Once there was a little toffle

Travels through Germany

It is the 1930s and very unusual for a young woman to travel alone. But since Tove Jansson has relatives in Velbert, Germany, she takes the opportunity to travel across the continent in 1934. She notices the widespread nationalist spirit and illustrates it in her notebooks. As she travels through Nuremberg, she depicts a distinctly hostile city.

The image of Germany she creates is far from romanticised. In the short story Brevet [The Letter], she expresses the horrors of life in Munich through the impoverished and unhappy Mr Vöpel who has sunk into a “grey cloak of meaninglessness.” Unable to afford travel, he looks enviously upon the happy globe-trotters at the train station.

Tove Jansson considers herself a liberal, joking that she is hopelessly bourgeois, despite the fact that her father calls her left-wing on account of the sort of company she keeps. In her social life among the Helsinki literati of the late 1930s, conversations are increasingly moving from art to politics and the impending war.

Hitler cries: “More cake!!!”

As early as 1935, Tove Jansson produces an illustration for Garm wherein a customer wants to buy a doll that says “mama”, but the toy shop exclusively stocks dolls that say “Heil Hitler.” The spread of fascism is seeping into the everyday lives of normal members of society, including women and children, and having a concrete effect. Garm is a progressive satirical magazine, outspokenly critical of dictatorship, with anti-fascism as one of their core values.

Tove Jansson first appears on the cover of Garm in 1938, with a startling image of Hitler sitting on top of a warehouse of explosives. This is the year that the German army expands into Central Europe, and at the fateful Munich Conference, Hitler is given free rein in Czechoslovakia. Just a few weeks later, Tove Jansson portrays the German Führer as a spoiled child, surrounded by adults trying to appease him with cakes. Hitler cries: “More cake!!!” while surrounded by cakes with names like Alsace-Lorraine and the Polish Corridor.

These restrictive boundaries, this racial hatred

Tove Jansson also speaks out when fascism rears its ugly head in unexpected situations. While studying in Paris in the mid-30s, she spends time in Le Dôme Café with people who turn out to be Finnish nationalists (so-called “genuine Finns”). In a letter to her family, she writes:

“I didn’t say a word for an hour and a half, but then I couldn’t hold it in any longer and told them it was the curse of the world, these restrictive boundaries, this racial hatred, this linguistic baiting, this petty ‘you-can’t-play-in-our-yard’, this ludicrous labelling, and next time they showed any tendency to start hacking on about politics, I would just get up and leave.” Letters from Tove

In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, Tove Jansson takes a trip to Italy. After staying in a hotel called Germania, she is inspired to pen the short story Aldrig mera Capri [Never Again Capri!] in which the island is invaded by German tourists. “Aryan white and hygienic all around,” the narrator thinks, wondering where authentic Italy is hiding and why on earth she has come to Italy to eat German cuisine.

Censored Stalin

While stuck in Helsinki during the war in the 1940s, Tove Jansson increases her contributions to Garm. She often includes the infamous swastika on her cover illustrations and makes copious allusions to the atrocities of her native country.

During the peace negotiations between Finland and the Soviet Union, her depiction of Stalin is censored. The illustration for Garm (1940 no. 1 & 2) jokes about the size of Stalin’s sword. For the picture to be approved, she has to change his physicality and give him a bushy beard, so that he might be interpreted as any typical Russian soldier.

But drawing caricatures of famous people is only a tiny fraction of Tove Jansson’s work. Portraits are not her main strength, after all. Most of her pictures for Garm deal with everyday life in a war-torn country and the experiences of the ordinary individual. In the New Year issue of 1943, she depicts the old year 1942 with its arms full of war-related debris, which it hands over to the innocent year 1943. She shows eternal sympathy for those crushed under the burdens of war, coupled with a talent for representing the absurd, and even comical, in ever more trying times.

Tove Jansson decorates the bathroom wall of her studio with a collage of newspaper clippings about horrific disasters: the flooding of the Seine, tornadoes and sinking ships. A proper storm never fails to inspire, bringing stories to life with the threat of catastrophe. Master of horror literature Edgar Allan Poe is one of her favourite authors, and his macabre style can be seen reflected in some of her short stories. It is a dream of Tove’s to illustrate Poe.

Anxiety in Wonderland

Tove Jansson is invited to illustrate a new Swedish edition of Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic Alice in Wonderland, and accepts even though she is very busy and usually rejects external assignments. She has previously illustrated Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and one of the reasons she says yes to Alice is that the request comes from publisher Åke Runnquist, a friend and important professional contact.

Another reason why Tove accepts is that it gives her the opportunity to communicate the feeling of horror she experienced on reading the book in childhood. She remembers perceiving the anxiety permeating Lewis Carroll’s work when she read it as a child.

“These stories are terrifying. Can I draw them in horror style? The way I saw them when I was little. (I love horror stories nowadays, too).” Letters from Tove

Tove Jansson wishes she could make her illustrations even bolder, creating deeper, darker landscapes to bring her vision of a nightmarish Wonderland to life. Could the book really be aimed at adults? On the publisher’s request, she keeps the pictures relatively tame, otherwise the result would have been a genuine horror book.

Still, the landscape of Wonderland remains surreal, and she explores the potential for more adult interpretations of its symbolism, with Wonderland read as a reference to Freudian ideas of repressed desire. It is an engaging but difficult assignment resulting in eerie pictures in a muted colour palette.

House of horrors and delight à la Gorey

Tove Jansson’s aesthetic takes inspiration from the similarly suggestive and humorous style of American illustrator and author Edward Gorey. She writes a short story dedicated to him in which she weaves in her artistic motto: “What is merely hinted at is much more important than what is clearly shown.”

In the short story Black-White, the protagonist is coming up against problems illustrating a horror anthology and, on the suggestion of his wife Stella, moves into a dilapidated old turreted house high on a hill. It’s a real house of horrors with a basement filled with water.

The illustrations all come out grey, and while he thinks the problem is too much white, his wife Stella claims that the problem is in fact too much black. He wants to make the pictures dark and dominating, like the glistening black water in the basement.

The illustrator stops drawing pictures for the anthology and focuses instead on drawing the house where he is staying. He unleashes himself into his art, and dark cracks in the walls take over all the white.

“Stella, do you know what it feels like to see everything grey and cautious all your life and to always try to do your best but all you get is tired? And then suddenly you know, you know with absolute certainty.” Black-White

Only desire can drive true creation, anything else would be tired and grey. At their best, passion projects result in fully realised, liberated art, overflowing with excitement. What a thrilling feeling it is – to know with absolute certainty.