From The Pioneers

The Klara Quarter is known for being the only part of Stockholm that never sleeps. A unique province domain with a unique temperament. 

Within the invisible boundary from Vasagatan in the west to Drottninggatan in the east, Kungsgatan in the north down to Fredsgatan in the south, a little city within the city has grown. Its narrow, uneven streets and alleys are so tight one’s shoulders skim the sides in an almost labyrinthine system. 

Everywhere is teeming with life and movement, at every hour of the day, roiling, swaying, rumbling and vibrating. Rattling workshops, ateliers, overfilled stockrooms and businesses of every sort are stacked atop one another, floor after floor, building after building. 

Grubby children run barefoot between open doors and down into dark, damp cellars, where large families live without water or heating. The same children often run after one of the horse-drawn milk carts in the hope that the officer from the public health committee who sits beside the coachman will sneak them a bottle. 

Klara is both opulence and slum. Peeling plaster and gilt mirrors in lavish hotel foyers. Poor workers and high earners. Rapidly expanding companies with hypermodern machinery sit alongside old smithies with blazing furnaces. 

Célie passes sweaty men pulling wagons loaded to the brim with clinking lager bottles on the way to one of the many alehouses. They are open from five in the morning, and the pavements outside are often just as packed and messy as it is inside the smoky, dim pubs. Men in work clothes crowd in, talking, drinking, laughing, quarrelling and fighting with one another or with the policemen on the beat. 

The so-called day labourers and itinerant workers who go from job to job have the worst reputation of all. Their idleness and self-esteem are replaced by beer glasses that are topped up for as long as the money lasts, regardless of the time of day. 

And then there are the prostitutes who circulate in the vicinity of the shabby hotels that rent out rooms by the hour. Hollow gazes and bodies for sale. 

The Klara Quarter is all of this. But it is also the home of the Swedish press. 

Stockholms-Tidningen on Vattugatan. Svenska Morgonbladet on Klarabergsgatan. Stockholms Dagblad on Vasagatan. Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet on Klara västra Kyrkogata. Svenska Dagbladet on Klara södra Kyrkogata. Aftontidningen on Barnhusgatan. And those are just the biggest among them.

In the lower part of Klara, where Célie is heading, the newspaper buildings stand practically wall-to-wall. 

The most important newspaper streets run straight as arrows in parallel lines, all the way down to the water at Klara Bay. It is entirely logical that all the big national newspapers and their presses would locate themselves right here. On the other side of Vasagatan is the country’s logistical crown jewel – Stockholm central station. 

Since the lavish building was inaugurated in 1871, they have been moving here, one after the other, to the area that has become the link out into Sweden, and Sweden’s most important link to the rest of the world. 

People had got fed up with the hassle of having two separate railway stations – one in the northern part of the city, the other in the south. Particularly since there was no connection between them. 

The solution was a so-called ‘connecting rail’, which now runs like an artery across Stockholm’s islands and water, with a large central hall for all incoming and outgoing rail traffic to the Swedish capital. 

The newspapers depend on fast and effective distribution. The expanded rail network and grandiose central station are their salvation. 

The direct link to the rest of the country and newly accessible foreign continents has changed this formerly shabby part of Stockholm. The Klara Quarter has now also become a place for politics, culture, and broadened horizons. 

Tourist hotels at all price points have established themselves. Small exchange offices, too. There are international newspapers in the cafés, and wealthy tourists buy freshly printed postcards depicting the Royal Palace, while editors pass with top hats and cigars in flashy holders, on their way to meetings or gentlemen’s clubs. 

The paper women trudge along on tired legs wearing headscarves and long skirts, their arms full of freshly printed newspapers. Dagens Nyheter’s white-painted distribution cars return from their rounds only to be loaded up again. 

[…] In the surrounding streets, it was, as previously mentioned, the fourth estate that ruled. One could not stick one’s nose out the door without seeing great bundles of papers being lowered into murky cellars. Even as a child, I became familiar with the rumble of the printing presses that could be heard even from the pavement, and I cannot count the times I’ve stood swathed in that specific scent of ink and oil, with my nose pressed up against the office windows. 

Sigfrid Siwertz 

Lights shine from the vaulted windows as she approaches the corner of Klara Södra Kyrkogata and Karduansmakargatan, and the contours of the building on the corner start to emerge from the dark. On the façade above the two entrances hang black signs with white painted letters. 

Svenska Dagbladet. One of the country’s largest daily newspapers. Founded in 1884, it is a strong liberal actor. Right above the largest door sits a watchful stone owl with a critical expression. 

She hurries across the last stretch of the muddy crossing, where horse-drawn carts and heavily laden horsecars have carved deep, mucky ruts. Those last few metres require attention, and ideally eyes in the back of one’s head. On the same crossroads as this state-of-the-art newspaper building with its electricity and central heating lies one of the most notorious alehouses. 

The newspaper has several side entrances, and Célie stops outside one, stomping her boots thoroughly on the paving stones. Then she opens the heavy, wooden door and begins her second shift of the day. 

Inside, work doesn’t let up around the clock, it’s a case of diving in and picking up where someone else has left off. Stressed journalists and editors are constantly racing up and down the great spiral staircase that runs between the different floors. 

This staircase is also the way up or down the building’s hierarchy. The further up, the higher the status. 

In the back part of the building and down in the cellar, the typesetters work in the pungent smells of lead, sweat, grime, oil and deep concentration. It is a finicky job, one that requires both dexterity and imagination. With the help of lead letter types – small rods with mirrored reliefs, letters, numbers and punctuation – printable text is created, and the newspaper pages come into being. 

Imagination is required when the typesetters must try to interpret the sometimes utterly illegible handwritten articles sent down to them. 

In one of the editing rooms, the one referred to as the ‘sea of slaves’, sit the general reporters. The wooden furniture here is heavy and dark, and floral curtains hang in the windows. There are maps on the walls. The tobacco smoke is so thick that it is sometimes hard to see. 

There are three desks and six workplaces. Five of these are occupied by men. Célie sits down at the sixth. 

She is the most enslaved of them all – stationed at a desk and bound to serfdom. 

For three hours, the newcomer in a skirt is loaded up with piles of papers, materials from the international bureaux and newspapers from every corner of the world. Everything must be translated and turned into so-called ‘C-notices’, short digests of the more sensationalist international news. It is a task that none of the ‘real’ journalists want. C-notices are editorial drudgery, the dregs. 

Célie works with great concentration, trying to find good material and turn it into clear summaries for the readers. She has learned that easier material can be found in The Daily Mail, and the opposite in The Daily Telegraph. She digs out French news from Le Figaro. Vienna’s Neue Freie Press is a trustworthy source of news, where there is almost always something to clip out and rework. 

The more exciting and sensational, the better. Not even the gory details are to be left out if she wants to avoid a telling off from the head of the world news section, CJ Engström. 

Engström is demanding, and he expects of his reporters an extensive general knowledge. They must be on their toes, focused and clear-headed when on the job. This also applies to Célie, even if she doesn’t count as one of the ‘real’ reporters. 

He occasionally stands on his head in his office, in order to keep himself focused. Gymnastic exercises and increased blood flow to the head is his method, particularly when there’s an editorial to write. As a snack, the eccentric Engström gobbles down raw eggs. 

Journalists who have worked in the building for a while have grown accustomed to conducting serious work conversations upside-down with the bald, plump foreign editor as he does his exercises. 

The ‘sea of slaves’ is cramped and loud. Around the full-time staff whirl the freelancers and line writers, those who get paid per line of manuscript they write. Who are always looking for an empty chair to sit in and get on with their article as fast as possible, before heading out into the dark again on the hunt for more lines. 

Between the reporters and editors there is a persistent din of shouted commands, laughter, arguments and heated discussions. If they don’t agree on an angle, or if the discussion descends into outright conflict, Carl Gustaf Tengwall will come marching through the room and play judge. He is the very head of the editorial department. At Svenska Dagbladet, his word is law. A powerful, feared man who has become something so unusual as a legend in his own lifetime. At least in the world of Swedish journalism. 

He is unbalanced, capricious and inconsiderate, and has an unpleasantly short fuse, according to the many biographies, festschriften and historical retrospectives that have appeared in trade journals and other similar sources. Sensitive types are warned not to cross editor Tengwall’s path. 

Tengwall lives for his job, in fact he lives at his job too – literally. In the so-called Bromsska building, which Svenska Dagbladet bought to house its operations, there are two apartments on the top floor. Tengwall lives in one of them. 

Early each morning, he walks down the two flights of stairs to the editorial section and holes himself up in his office. Inside, he paces about impatiently, perusing at least two of the paper’s competitors at once, before throwing them down on the floor, either furious or satisfied. 

His rebuffs and associated tellings-off are publicly delivered, so that everyone around will see and hear and get the chance to exchange their knowing looks. 

Under him are several heads of department with various editorial titles. Gunnar ‘Bjuret’ Bjurman is one of them, Célie’s direct manager in the World News section. He wears his dark hair combed into a side parting, a bushy moustache covers his entire upper lip, and he speaks with a burr that betrays his southern-Swedish upbringing. 

Célie reads, translates, cuts and writes at a feverish pace. Bjuret hovers above her to spur on new material for the empty space in the columns he is responsible for. He commissions it by the inch but always seems to need more. 

Bjuret was actually hired to cover theatre and literary criticism, and is nowhere near as stress-tolerant as someone on the news desk ought to be. His cries of frustration over deadlines and other daily workplace occurrences can be heard throughout the whole department. 

The worry line between his eyebrows deepens every day, but his gaze is always open and friendly. That’s not a given in this building. 

The reporter who covers Stockholm’s nightlife and salons sits with his feet nonchalantly up on his desk. He is always well-dressed, wearing patent leather shoes and a white shirt. Now and then he will shout something in an exalted voice about yet another beautiful woman he has seen on one of the city’s stages. The comment will often lead to others of the same sort from other parts of the room. Women and their looks are a pet subject. ‘Oh, I would never, she wears spectacles.’ 

Célie always responds, cutting and harsh. But only in her head. 

At the desk behind her there is a seat that is often empty, but where none of them dare to sit. It must always be ready to receive the general editorial office’s most esteemed reporter, Tengwall’s personal protégé, who is essentially given free rein and unlimited column inches. 

Célie is acutely aware of that empty chair. She glances at it over her shoulder now and then, dreaming, longing. 

In the desk drawer beside her is a pair of white reporter’s gloves, the kind that the journalists put on when they go to do important interviews with politicians, royalty, actors or authors. The gloves shine like virgin snow every time she opens the drawer – Célie’s holy grail. 

To get to use them she must be assigned a real commission, outside of the editorial offices, armed with her notebook and pen. She must become a reporter.

In a short time, a whole new type of journalistic corps has emerged in Sweden. Leading the pack are the reporters, the journalists who are sent out into the world on assignments. Energetic and intelligent, and with unwavering zeal, they investigate the contemporary world on behalf of the population. 

Fierce competition in the news industry has changed both the function and the content of the newspapers. The editors have seen what America is doing and want to go in the same direction. The press has begun to distance itself from politics and to behave critically. Nowadays, those in power are scrutinised and held to account. This has turned the reporters into society’s new heroes. 

A tiny fraction of them are women. Barely even that. 

Female journalists are still so rare they spark great attention and strong feelings. Most often, they work under gender-neutral pen names. The pseudonyms behind the articles are presumed to be men, which keeps the peace. 

Célie Cleve has spent these first years of the new century carefully following those few who have been entrusted with column inches. She hopes to become one of them, and she has never been closer to her goal than now. 

The empty chair at the most important desk in the general editorial office, the one diagonally behind Célie’s spot, belongs to her idol. Lotten Ekman. 

Ekman has worked at Svenska Dagbladet since she was a teenager, toiling her way up through the ranks, in spite of her sex. These days she writes under forty-one different pseudonyms, depending on the subject matter and where in the paper it appears. According to Tengwall, she is unsurpassed in her ability to take the city’s cultural temperature and societal wind strength. God help anyone who says otherwise. And it seems nobody does, neither her male colleagues nor the readers. 

Lotten Ekman’s white gloves are so worn they’ve split at the fingertips. But the fact that she has become Svenska Dagbladet’s star reporter is the result of a well-executed strategy. A strategy that was planned by Carl Gustav Tengwall and is already making historic waves far outside of the newspaper’s own end-of-year report. 

He wants to have more female news reporters, and more of what is known as ‘women’s issues’ in the paper. More editors have followed suit, and in the emancipated circles of the city the rumour has spread quickly: there is momentum for women who want to start making careers as journalists. 

There have been female-friendly editors in the Swedish press before, but Svenska Dagbladet’s managing editor Carl Gustav Tengwall has taken this burning question several steps forward. 

He believes that women should be a permanent fixture in newspaper offices, and not only as one-off phenomena; they ought to be employed as real journalists. And that content that might appeal to women ought to appear regularly in the paper.

This is not a question of charity or a display of principles, but rather an editor’s characteristic sixth sense for what the readers want. The purpose of the new ‘feminine’ content in the columns is to attract female readers, in exactly the same way the press has tried to adapt the newspaper’s contents to the workers, a growing social class in the wake of the industrial revolution. 

New types of readers mean new types of adverts and new, fresh advertising money in the money-guzzling newspaper industry. 

By the autumn of 1907, he has devoted several years to actively searching for women from the upper echelons of Stockholm society who might join the newspaper as editorial staff and writers, and he is ready to employ the best of them. 

Célie has dreamed in secret for a long time, though she is perceptive enough to realise that the odds of her, of all people, passing through the eye of that particular needle are sky-high. As a timid young woman who was educated at home by her own mother, without a single document to prove her abilities or skills, she shouldn’t have had a chance. 

That made her victory all the sweeter. The plan had worked. 

And now here she is, in the eye of the storm at one of the country’s largest and most important newspapers. Her closest colleagues have already noted her efficiency and capacity. That she is unusually sharp and knowledgeable, in everything from Italian literature (which she reads in the original) to complicated needlework techniques. And always so calm and steady. 

What they don’t see is that it’s really their jobs she’s after. 

Célie wants to be listened to. She has ideas and opinions – she just has to get the chance to express them. When the time is right, she plans to show her much-feared boss that she is indispensable. She has already managed to beat him once.