ABSTRACT
After Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, was killed in a plane crash near Ndola on 17 September 1961, two of his colleagues began to sort out his estate and personal papers in New York prior to depositing them in a private archive at the Royal Library in Stockholm. In the course of their work they made two discoveries. In Hammarskjöld’s apartment, Per Lind, a staff member of the Swedish foreign ministry who Hammarskjöld had taken with him to New York in 1953, found a manuscript that contained a diary of sorts, together with a covering letter to Leif Belfrage, a former colleague of Hammarskjöld at the foreign ministry. This manuscript, subsequently published as Markings, provided a completely new insight into Hammarskjöld’s personality. Brian Urquhart, who divided the Secretary-General’s personal documents between the UN archive in New York and the private archive in Stockholm, made a second discovery: ‘His papers were arranged in a way as if he wanted to write a moral book on politics’ (Interview 1997).
