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Article Excerpt
AT THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century, Djursholm was Stockholm's most prosperous suburb while Birkastaden on the city's northwestern outskirts was one of its poorest quarters. Both had come into existence relatively recently and were products of a new industrial age. The relationship that would soon develop between them tells much about conditions at the time in Sweden and the spirit of that era.
Sweden's economy and society had been largely transformed during the preceding century. At its beginning one of Europe's poorer countries with an economy still based largely on subsistence agriculture, Sweden had become increasingly industrialized, especially by the 1890s. (1) As more and more of the population moved into towns and industrial areas--as well as across the sea to America--the old local ties of kinship, parish, and patriarchalism broke down. Classic Manchester liberalism, in Sweden as elsewhere by mid-century, regarded and treated working men and women as simply cogs in the machinery subject to shifts in supply and demand. Industrial workers crowded into old city slums or hastily thrown-up workers' housing, where sickness, alcoholism, crime, and domestic violence flourished. (2)
The problems caused by industrialization and urbanization could not be overlooked and various efforts at private charity were made to help at least some of their victims. By the 1880s, meanwhile, the rise of positivist social science gave hope that social problems could be analyzed rationally and effective means be found to remedy them. One expression of this new attitude was socialism and an organized labor movement, which arose during that decade and which envisioned an entirely new social order. Another--and in its time more effective--was social liberalism, which was prepared, unlike classic liberalism, to employ legislation to limit the excesses of unbridled capitalism and improve the lives of the working classes.
It was a time of high optimism for the future and not only for the working poor. Among the middle class, new ideals for a freer, healthier, and more "natural" way of life flourished. These characteristically called for escape from the confines of flats in the older, more fashionable quarters of the cities, to villas in newer more spacious quarters. This in turn led to a growing interest in the concept of the "garden city," like those that by then were to be found in Germany and especially in England and America. (3)
The ideal of a better life for those with means came to be embodied in the Djursholm community, established in 1889, some six kilometers northeast of Stockholm. Its initiator was the prominent financier Henrik Palme, who had recently developed Villastaden, the "villa quarter" north of Humlegarden in the city. This project had not satisfied his hopes, and he began to consider where next to turn. In 1888, Palme traveled to the United States to visit new "garden cities" While there, he learned that the owner of Djursholm Manor, on the coast close to Palme's summer home, was prepared to sell his whole property. On his return Palme, together with a business partner, negotiated the purchase and in October 1889 the Djursholm Company was chartered to subdivide and develop it. Already that month, it sold fifty-eight lots, and less than a year later construction began on Djursholm's electric railway connecting with the Rimbo line into Stockholm, which made it possible to live close to nature and commute to work in the city (Palme; Stiernstedt esp. 176-213, Johansson 270-7).
Palme was an idealist as well as a practical businessman, inspired by the vision of a new and better way of life which Djursholm was to make possible. He attracted people from the wealthier liberal middle class with a strong intellectual element to settle there. Several of the more influential moved out from Palme's earlier Villastad in the city. A particular coup was Palme's successful invitation to Viktor Rydberg, the bell-wether of Swedish liberal idealism, to move out to Djursholm (Palme 24). He became the community's leading personality, and his new home, "Ekeliden" its cultural center up to his death in 1895.
Other prominent cultural figures in Djursholm came to include, among others, Verner von Heidenstam, the painter Robert Thegerstrom, the educational reformer Anna Whitlock, and at various times Carl Snoilsky, August Strindberg, and the young Karl Axel Karlfeldt, who was Ernst Beckman's particular protege. Incidentally, Beckman also noted that an American painter, W. L. Marcy Pendelton, owned a villa in Djursholm while the latter's compatriot, the United States' minister to Stockholm, the colorful William Widgery Thomas, sometimes spent his summers there (Hildeman, Loskekarl esp. 9-48; and Karlfeldt fore Karlfeldt, esp. 209-15; Beckman, Djursholm 26, 28; Cf. Barton, "Thomas" 36-4). Looking ahead, the writers Marika Stiernstedt, Ludvig Nordstrom, Torsten Fogelqvist would later make their home there. Other residents were well-to-do academicians, artists, architects, public officials, professional men, businessmen, both active and retired, rentiers, widows, and maiden ladies of means, most characteristically liberal-minded and with strong intellectual and cultural interests. Provisions in the Company's sales contracts were carefully devised to assure that people of the "right sort" settled in Djursholm. (4)
A progressive private coeducational school was established in 1891-92, to begin with in the Baner family's venerable seventeenth-century Djursholm manor house. Palme meanwhile tried, although unsuccessfully, to establish a cooperative society. His high cultural aspirations for the new community, however, led to cost overruns and friction with the other three shareholders in the Djursholm Company, who regarded it simply as an economic venture. Palme resigned as director although he continued to live in Djursholm and remained active in its affairs (Palme 33-7).
His successor, from 1892 to 1903, was Ernst Beckman, who had built the first home in Djursholm and greatly resembled Palme in his enthusiasm for modern community-building. Already in 1893, Beckman brought out a promotional book about Djursholm. He proudly set forth its modern features, especially its electric railway and street lighting. He wrote in glowing terms of its rural character with spacious lots and houses in sylvan settings situated well back from winding streets bearing names drawn from Nordic mythology, of its prominent and cultivated inhabitants, and of its healthy and natural way of life (Beckman, Djursholm).
Particular emphasis was placed upon Djursholm as an ideal environment in which to raise children. Hence the special emphasis placed on its progressive coeducational school, Djursholm's Samskola. Educating boys and girls together was an...
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