My European Family

by Karin Bojs

  But I don’t give up that easily. I reply, asking if I can meet Peter in Värmland anyway, even if it’s only to ask him some more general questions about life around Glafsfjorden in the eighteenth century. Fortunately, he agrees.

  A few weeks later, one oppressively hot day in August, I get off the train at Arvika station. Peter Olausson fetches me by car, and our meeting exceeds all my expectations. He is on leave from his job at Karlstad University, but spends a whole afternoon driving me round to various places around Glafsfjorden that are linked in some way with my family. We visit the beautiful church at Stavnäs, where my forefather Gudmund Erlandsson once worked as clerk, and the place on the nearby shore where his homestead once stood and Karin Gudmundsdotter was born.

  By way of a bonus, Peter tells me a good deal about the author Selma Lagerlöf. I didn’t realise she had such close links with this area; her childhood home, Mårbacka, was in Östra Ämtervik, several dozen kilometres away. However, she had several relatives around Glafsfjorden. One of them was a pastor in Stavnäs at the same time as my forefather Gudmund Erlandsson was the parish clerk there. Another of her relatives was the pastor of a nearby church, which is now in ruins. He was one of the models for the protagonist of Gösta Berling’s Saga, Peter tells me. We pass by, and I stand on the spot where the best-known opening in the whole of Swedish literature is set: ‘The pastor was mounting the pulpit steps. The bowed heads of the congregation rose – he was there, then, after all, and there would be service that Sunday, though for many Sundays there had been none.’ It is true that the pastor was a drunkard, that he was involved in major scandals and that he was dismissed, Peter says. But the rest of Gösta Berling’s tale was Selma Lagerlöf’s own creation.

  We take a look at Hillringsberg Manor, which I visited two years previously, and Fors, the large farm where Gudmund Erlandsson lived as a soldier and met Märta, his future wife. A real major’s wife who ruled the roost at Fors was the inspiration for the wife of the major at Ekeby in Gösta Berling’s Saga, Peter Olausson tells me. It occurs to me that the unusual name Gudmund Erlandsson crops up in another of Selma Lagerlöf’s books, Girl from the Marsh Croft and Other Stories. An elegant young man by that name is the protagonist and hero of the short story that gives its name to the collection. The story was also turned into a silent film directed by Victor Sjöström. The film had its premiere at Stockholm’s ‘Röda Kvarn’ cinema in 1917, the same year in which my maternal grandmother, Berta, passed her teacher’s examination at the teacher training college there. The real-life model for the girl from the marsh croft may have been Gudmund Erlandsson’s first wife. My foremother Märta was his second wife, according to church records.

  At the linen factory in Klässbol, famous for weaving the tablecloths for the Nobel banquet, we stop for a coffee in an old mill. Peter Olausson has a cup of coffee and a cake, and I buy a bottle of apple juice. The apples were grown and pressed just a few kilometres away. It is so oppressively hot that we choose to sit indoors in the shade.

  When we take our seats at the table, Peter suddenly says, ‘Oh, there was something else, by the way. I’ve found the mother-in-law.’

  ‘What?’ I reply. After all, it’s only a few weeks since he emailed me to say it was impossible to find Märta’s mother.

  ‘Yes, but then I did find her after all. Her name was Annika. She was from Stockholm.’

  So I’ve been over to Värmland twice and searched for my ancestors among Forest Finns and other ancient Värmland families, and now the trail leads back to Stockholm. To the capital, where my parents lived as young medical students, and where I myself have been living for some years now.

  ‘It’s quite common for genealogy researchers to suddenly stumble across unexpected coincidences,’ says Peter. ‘There are times when it seems as if you’re going round in circles.’

  The document he happened to leaf through before our get-together is a little book called Anteckningar om Glafva socken i Värmland (‘Notes on the Parish of Glava in Värmland’). It was written by a local historian in the nineteenth century, but the whole edition was bought up and destroyed by a local family who felt they had been misrepresented in some way. It was not until the 1970s that the little book was republished by a genealogy researcher and county librarian. It contains all kinds of notes about people who lived in Glava, and for some reason Peter Olausson noticed the obituary of a church caretaker called Jean Pettersson. Somehow or other – I still don’t understand how – he realised that this caretaker was the brother of my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, Märta Pettersdotter.

  According to the obituary Jean was born in Stockholm, where his father, Petter Jonsson, worked as a gardener. Some time after his son’s birth, the gardener and his wife, Annika Jeansdotter, moved first to Västergötland, then to Jösse in Värmland, and finally to Hillringsberg. This was at the end of the seventeenth century, when Sweden was a great power and it had just become fashionable for the country’s wealthy elite to create elaborate gardens in the French Renaissance style. Clearly this also applied to the largest estates in Värmland.

  After our coffee, Peter Olausson and I visit the open-air museum of traditional buildings in Glava, where we look at some more documents that confirm Peter’s findings. Annika Jeansdotter was the wife of a gardener at Hillringsberg, who had moved from Stockholm with her husband. Her daughter Märta grew up there and was later employed as a maid at nearby Fors farm. It was there she met Gudmund Erlandsson, the soldier who was later appointed parish clerk at Stavnäs, and they moved a few hundred metres away to the other side of Glafsfjorden. A generation later, Märta’s daughter, Karin Gudmundsdotter, moved back over Glafsfjorden to Hillringsberg and became the wife of a miller there. For five subsequent generations, women moved no more than a few kilometres within the area that is now the municipality of Arvika. When my grandmother Berta started studying at the teacher training college in Stockholm during the First World War, she returned to the city her foremother had left about 240 years previously.

  But where did Annika Jeansdotter, the gardener’s wife, come from originally? She is very likely to have been a relative newcomer to Stockholm. When Sweden was a great power, the rapidly expanding capital was a magnet, attracting large numbers of people from other places – just as it does today. I am one of those who have moved to Stockholm for work reasons.

  Was Annika Jeansdotter originally from Värmland after all? Written sources are probably never going to take me any further back. What remains are the DNA results. One day I receive an email that ends with the words: ‘Best wishes from your very distant relative Tomas.’ The man who wrote the letter is the nearest match to me so far on that branch of my family tree. Our mitochondrial DNA sets differ only on two points. His earliest female forebear also lived in Värmland in the eighteenth century, but in the parish of Norra Råda, which lies further north, in the municipality of Hagfors. She was also called Annika, and her daughter’s name was Karin.

  ***

  My own mother was not called Annika, but Anita. She, too, lived in Stockholm for a few years while she was studying medicine at the Karolinska Institute. There is a black-and-white photograph taken in the flat where she and my father lived as newlyweds.

  The little one-roomed flat is full of paintings and beautiful furniture, most of it inherited from my grandmother, who had died a few years previously. She spent much of her income on paintings by artist friends and on other beautiful objects. The photo shows my mother playing an old square piano, an old-fashioned form of the instrument. Above the piano hang a violin and a guitar. There is a writing desk in masur birchwood and a substantial table of solid pine. All the furnishings were chosen with the help of relatives in Värmland – my grandmother’s musician brother, Gunnar, and her father, who built organs for a living.

  The photograph shows my mother as a slim young woman with fashionably styled hair. She is recently married and a student on one of the country’s most prestigious university courses.
The picture must have been taken around 1957, which was a great time for our maternal line. Only 150 years had passed since my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother in the maternal line, Annika Svensdotter, died at 45 as the penniless widow of a blacksmith. During these 150 years, Swedish society underwent unprecedented development from poverty to prosperity. The same was true of my family.

  About 10 years after the photo was taken, the problems began to pile up for my mother as well. Illness and other problems destroyed our family. The riches of her genetic make-up were beyond money; she was very gifted and full of energy. But there was a dark side to that heritage. Humanity pays for artistic gifts and creativity, and the toll is mental illness.

  That is the way it has been throughout European history, ever since the Ice Age people created their cave paintings and carved figures from ivory. And I firmly believe that that dual heritage was in our baggage a long time before some of us left Africa to people Europe and the rest of the world.

  I have been lucky in the genetic lottery. I have been spared serious mental illness, but have nonetheless inherited a generous portion of creativity and energy. That’s a winning ticket to be grateful for. Rather than fret over the impact that illness and other problems had on my childhood, I can be thankful for the strength and the abilities I was born with. The different sides of my biological heritage are inter­connected. The bad comes with the good, the good with the bad.

  That’s the nature of genetics. You can’t say that certain genetic variants are ‘better’ than others. Inherited traits can be advantageous for some individuals in particular circum­stances but represent a drawback in others. The British author Richard Dawkins made a big splash in the 1970s with his popular science book The Selfish Gene. He has subsequently tried to alter the concept somewhat and tone it down. But the damage has already been done. The punchy title gave a whole generation a simplified, indeed erroneous idea of how DNA works. This prolonged the political polarisation of the 1930s and 1940s, when Nazis were keen to stress blood, earth and heredity, while Joseph Stalin and his followers in the Soviet Union regarded heredity as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’.

  Genes are not selfish, nor do they exist in isolation. They work together in large, complex constellations of DNA. DNA is passed on to each new generation, not in the form of individual genes, but in large bundles.

  Rather than ‘selfish genes’, I would prefer to use the term ‘two-faced genes’. Genes can be good or bad, depending on the environment in which they occur. They can result in mental illness or great creativity; in a well-filled physique, which enables the individual to survive in harsh surroundings, but also causes overweight if there are ample amounts of food available. Hypersensitivity to sensory impressions helps the hunter to locate his quarry, but can be disastrous in a classroom or an office. What is good or bad depends on the combination and the context.

  And inherited traits are just the beginning. We are also formed by all our experiences, from the time we are in the womb, and throughout our lives. Our DNA is also affected to some extent by the experiences of previous generations through mechanisms known as epigenetics, which scientists are only just beginning to understand.

  Together, nature and nurture condition our identity and our health. They belong together. Only the very ill-informed now believe there is a contradiction between these two poles; the very ill-informed, and those who are blinded by ideology.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The Legacy of Hitler and Stalin

  Though DNA research is advancing in huge strides, it is dogged by dark forces reminiscent of the totalitarian ideologies of the 1940s.

  The voices that hark back to the Stalinist era are something I have been aware of for a long time. Such tones were commoner 20 years ago, when I started writing about the achievements of the new biotechnology. At that time, I quite often got readers’ letters voicing sweeping prejudices against genetics. Fellow journalists would sometimes demonstrate a total lack of nuance, coming out with forms of words that might have been taken straight from Stalin’s witch trials of biologists. I will never forget the time a cultural commentator who was prominent back then suddenly burst out – and this is a direct quote – that ‘all geneticists are fascists of a kind’.

  A visit to Russia’s Vavilov Institute made me even more sensitive to that sort of knee-jerk criticism of DNA research. The Institute’s premises, still a feature of central St Petersburg, housed the world’s first major seed bank. When stem rust threatens wheat harvests worldwide, when the global climate heats up and drought becomes more widespread, plant breeders will be able to search seed banks like this for resistant genetic material to grow the crops of the future.

  The Institute is named after Nikolai Vavilov, one of the world’s foremost plant geneticists in the first decades of the twentieth century. He travelled on five continents, collecting seeds from wild species and traditional varieties from all the farming environments imaginable. One of the motives that drove him was the desire to end hunger and famine in Russia and the rest of the world. He sought to improve and secure food resources by collecting the raw material for new and better crops. But he was also passionate about fundamental research. He wanted to know where agriculture was first developed. I have found myself thinking of Vavilov a good deal while working on the parts of this book that deal with the genesis of agriculture. If only he had had access to the new DNA studies on wheat, beans and other crops that have enabled today’s geneticists to pinpoint the birthplace of early agriculture as the border regions of Turkey and Syria.

  From 1924 Vavilov was the director of the seed bank in Leningrad, as the city was then called, and he also became the head of the genetics department of the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences. However, in the early 1930s a young agricultural engineer from the Ukraine called Trofim Lysenko began to scheme against him. Lysenko claimed that the importance of genetic traits was overrated. Mendel’s laws of heredity were mistaken, and environmental influences could, in fact, be inherited. Wheat and other crops would be able to adapt to the harsh climate of Siberia if only they were treated in the right way to withstand the cold.

  Lysenko got the ear of Joseph Stalin, as his rhetoric was an excellent match for the prevailing Soviet jargon. Just as the new Soviet man and woman would develop under new, more favourable conditions, so crops would grow stronger, healthier and better in a socialist society. Genes were ‘bourgeois’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’; environment was all. The working conditions of serious Soviet geneticists continued to deteri­orate. Many of them were imprisoned in the 1930s. Vavilov was one of those who kept going longest, although he was clear in his criticism of Lysenko. But in 1940 he was arrested by Stalin’s henchmen. He was imprisoned and sentenced to death. The sentence was subsequently commuted to 20 years’ imprisonment, but Russia’s greatest plant geneticist died of starvation in a gulag in 1943.

  Leningrad was under siege by the Germans at that time, and was cut off for 900 days. At least a million inhabitants died, largely through starvation – nearly half the city’s people. The staff of the seed bank guarded the collections with their lives. They could have made porridge from the oats and pea soup from the stores of dried peas. Yet they did not do so. On my visit to the Vavilov Institute, I saw photographs of 15 members of staff who died at their posts during the siege.

  Lysenko’s erroneous doctrines damaged biological and genetic research in the Soviet Union, China and eastern Europe for many decades after that.

  That is what springs to mind when I hear lazy, sweeping criticisms of genetic research. However, there is another side to this. There are DNA tests on sale in Hungary which, so it is claimed, can establish that the person tested has no Jewish or Roma forebears. A science journalist who used to be well respected, Nicholas Wade of the New York Times, with a background at both Science and Nature, recently published a book that makes a series of problematic assertions. These include his thesis that natural selection has resulted in difference
s in IQ, educational outcomes, political systems and economic development between different parts of the world. Over 100 of the world’s foremost DNA researchers – including Svante Pääbo and Mattias Jakobsson from Sweden, Eske Willerslev from Denmark and the American David Reich – have signed a sharply worded petition in which they distance themselves completely from Wade’s theses. They write: ‘We reject Wade’s implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. They do not.’

  These events hit me hard. Wade was a fellow journalist whom I once respected; he has worked on some of the world’s leading science desks at the world’s most highly respected journals. He has had access to the same published research on genes that I have been following over the last 20 years. And yet he has gone off on the wrong track. Despite everything, he has started to make claims about conclusions that scientists such as Pääbo, Jakobsson, Willerslev and Reich have certainly never drawn.

  I have every confidence in the leading Swedish exponents of genealogical research. They show intelligence and discernment in avoiding the potential pitfalls of both genetics and ethics. Their shared websites contain rebuttals of commentators who draw any far-fetched or erroneous conclusions. They hone the wording they themselves use, so as to avoid any overinter­pretation or misunderstanding of their material.

  Unfortunately, there are other blogs and discussion groups that are less scrupulous. Some of the most deplorable expressions I stumbled across came up when I was trawling the net for information about my paternal grandfather’s haplogroup, R1a. There are a number of people out there in cyberspace who are trying to spread the notion that R1a is an ‘Aryan’ group and that those belonging to it have superior characteristics. Such voices are widely heard in India, but they occur in Europe too.

  That is a very regrettable state of affairs – but it is not a reason to abandon DNA as a new and important tool for researching the origins of humankind. ‘We can’t let Hitler dictate what subjects we can research, 50 years on.’ That was Svante Pääbo’s riposte to the Senate of the Max Planck Society when they were discussing whether it would really be acceptable for Germany to set up a new institute for anthropological research, given the role the old anthropological institute had played in the Holocaust.