Book by Dag Hammarskjöld

Review by Thom Hartmann, originally published at buzzflash.com on March 3, 2005

I was ten years old when Dag Hammarskjöld died in 1961, and I still remember that week. Having grown up with monthly "duck and cover" drills in our elementary school, many of the kids of my generation saw the UN as the great moral force that would prevent the Soviet Union and war hawks in America from plunging the planet into a nuclear holocaust.

I remember wondering, the week his plane went down over Africa on a peace mission to the Congo, if Hammarskjöld's death would mean world war. I remember President Kennedy, on TV, saying, "Dag Hammarskjöld is dead, but the United Nations lives. His tragedy is deep in our hearts, but the tasks for which he died are at the top of our agenda." I remember that I felt mildly reassured.

I remember that we talked about it in school when it happened, and we asked our teacher if the only UN leader we had ever known (he was elected in 1953 as the second Secretary General of the then-still-new institution) meant the bombs would begin to fall soon. My father reminded me today that, at the time, he had been considering creating an "old fashioned fallout shelter" in our home by putting a false ceiling into the basement and covering it with dirt from the back yard.

On July 29th of this year, Hammarskjöld would have been 100 years old. Still regarded as its greatest Secretary General, he helped shape the latter half of the 20th century, and kept the world from plunging into World War III.

As Kofi Anan said of Hammarskjöld in September of 2001, "His life and his death, his words and his actions, have done more to shape public expectations of the office, and indeed of the [United Nations] Organization, than those of any other man or woman in its history. His wisdom and his modesty, his unimpeachable integrity and single-minded devotion to duty, have set a standard for all servants of the international community - and especially, of course for his successors - which is simply impossible to live up to. There can be no better rule of thumb for a Secretary-General, as he approaches each new challenge or crisis, than to ask himself, 'How would Hammarskjöld have handled this?'"

On the United Nations website, the organization notes:

"In his final address of the year, broadcast over United Nations Radio on 31 December 1953, Mr. Hammarskjöld said:

"'....Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each one of us. To build for man a world without fear, we must be without fear. To build a world of justice, we must be just. And how can we fight for liberty if we are not free in our own minds? How can we ask others to sacrifice if we are not ready to do so?... Only in true surrender to the interest of all can we reach that strength and independence, that unity of purpose, that equity of judgment which are necessary if we are to measure up to our duty to the future, as men of a generation to whom the chance was given to build in time a world of peace.'" (UN Press Release SG/360, December 22, 1953)

The year he died, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously. (Today, the United Nations dedicates an entire region of their website to Hammarskjöld.)

Thirty years later, I discovered that Dag Hammarskjöld had kept a diary, which came into print in the 1960s with the title "Markings." Reading it, I was touched in a way that no other book has done in decades. Fifteen years ago, when I owned an advertising agency in Atlanta, I bought 120 copies and mailed them to all our clients as Christmas/Chanukah presents.

"Markings" is not a political book, but, instead, is the spiritual diary of a man tortured by and yet at the same time drawn to the incredible burden he held of keeping the world from disintegrating into nuclear holocaust while both Khrushchev and US hawks like McCarthy and Vice President Nixon were doing their best to thwart his efforts. It starts in 1925, when he was 20 years old, and ends at his death in 1961.

There are occasional veiled references to people and situations of the time, and knowing the history of the day it's not hard to figure them out, but mostly this book is the record of the personal spiritual and deeply mystical internal journey of one of the 20th century's greatest men, even as he walked through a political minefield and tried to keep the world from total nuclear annihilation.

"Markings" has developed a cult following over the 40 or so years it's been continuously in print. Two books have been written purely dedicated to decoding it - "Dag Hammarskjöld's White Book: The Meaning of Markings" by Gustaf Aulen, which sits beside my bed next to my old and tattered copy of "Markings," and "Dag Hammarskjöld: a biographical interpretation of 'Markings," by Henry P. Van Dusen.

A protestant Swede, Hammarskjöld would have called himself a Christian. I would call him a mystic who transcended Christianity. And friends I've introduced this book to - Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and agnostics - have found inspiration and meaning in it. (And for some, it was just too introspective or poetic.)

In "Markings," Hammarskjöld quotes the famous Sufi/Muslim mystic and poet Rumi: "The lovers of God have no religion but God alone." He quotes Zoroastrianists, ancient Chinese mystics, and Greeks.

As Gustaf Aulen writes, "God does not work only in the Christian sphere. His activity is universal, and its signs can easily be recognized everywhere with non-Christian religions. It is thus no accident that 'Markings' contains quotations from non-Christian authors. On the contrary, Hammarskjöld has searched - we might say, eagerly searched - for statements that can transcend the barriers between different religions."

Hammarskjöld was a Swede who loved his nation and the Scandinavian sense of "community obligation to others" (which conservatives decry as "socialism"), and an internationalist liberal with a PhD in economics. But in his heart he was a mystic.

Here are a few of his entries, just to give you a taste, a feeling, for his voice in this extraordinary diary:

On April 7, 1953, as the United Nations was voting him into an office he did not seek (up until just a few days before, he had no idea he had even been nominated), he wrote:

In 1955, struggling with communist China to release US prisoners of war from the Korean conflict, buffeted by criticism from both Khrushchev and American conservatives, Hammarskjöld wrote in his diary:

It's unlikely that people who did not know him personally would have guessed that, during this incredibly turbulent year, the thoughts Hammarskjöld would choose to write into his diary talked of his wrestling with faith instead of world politics. In a 1955 paragraph that reminds one of great mystics like Meister Eckhart or Paramahansa Yogananda, he added:

On October 12, 1958, the Soviet Union exploded a 1000-kiloton nuclear bomb in an atmospheric test that shook the world. That day, Hammarskjöld wrote in his diary:

On the next page, perhaps at day's end, he wrote, simply, "Lord - Thine the day, And I the day's."

"Markings" is the diary of a man who was deeply struggling to fill himself with the transcendent, who had touched it and knew it, but also struggled with the humanness that so often keeps us from it. It's a frank and extraordinary insight into another person's soul, into his spiritual battles, his doubts, fears, and joys.

There is no mention in the book, other than in the most oblique of terms, of his work with the United Nations. Instead, we simply find the true heart - and the deepest anguish - of one of history's greatest statesmen and peacemakers.

Just a few months before he died, he wrote:

In his final speech to the UN, he compared the struggle for world peace with the progression in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (his favorite) from the stormy, bleak First Movement into the Ode To Joy of the Forth Movement. This rise from the base to the joyous, from the selfish to the selfless, from the human to the divine, was the constant effort of his life. (Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was played at the UN in the commemoration of his death.)

Dag Hammarskjöld's extraordinary time on this world's stage - and the startling diary that he left behind - demonstrate to each of us the possibility of maintaining a deeply spiritual center, while still dealing with the most difficult problems of life. Indeed, his advice to himself was to throw himself into life with total effort, as his greatest gift both to his fellow humans and to God.

"Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live, great enough to die for," he wrote in 1952, before that fateful call from the United Nations.

Every reflective person struggles with finding his or her own personal mission, dedicating ourselves to things greater than our own short lives, and looking into the often frightening depths of our own souls. In following Hammarskjöld's discovery of his own mission, passion, and struggles with the seduction of joy and the pain of death and tragedy, we better prepare ourselves for our own inevitable confrontations with the same.