Grönköping eller Lilla Paris? Birger Sjöbergs Vänersborg (Grönköping or Little Paris? Birger Sjöbergs Vänersborg)

Abstract

(Fictitious) Grönköping is, for the Swedes, the embodiment of the self‐centred provincial town, with its limited horizons, and that’s how Birger Sjöberg experienced Vänersborg in Southwestern Sweden, where he grew up. He left it at the age of 20 to work for national or regional newspapers but entertained friends and colleagues sometimes with songs, in which he took the role of an ambitious young man in such a provincial outpost, who addressed his sweetheart Frida, a shop assistant. He published 31 of them towards the end of 1922 as ‘Frida’s book’. The following year he performed a great number of them in various places in Southern Sweden, a feat for somebody with a severely depressive disposition. Neither a successive novel nor a collection of serious poetry found the critical echo he had hoped for, so after his death in 1929, his brother published a further 27 Frida poems, and these survived gloriously. When in the 1960s an immensely popular series, the ‘Green’, the ‘Yellow’ and the ‘Red Songbook’ appeared, Sjöberg’s songs were the thirdmost numerous group. And they continue popping up in popular song collections, but probably in a nostalgic, rather than satirical, spirit. The 19th and early 20th c. provincial town has pretty much disappeared in Sweden. The internet has largely replaced personal social intercourse with neighbours and shop‐owners, large chains and e‐shopping are the usual providers of goods, people live no longer in simple detached cottages but in large blocks. What was once seen as small and ridiculous has become an idyllic lost world, free from the pressures of today’s hectic and fiercely competitive life.