The little boy has a round head with his eyes, nose and mouth very high up. Its hair consists of short spikes, instead of ears it has two small balls, and the neck is right in the torso. He wears a green or brown sweater that is too big for him and patched trousers that reach just above his knees, regardless of the time of year. The boy is called “Willi Wiberg” in German, “Alfons Åberg” in the Swedish original.
Regardless of the name, however, this Willi has accompanied several million boys and girls halfway around the world from toddler age to first year of school over the past five decades. He shared their joys, sorrows, and defiance because he felt the same way she felt, and they felt the same way he did. He helped them grow up as a mirror of themselves, and he did it with a fundamental good nature. All Willi Wiberg stories were designed by Gunilla Bergström, a Swedish journalist who gave up her actual job in the early seventies in order to dedicate her work almost exclusively to this character.
There is no mother, and she does not seem to be absent either
The children’s book children of the early twentieth century grew up outdoors. Pippi Longstocking was one of the last of its kind. Willi Wiberg came into the world in autumn 1972 as a resident of a skyscraper in an anonymous suburb, a few years after Sweden became the first country in the world to ban corporal punishment of children. He lives alone with his father and has a key on a chain around his neck. The father is often absent-minded, has a hole in his sock, smokes a pipe and reads the newspaper. There is no mother, and she does not seem to be absent either. After all, aunts, a grandmother, cousins, playmate Viktor and an invisible friend belong to the environment.
The half-orphanage not only means that Willi has a high degree of control over himself, but also that upbringing, in its infinitely many small steps, becomes an object of negotiation between the child and the adult. The child does not always lose in the process, on the contrary. Gunilla Bergström worked with firm lines and closed structures, without shading and with a minimum of scenic design. Your pictures therefore often look like collages. In their midst is an almost autonomous child.
Gunilla Bergström – in 1972 she let Willi Wiberg step into the world for the first time, the boy who lives in a high-rise housing estate and whose original Swedish name is Alfons Åberg.
(Photo: Rolf Adlercreutz)
There are more than two dozen books that tell the stories of Willi Wiberg. Most of them are probably read aloud so often that at some point they become part of the intellectual common property of a family and can be recited by heart. How is the story going in which Willi cannot fall asleep? First he wants to have a drink first, but the water spills, so a towel has to be fetched. Then Willi has to pee, then he is afraid of the lion in the cloakroom, so that the father has to go out with the flashlight. Finally the father has to get the teddy bear. But he does not return from this assignment. Willi finally finds him, lying soundly on the floor, surrounded by the towel, pot, teddy bear and flashlight. The picture that shows this scene is drawn from the central perspective, the only one in this book, Bergström’s first to be entitled “Gute Nacht, Willi Wiberg”. Willi has to laugh when he sees the sleeping father, and the angle of view enables this laughter to come from the backdrop, as it were, as a redeeming moment.
Gunilla Bergström died in Stockholm on Wednesday of this week. She was 79 years old.