sent to Gothenburg to learn a trade, and he settled there for a number of years. He seems to have found Gothenburg dull enough to merit his founding a private billiards club there, and the club has withstood the test of time. Two hundred fifty years later, it is still possible to shoot pool in the Royal Bachelor’s Club or to enjoy a drink in the Large Club Room where Erskine’s portrait hangs over the fireplace.

George Seton found his way from Scotland to Sweden as well, settling near Stockholm in the eighteenth century. Seton apparently wished to live like a king, as he bought the royal Ekolsund Castle from King Gustav III in 1785, and from that time forward the castle was occupied by Setons for the next 125 years. In hindsight it is interesting that so many of our Scottish ancestors lived so nearby in Sweden. But it is our direct line of descent from the old Swedish Gyllenhammar line—and its origins in war, patriotic service, and monarchical recognition—that remains the best documented and known to me.

Our ancestral family patriarch Mans Andersson was born in the early seventeenth century at a time when Sweden was reaching the apex of an unprecedented era of political and military power. This time period is often referred to as the stormaktstid, a Swedish word that translates as the “age of great power.” Young King Gustav II Adolph, enthroned in 1611 when he was just fifteen years old, was an outspoken Protestant with a passion for education and a military prowess that would be viewed historically as a form of genius. The Golden King (as he was called) had no personal or political motivation to take up the gauntlet of the Thirty Years’ War—a series of regional conflicts in which virtually every major power in Europe had a stake. But the conflicts pitted Catholics against Protestants, and the Golden King was deeply concerned about the fate of the Protestant population in present-day Germany, who faced possible eradication without the intervention of a powerful ally.

Sweden’s empire at the time was comprised of a large stretch of coastland forming a horseshoe around the Baltic Sea, and included present-day Finland, parts of Denmark and Norway, and northern Germany, making Sweden the preeminent power in Europe. King Gustav had nothing to gain by lending the power of a Swedish alliance to the German Protestants, and no motivation to do so other than the agitation of his own conscience. Sweden’s Lutheran church was under no threat. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 had established the principle cuius regio, eius religio—whose realm, his religion. Quite simply, a prevailing ruler would dictate the religion over the dominion in his control. Catholic ruler, Catholic state. Protestant ruler, Lutheran state. But it applied only to Lutheran Protestantism. The Calvinists of the Habsburg-ruled Kingdom of Bohemia were unprotected by this realm-religion principle.

Upholding his fabled moral code, the Golden King chose in 1632 to put his life at risk and personally led an army to Bohemia to fight on behalf of the Protestants. The well-beloved King Gustav and his forces prevailed, and he won the battle, but at the cost of his own life—making it the ultimate Pyrrhic victory. The Thirty Years’ War came to a close fifteen years later, and the remaining hostilities that would ebb and flow for the latter half of the century in northern Europe were largely a prolonged wrangle over territory.

The regional tug-of-war between Denmark and Sweden dates back to the fourteenth century, when the Kalmar Union bound Sweden to both Norway and the dominant nation of Denmark. In 1523, the self-declared King Gustav declared Sweden’s independence and severed its ties with the Holy Roman Empire, and by extension with Catholicism. The remaining Danish southern provinces of the Scandinavian peninsula were ceded to Sweden in 1658, as part of a territorial acquisition dictated by the Treaty of Roskilde. For peasants like Mans Andersson, who were the latest in a long line of ancestors living and farming in or near the Scania region, it is likely that their sense of loyalty to Denmark-Norway was not necessarily so quickly forgotten, and that some continued to consider themselves more Danish than Swedish. Just five months before Mans Andersson and his son Jonas answered the call to join the Swedish fleet in the Battle of Oresund, the inhabitants of Bornholm, a small island some eighty miles west of the Danish Coast, successfully revolted against the Swedish Crown, returning the territory to Danish rule. Considering these recent events, it is easier to understand why the willingness of men like Mans and Jonas Andersson to join the Swedish naval fight at Oresund engendered real gratitude from the Crown.

The saltwater Strait of Oresund separates Sweden from Denmark and provides a crucial connective passage between the Baltic Sea to the Kattegat Strait and the Atlantic Ocean. This maritime Atlantic-Baltic conduit is the sine qua non of strategic positions in the Baltic regions and was (and today still is) one of the most important shipping lanes in the world, heavily trafficked with vessels laden with grain, iron, copper, timber, tar, hemp, and furs. From any standpoint—military, economic, or political—unhindered access to the Oresund was imperative. Any force that obtained sole control of the strait effectively wielded the ultimate power and authority in all regional matters of trade and travel. It was therefore in the interest of every prevailing European power to prevent any single nation-state from ever controlling both the north and south coasts of the Oresund again. If each coast were controlled by a different nation-state, it lessened the chances that the passage would be politically leveraged or weaponized. The Treaty of Roskilde transferred ownership of the southern Scandinavian peninsula from Denmark to Sweden. The local resident may have been unhappy about their sudden and compulsory allegiance to the Swedish Crown, but the powers of continental Europe would have found the prospect of a Swedish Scania more palatable and less threatening that that of a Danish Scania.

So the tangled web of centuries of shifting alliances and hostilities continued to play themselves out between Sweden and Denmark, and in the fall of 1658 the subject of dispute was control of the Strait of Oresund. Under the command of Lord High Admiral Carl Gustaf Wrangel, the Swedish fleet’s mission was simple—support their army’s siege of Copenhagen by blocking Denmark’s access to naval resupply and trade vessels. Denmark’s occasional ally, the Dutch United Provinces, sent a squadron of their own to engage the Swedish ships. Denmark badly needed this assistance. The Dutch ships were in a position to take advantage of strong northern winds, but those same winds effectively prohibited Denmark’s seven warships from leaving their Copenhagen port, leaving the Swedes and the Dutch to duke it out alone.

The Dutch painter Willem van de Velde witnessed the ensuing clash and documented what he saw in his painting The Battle of the Sound. I know nothing of the details of Mans Andersson’s onboard role, nor do I know how he met his death. But van de Velde’s painting gives a very vivid sense of what the battle was like. In the monochrome rendering, a sixty-gun Swedish warship is in the foreground firing upon a Dutch vessel, identified as the Dutch commander’s warship Eendracht. Off its starboard side, a smaller ship is sinking; tiny figures are visible as they leap into the water and wave to an overcrowded lifeboat. Tall-masted ships fill the field of view in every direction, the horizon papered with overlapping sails as thick columns of smoke from firing cannons and burning boats rise into the sky. In the distance, the rounded turrets of Kronborg Castle are visible on the Danish coast. The scene looks chaotic and loud, and the violence occurring in close quarters—to the men on board one ship firing on another, the destruction and carnage would be immediately audible and visible on a very human level.

The powerful currents surging through the sound severely limited the ships’ maneuverability, and the fighting was fierce and at very close range. Four Swedish ships were captured, and the Dutch successfully drove the remainder of the fleet from the sound. Of Sweden’s 6,000 men, over 400 were dead, 650 wounded, and hundreds captured. Among the Swedish casualties was Mans Andersson, officially listed as a captain from the province of Smaland’s Jonkoping regiment, along with one of his sons. A second son, Jonas, survived the battle, and returned home to his family with the heavy heart of one who has paid the price of warfare with his dearest blood, but who has also gained something highly prized by his kinsmen—honor.

Like most residents in southern Sweden’s Smaland, Andersson’s family were peasant farmers who settled on the floodplains of fertile soil and arable land when the Scandinavian glacier retreated to the north circa 11,000 BC. The earliest settlers were hunters and fishers who soon evolved to cultivate farming skills and animal husbandry. By the sixteenth century Sweden had been a primarily agricultural region for centuries, and the Andersson family would have been accustomed to the area’s periodic crop failures and long harsh winters. Life for landed peasant families like the Anderssons was physically challenging, particularly in the grain-harvesting months of August and September when families could expect to work twenty-hour days. In the community of village and extended families, the Andersson family would have made the winter hours more passable by communal meals, fireside conversation, and the consumption of aquavit—homemade grain or potato-based alcohol vilified by one Swedish king as the ruination of the Swedish people. Seventeenth-century Smaland is also notable as the region in which Swedish witch mania first erupted—from 1668 to 1676—fifteen years before the infamous Salem witch trials in America’s Massachusetts.

In Scanian peasant culture of that time, personal honor was valued above all other qualities, and loss of one’s honorable reputation could result in ostracization from community—a punishment that was nothing less than the severance of a lifeline. In the sixteenth century, the Swedish King Gustav Vasa had ended compulsory military conscription, so that “the native peasantry may sit at home, tend their fields and meadows, feed their wives and children, and no longer go out to get themselves killed.” By Mans Andersson’s lifetime, the Golden King had devised new rules of conscription, and King Charles X Gustav made it clear that more was needed and expected of peasant families. When Denmark declared war on Sweden in 1657, county governors received word from the Swedish Council alerting them of the imminent war and asking them to do their part in bolstering the courage of their constituents and encouraging them to actively partake in the defense of the fatherland. In instances where King Charles X Gustav specifically requested that a county governor muster the unit of volunteers, the response was negotiated and agreed upon by the peasants themselves. But after many successive calls for volunteer soldiers, numbers and patience were growing thin. When a new request for the mustering of volunteer soldiers reached counties in the autumn of 1658, the Crown met with somewhat more resistance and found many fewer men stepping forward to answer the call. For that reason, the willing participation of men from families such as that of Mans Andersson was especially appreciated by the Crown.

In recognition of the honor and sacrifice of Mans Andersson’s service and death in the Battle of the Sound, he was posthumously knighted as Adliga ätter (untitled nobility) and introduced at the Riddarhuset—the Swedish House of Nobility—in 1668. With a family’s ennoblement, the Crown also presented them with a new name, and from that time onward the recipient would cease using the patronymic system and instead pass the noble surname down to each successive generation. These names were generally crafted to impart an imposing or admirable air—the one bestowed upon Andersson and his descendants at the Riddarhuset was Gyllenhammar—which translates as golden battle axe. A perusal of a list of 2,350 numbered noble family names produces eighty-one surnames with the golden prefix “gyllen,” including Gyllenpistol (golden gun), Gyllensvard (golden sword), Gyllengranat (golden grenade), Gyllenskold (golden skull), and the impressive if nautically dubious Gyllenskepp (golden ship). Other popular prefixes of the time were Silfver (silver) and the Germanic Adler and Ehren—meaning eagle and honor respectively.

In my childhood, there was little novelty in our name, and I felt no compunction to live up to the golden battle axe family standard. The Gyllenhammar lineage of nobility was a historical fact, but not a source of self-importance—on the contrary, my father was a very modest man who had no patience for ostentation or self-aggrandizing of any kind. My father was an insurance company executive, and my mother a pianist. I had one sibling—my sister, Anne, who was four and a half years my senior. We lived in a comfortable flat in Gothenburg, the rooms often filled with piano music as my mother played and practiced daily.

As young children, my sister and I were encouraged to be intellectually curious and to speak our minds—ours was the sort of family that preferred lively discourse at the dinner table over silence. Some of my earliest memories are of that sense of unease I associate with my Aunt Irma’s warnings about the atmosphere in Berlin. When the war broke out, I remember almost nothing but being evacuated to my great-uncle’s country home, owing to the expected German bombardment of Gothenburg. Like the much larger Pied Piper operation in London, children in geographically vulnerable cities like Gothenburg were relocated to rural areas in Sweden, as were some 70,000 Finnish children. My days in my great-uncle Oskar’s home were happy ones, and I grew deeply fond of him. Oskar Gyllenhammar was a lovely man and a very successful and interesting person.

Born in 1866 on the Gotland Island in the Baltic Sea, some sixty miles from Sweden’s southeastern coastline, Oskar Leopold Gyllenhammar began his career as a bookkeeper and office manager of the Ystad Sugar Refinery and was later a member of the Board of the Nordic Trade Bank 1917–1925. His biography in a Swedish collection of historical business profiles also lists him as founder of the Scandinavian letter pigeon union. But he is best known for his invention of a rapid-cooking porridge that made him the effective founder of the Swedish instant oatmeal industry as we know it. I was too young to be impressed by my great-uncle’s business success or prosperity—though I do recall feeling the silver tea he always drank was a notable beverage, I think what drew me to him at the outset was his capacity for listening. When I talked to him, he gave me his full attention, as one would with an adult, rather than listening as a kind of patient concession to a child. Even after we returned home to Gothenburg, I continued to visit him each week and always looked forward to spending a pleasant hour in conversation as he sipped his silver tea.

My father did not quite share my high esteem of Oskar. He thought Oskar was vain—and perhaps he was, though I do not recall him that way. My father was an enormously modest man, one who shied away from publicity and accolades, and as such he had no tolerance for vanity in others. He was also a person of enormous integrity, independent of thought, well read and well spoken. I admired him, but also differed from him in many ways. Even in my childhood I was determinedly independent as to how I wanted things done, a trait that often resulted in his disapproval. But we had some common ground as well. I inherited his great love for the sea, and like him, my affinity for sailing and racing boats began early in childhood. My father could not afford to buy a sailboat of his own until after the war, and even then, it was not a particularly flashy vessel, but it was sound, reliable, and unobtrusively seaworthy, not prone to accidents or liable to stray off course—rather like my father himself.

My parents had a true love match, which was perhaps more the exception than the rule in those days. I remember their frequent hushed-voice discussions during the war, and of being acutely aware as the war broke out of my father’s fear for my Jewish mother and her family. I’m sure that in part his fear was due to the fact that in spite of its official neutrality, Sweden was in reality accommodating the Nazis by allowing German military transports to travel through Sweden (often by use of their railroad system) and by continuing to export its iron ore to Germany—a crucial element in the manufacturing of German weaponry. Sweden’s willingness to indulge in this level of cooperation with the Nazis gave rise to the reasonable fear that the degree of difference between accommodating the enemy and colluding with the enemy was small. Sweden could well have been a few simple steps from espousing that fascism. My father thought—both then and later in life—that it was scandalous that Sweden had not only stayed out of the war rather than assisting the Allied powers, but also allowed those Nazi convoys through the southern Scandinavian peninsula to German-occupied Norway.

I was happy and relieved when the war finally came to an exhausted end, eager for life to return to normal in spite of the fact that the prewar state of things was less than a hazy memory, as I had been just four when Germany invaded Poland. I believe on some level I understood that things could never return to the way they had been before the war. The sense of unease I had always felt about my own country—which had its genesis in my early childhood listening to my parents talk about the war—never left me. From my childhood on I harbored a fear that there might be a fascist tendency in Sweden that was buried just below the politely neutral surface. And as a Jewish boy, I had seen just how barbaric that kind of fascism could be. It was little wonder my father had been so fearful for my mother. In the agonizing months after Germany’s surrender, one after another of my mother’s family was declared dead, slaughtered in concentration camps. I can recall hearing only of a single survivor—a cousin who had gone to France to work for Radio Free Europe.

Life went on in Sweden after the war, as it did in the rest of Europe. But I would never forget what I had seen and heard, nor did I ever shake the feeling that the cool and politic veneer of a civilized and humanistic Sweden was a flimsy camouflage at best. I had recognized what one could call the truth of my Swedish heritage from those early moments of my childhood. I understood that what was solid ground for me as a young person could change—that beneath the strata of security and permanence there would always be movement. Passive underground rumbling—the kind my parents sensed with Sweden’s accommodation of the Nazis—could in the future erupt without warning into a violent quake into fascism that could leave the national landscape and everything Sweden purported to be unrecognizable.

The nature of a solid place, of the ground of national identity, is tectonic. I think this is a difficult idea for many to accept—the inevitability of upheaval in one’s own back yard. It is an idea with which I imagine my ancestor Mans Andersson was much more comfortable. In those generations, war with Denmark came and went, over and over again. Catholicism, the Hanseatic League, and the Black Death dominated until they dwindled, and the Swedish Empire grew fat until the pendulum began to swing back, and it was starved to the bone. In the Sweden of Mans Andersson, the triumph of the stormaktstid and the tragedy of the Golden King’s death would have been celebrated and mourned with the resolute acceptance of people who were long accustomed to the historical cycles of gain and loss, people who did not always insert a sense of self into the concept of losing a thing or leaving a place.

Perhaps it is that ancient equanimity that is my strongest link to the earliest Gyllenhammars. Having absorbed and internalized my father’s fearfulness during wartime, I may have made my peace with the specter of change. In the decades that followed I developed a fine-tuned sensor for the shifting of plates beneath a solid surface, and a pragmatic attitude about upheaval and departure. It is accepted without saying that structural integrity is crucial to human well-being—and yet the laws of physics dictate that solid and firm structures degrade over time, and orderly systems such as corporations, democracies, and nations grow disorderly. So I learned at an early age that once I could no longer maintain my footing and stand upright in my workplace, or a partnership, or the organizations I helped run, or my nation itself, then I did not hesitate to leave. Whether it was a home, or a career, or even a country, I knew when the moment had arrived when things were beginning to shift and integrity had been lost. And when integrity was lost, it was time to move on to solid ground elsewhere, and I did so again and again without hesitation, or any compulsion to look back with regret.