_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [15]
1999 was the year of greatest change and greatest risk. Stieg decided to leave TT, as I’ve already noted, and extreme-right violence in Sweden increased dramatically. Once more, Stieg paid homage in The Millennium Trilogy to an “ordinary hero” through his inclusion of Hallvigs Reklam AB in Morgongava (in Uppsala County, just north of Stockholm), the publishing company that took over from the one that stopped printing Expo after receiving serious threats. The owner of Hallvigs, Jan Kobin, made a great impression on Stieg because he didn’t hesitate to use his own car to ensure that every last issue of Expo was delivered on time, and I was pleased when he was named Sweden’s Businessman of the Year in 2007. In the first book of the trilogy, Mikael Blomkvist entrusts to Jan Kobin the printing of his book on the Wennerstrom affair and the special issue of Millennium that will reveal this scandal. In the second volume, Blomkvist again puts his faith in the printer who offers “the best price and service in the industry,” giving him Dag’s book on the sex-trafficking networks in Eastern Europe. And in the third volume, it’s Kobin again who prints the book exposing the Section, the secret organization of spies created during the Cold War.
Expo continued to survive as best it could thanks to the very things that power the magazine Millennium: the enthusiasm of all sorts of people for a common project in which they strongly believe. In a scene in The Girl Who Played with Fire, Erika Berger prepares coffee in the magazine office’s kitchenette, and Stieg has her smiling at the sight of so many mismatched mugs all bearing the logos of different political parties. It was an affectionate wink at Expo, where the cups were as varied as the opinions of the journalists, who were allowed to support any party they wanted—but not as active members. This strict rule guaranteed the independence of the magazine, so that it would never be caught up in political rivalries.
After years of dependence on other publications, Expo officially resurfaced in 2003 thanks to grants we obtained to fund two projects: school programs fostering the culture of democracy among young people, and the production of RAXEN reports for the EUMC. These reports by the Racism and Xenophobia European Network for the EU’s Monitoring Centre examined the incidence of racial discrimination and racist crimes in various sectors such as housing and employment.
So a few salaries were assured, one of them Stieg’s. We had a new team, still as young as before but more professional, most of whom had journalistic experience. I dealt only with those RAXEN reports, which I fact-checked, completed, or translated into English. It was a rather “dry” job, sort of like editing, but a necessary one, since the reports were our main source of income. I remember our New Year’s Eve in 2002, when we worked through the night on a report that absolutely had to be delivered by January 1. A few of our fellow workers peeled off at some point to go celebrate, but we “old folks” stayed on to meet our deadline.
Throughout our years of political struggle against the extreme right, Stieg wrote constantly, hoping to sound the alarm about nationalist political parties like the Sweden Democrats. He tried to show that they weren’t simply a gang of madmen plotting to infiltrate Swedish society (as one conspiracy theory had it), but a real political movement that had to be combated through political means. Given what is happening in Sweden today, with the SD now represented in the Swedish Parliament, it seems clear that Stieg’s nightmare has come true….
Threats
WHEN HE began writing for Searchlight and its antifascist agenda, Stieg, too, became a hated enemy of the far right. In the spring of 1991, he published Extremhogern (Right-Wing Extremism) with Anna-Lena Lodenius. The book provided an overview of all the groups and parties at that end of