[1] His father was a social democratic figure and worked for the Gothenburg-based news magazine Ny Tid as a foreign editor in the 1940s.
[4] Backlund mediated secret meetings between Willy Brandt, then Mayor of West Berlin, and Pyotr Abrasimov, ambassador of Soviet Union to East Germany, which were held at the Swedish Embassy in Berlin in November 1966.
[4] Backlund was appointed ambassador of Sweden to West Germany in 1972 and remained in office until June 1983.
[4][9] Throughout his diplomatic tenure in West Germany Backlund was one of the people who helped East Germans to flee.
[10] In the report Backlund argued that if Franz Josef Strauss, head of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, would become prime minister, then the relations between two countries would be problematic.