In 1978, Astrid Lindgren, white blouse, black jacket, stepped up to a lectern in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche and gave a speech that would become famous, and which, tragically, could actually be given almost exactly the same way today, 45 years later, without rubbing your eyes in amazement. The children’s book author, who was already famous at the time, had just been awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She could give a good acceptance speech, as had been suggested to her beforehand. But the 70-year-old doesn’t do that. In excellent German, which she learned as a young adult, she thinks aloud about the utopia of global peace. “Couldn’t we perhaps learn to renounce violence? Couldn’t we try to become a whole new kind of person? But how should that happen and where should one start?” she asks and finds an answer for herself: ” I think we have to start from scratch. With the kids.” For example, by “never” being exposed to parental violence, a demand that is tantamount to an affront to the West German audience, since “breeding and order” are still so much part of the German understanding of education that two thirds of the children are beaten. Incidentally, a measure that has only been punishable since 2000 (in Sweden, Lindgren’s homeland, since 1979).
Biography about Astrid Lindgren: The voice that is missing – culture
