Oslo, in addition to being simply a beautiful city in Scandinavia, is famous for at least three things.
It is renowned for boasting the Holmenkollen, arguably the world’s most important venue for Nordic Skiing events; for being the capital of Norway; and, linked to the second more than the first, for forming the venue both of the announcement of the annual recipients of the Peace Nobel Prize and of the awards ceremony itself.
Nobel, you will ask, wasn’t he Swedish? Indeed, Alfred Nobel (1831 – 1900) was a Swedish scientist, entrepreneur, and arms manufacturer. He was also the inventor of dynamite, which links directly to the prizes named after him, and the story goes as follows.
In 1888 Alfred's brother Ludvig died while visiting Cannes, but a French newspaper erroneously published Alfred's obituary instead. It stated, Le marchand de la mort est mort ("The merchant of death is dead") and went on to say, "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday". Alfred, who never had a wife or children, was shocked at what he read and concerned with how he would be remembered.
So being the seriously rich man he was – some of the companies he founded still exist today, such as AkzoNobel – Alfred Nobel in his last will stipulated that after his death the bulk of his estate (it turned out to be 94% of his total assets – now that’s what I call a guilty conscience) should be dedicated to establishing the initial five prizes, to be awarded annually through the Nobel Foundation: Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, and Peace. The first awards were made in 1901, the year after Nobel’s death. In the more recent past, a sixth prize was added, for Economics.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences; the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; the Swedish Academy grants the Nobel Prize in Literature; and the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded not by a Swedish organisation but by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, as per Nobel’s own instructions which reflected the existence in his lifetime of “The United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway”, a personal union of the separate kingdoms of both nations under a common monarch and with a common foreign policy from 1814 to 1905.
And there you have the story behind the third reason for Oslo’s fame. Fun fact!
Just like this one to do with another world-famous Swedish institution – the pop group ABBA, the second best-selling music act of all time, after The Beatles. One of the two female singers in this quartet, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, aka Frida, “the brunette one”, is actually Norwegian. In the interest of full disclosure, and without in the least wanting to discriminate against Swedish blondes in general or the other girl in ABBA, Agnetha Fältskog, in particular – I always did like Frida better, for reasons unrelated to her passport and unsuitable to expand on here and now.
And speaking of nationalities, The Beatles, and the Peace Nobel Prize – last week Friday, 9 October 2015, was a special day as the 2015 winner of the award was announced by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a body of five members appointed by the Parliament in Oslo. By pure coincidence – or maybe not? – it was also the 75th birthday of John Lennon, tragically gunned down with four shots in the back by Mark David Chapman, a crazy “fan” who ambushed him on his return to his apartment in the Dakota building on the Upper West Side in New York City at 10:50 pm on 8 December 1980. Earlier that evening, as he was going out, Lennon had autographed a copy of his album (in today’s terms, I guess you would speak of a “playlist”) Double Fantasy, released only three weeks before, for his killer.
Chapman was sentenced to 20 years to life for second-degree murder. He is still in prison, with parole having been denied him eight times to date.
For me, this is one of those events where I will always remember where I was (in my student’s digs in Heidelberg, Germany), who I was with (my girlfriend), and what I was doing (listening to the radio while having breakfast), when hearing the news. I did not go to my morning classes that day.
In fact, it’s probably in my personal Top Three, alongside the murder of John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963 (playing tennis, alone, against the wall of our house in Casablanca, Morocco; my father called my mother from the office with the news, and she came outside to tell me, just as I was perfecting my serve); and the landing on the moon on 20 July 1969 (staring into the night skies with my family from our garden in Lower Hutt, New Zealand – I was very excited about manned space travel back then).
What are your Top Three?
I confess to having had to look up the date of the moon landing just now – but not that of Kennedy’s assassination. And you know why? Because there is a novel by Stephen King, published in 2011 and simply entitled 11/22/63 that centres around this event, exploring very intelligently the intriguing but in the end unanswerable question whether a time traveller from our present – transported back through a mysterious portal to the year 1958 with the knowledge of what would happen on that fateful day in November 1963 – should interfere, prevent the murder, and thereby change history. What if?
At the time of the book’s publication, The New York Times ran an interesting interview with Stephen King, conducted by Errol Morris, a maker of documentary films, who was in parallel working on the same theme, Kennedy’s assassination:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/errol-morris-interviews-stephen-king/?_r=1
Morris also reviewed the novel for the NYT Sunday Book Review (“Stephen King Goes to the Rescue of JFK”):
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/books/review/11-22-63-by-stephen-king-book-review.html
I found it fascinating to see how King mixed his fictional phantasy with historical fact – and in the interview he talks about the extensive research he conducted around this project – and how this contrasts, or not, with the approach taken by a documentary filmmaker, or an historian for that matter.
Before leaving the subject of time travel, please let me draw your attention to a major event to take place next week. On Wednesday 21 October 2015, Marty McFly will arrive in our midst according to Back to the Future Part II. If you have the time between now and then, watch the movie to see what the script writers in 1989 thought we would have invented and developed over those 26 years in terms of break-through technologies, useful everyday equipment, and fun gimmicks. I think you will then agree they seriously overestimated mankind’s ingenuity: we still don’t have flying cars, robotic dog walkers, or, importantly, hover boards – skate boards that levitate on a cushion of air. A lot of hot air, it would appear with hindsight.
But then, the year 1984 thankfully didn’t live up to George Orwell’s very pessimistic expectations in his novel 1984, published in 1949, either.
To quote Yogi Berra: “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
Meanwhile, back in Oslo, the Norwegian Parliament’s Group of Five Wise People awarded the Peace Nobel Prize to The Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet "for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011".
And while I seriously salute the efforts of the Tunisians to rescue a semblance of freedom and democratic structures from the Arab Spring that they triggered; that then quickly spread like a bushfire across the region; and that has since spectacularly gone wrong everywhere else – I have to admit I was disappointed on reading the Breaking News on the day.
You see, my money was on another candidate from the list of nominees: I was hoping for the German Chancellor, Dr Angela Merkel to be awarded the Peace Nobel Prize for 2015.
“Angie”, as her fans and followers in Germany like calling her (years ago, at one party conference of the Christian Democratic Union she leads, they actually played the eponymous Rolling Stones hit of 1973 as she took the stage, and it has stuck ever since), had been proposed for her contribution in February to brokering a truce between Russia, the pro-Russian separatist rebels, and the Ukraine, helping to deflate arguably the most dangerous situation in Europe since 1945. Raised in the former East Germany and fluent in Russian, it is said she “gets” Vladimir Putin – who, in turn, during the Cold War was stationed in East Germany as a KGB agent and speaks excellent German – more than other western politicians.
The deadline for nominations had expired before the avalanche of human misery making its way across the Balkans we have witnessed over the summer materialised, so her decision to open her country’s borders to anyone who would care to come and make it there – while the other “leaders” of European countries were either grandstanding on the minutiae of EU law, quibbling over immigration quotas to fulfil by 2020, or simply building walls and fences – didn’t even feature in the deliberations on whom to award the Prize.
I wish it had as I can’t imagine it would not have tilted the balance in her favour, and deservedly so.
Angela Merkel would have been only the second German recipient in my lifetime after Willy Brandt (1913 – 1992), the fourth Chancellor of The Federal Republic of (West) Germany, and the first Social Democrat holding this office, from 1969 to 1974. In his prior political career he had also been Governing Mayor of (West) Berlin between 1957 and 1966, years of rising tensions in the relations between the West and the Soviet Union which led in August 1961 to the erection of the Berlin Wall and the fortification of the 1,393 kilometre-long “border” between the eastern and the western parts of Germany – with barbed wire, strips of no-man’s land with minefields, and interspersed at regular intervals with watchtowers manned by soldiers under order to shoot to kill should anyone seek to flee from the Socialist paradise called the German Democratic Republic. Still many did, and many died trying.
As Mayor, Brandt hosted John F. Kennedy in Berlin where the American President held one of his most famous speeches. In front of 450,000 people, on 26 June 1963, he said:
Standing on a podium in front of the western side of the Brandenburg Gate, on 12 June 1987, Ronald Reagan addressed directly the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union:
Anyhow, to try to retell Willy Brandt’s life and times and achievements in one blog post would be embarking on a mission doomed to fail. But because it fits in so neatly with the theme of the Peace Nobel Prize, I will point out that he had a special relationship with Norway and the Norwegians.
Born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm in the German port city of Lübeck on the Baltic Sea in 1913, as a very young man he already got involved with the Socialist political movement and fled to Norway in 1933 to escape the Nazis, taking on the pseudonym Willy Brandt and becoming a Norwegian citizen in 1940, by which time he had moved on from then German-occupied Norway to live in neutral Sweden. The first two of his three wives were both Norwegians. The second, Rut Brandt, née Hansen, was Germany’s First Lady during Brandt’s tenure as Chancellor, and a highly respected and well-liked one at that.
Brandt was awarded the Peace Nobel Prize in 1971 in recognition of his efforts to strengthen cooperation in Western Europe through the European Economic Community (a precursor of the European Union) and, more importantly, to achieve reconciliation between West Germany and the countries of Eastern Europe.
This Neue Ostpolitik (New Eastern Policy) – aimed at creating a degree of normalisation in relations with East Germany and also in reaching some kind of détente with the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Eastern Bloc (Communist) countries – was more than a little controversial as it entailed giving up the claim for all the German territories in the East lost after World War II and now mostly parts of Russia and Poland. And it was driven by someone who had fled his country in 1933 and, allegedly, worked with Norwegian resistance fighters whose aim it was to kill as many German soldiers as possible.
A seminal moment came in December 1970 with the famous Warschauer Kniefall when Brandt, apparently spontaneously, knelt down at the monument to victims, either killed or deported to concentration camps for extermination, of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during the German military occupation of Poland. Check out the photo that made it to the cover page of just about every print publication on the planet.
Time magazine in the U.S. named Brandt as its “Man of the Year” for 1970, stating, “Willy Brandt is in effect seeking to end World War II by bringing about a fresh relationship between East and West. He is trying to accept the real situation in Europe, which has lasted for 25 years, but he is also trying to bring about a new reality in his bold approach to the Soviet Union and the East Bloc.”
And in 1971, the Norwegian Committee awarded Willy Brandt the Peace Nobel Prize.
A huge fan of Brandt’s at the time, in my youthful enthusiasm I wrote him a letter to congratulate him, and through some twist of luck, I made it into the limited number of people to whom he actually replied.
To this day, I hold as one of my most cherished possessions (and yes, it has survived my traumatic recent house move, its related down-sizing program, and its drastic de-cluttering drive) a card, a piece of thick, luxurious stationery, embossed at the top with the seal of the Federal Chancellor and the words “Der Bundeskanzler”, and hand-written on it in black ink the following words (translated from German):
Pretty cool, right?
A man of immense civil courage who always stood by his convictions, Willy Brandt resigned from the office of Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany on 7 May 1974 after Günter Guillaume, one of his closest aides, was exposed as an agent of the Stasi, the East German secret service. A lot of other politicians would have stayed put and instead let some heads roll at the security agencies responsible for a fiasco of such epic dimensions.
In the hilarious satirical movie Burn After Reading (2008), directed by the Coen brothers, a senior CIA official coins a wonderful term to characterise an operation seriously gone wrong, calling it a “cluster fuck”.
Back in the present and after last week’s decision, I will now have to wait at least another year for Germany’s next recipient of the Peace Nobel Prize – just as I will continue patiently rooting for Bob Dylan to be given the award for Literature one day.
As I am writing this, a TV news show is running in the background – on weekends, they alternate with football games, as my wife will testify to with a degree of exasperation.
And I am reminded in no uncertain terms of another anniversary to be celebrated: 70 years of dictatorship in The Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea, marked by an equally frightening and pathetic show of military force and carefully choreographed mass hysteria in the big open squares of its capital, Pyongyang, where on normal days nothing much happens. George Orwell would have loved it.
According to the regime’s official website, “The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a genuine workers' state in which all the people are completely liberated from exploitation and oppression. The workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals are the true masters of their destiny and are in a unique position to defend their interests.”
By contrast, if you want to know everything about what life is really like for the subjects of the Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un (and his father and grandfather before him), please read the novel by Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son (2012), winner of The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013.
For the citizens of the South Korean capital Seoul, just a short missile’s flight south of the Military Demarcation Line that to this day serves as the last remnant of the Cold War and keeps the Korean nation waiting for the reunification Germany was allowed to achieve in 1990 (this one a happy 25th anniversary celebrated also only a few days ago, on 3 October 2015) – and which Willy Brandt was still allowed to witness, famously commenting: “Jetzt wächst zusammen, was zusammengehört.” (“Now grows together what belongs together.”) – I guess the scary side of those celebrations north of the border outweighed the amusement.
Then I saw an interview with the Danish (for once in this post, not Norwegian) politician Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former Prime Minister of his country and most recently Secretary General of NATO, philosophising about Article 5 of the NATO Treaty in the context of Russian incursions into NATO member Turkey’s airspace. The famous Article 5 stipulates an attack on one Member State is considered an assault on the whole of the Organisation, automatically leading to joint retaliation.
And finally, speaking of Turkey where I have friends, the bombings in its capital Ankara, claiming, at the latest count, 128 lives with many more injured, would be enough just on their own to make you feel bewildered, depressed, and hopeless.
In addition to all the wonderful music John Lennon left to posterity as a member of The Beatles, there are also a couple of songs worth remembering from his later solo efforts.
One is “Imagine” (1971) that became a ready anthem for anti-war movements everywhere. And then, at least for our context, there’s another one released in July 1969.
Following his untimely violent death, John Lennon was cremated and his ashes scattered on the west side of Central Park. Today, there’s a memorial in that spot, named after one of his most famous Beatles compositions.
“Strawberry Fields” was dedicated on what would have been his 45th birthday, 9 October 1985, by New York Mayor Ed Koch and Lennon's widow Yoko Ono. The entrance is located on Central Park West at West 72nd Street, directly across from the Dakota Apartments building. The memorial is a triangular piece of land falling away on the two sides of the park, and its focal point is a circular pathway mosaic of inlaid stones, with a single word, the title of Lennon's famous song: "Imagine".
Next time you come to The Big Apple, and if you haven’t done so already, go visit.
That other song? It’s the title of this post.
“All we are saying
Is give Peace a chance”
If we try, who knows – maybe we’ll like it.
Nobel, you will ask, wasn’t he Swedish? Indeed, Alfred Nobel (1831 – 1900) was a Swedish scientist, entrepreneur, and arms manufacturer. He was also the inventor of dynamite, which links directly to the prizes named after him, and the story goes as follows.
In 1888 Alfred's brother Ludvig died while visiting Cannes, but a French newspaper erroneously published Alfred's obituary instead. It stated, Le marchand de la mort est mort ("The merchant of death is dead") and went on to say, "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday". Alfred, who never had a wife or children, was shocked at what he read and concerned with how he would be remembered.
So being the seriously rich man he was – some of the companies he founded still exist today, such as AkzoNobel – Alfred Nobel in his last will stipulated that after his death the bulk of his estate (it turned out to be 94% of his total assets – now that’s what I call a guilty conscience) should be dedicated to establishing the initial five prizes, to be awarded annually through the Nobel Foundation: Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, and Peace. The first awards were made in 1901, the year after Nobel’s death. In the more recent past, a sixth prize was added, for Economics.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences; the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; the Swedish Academy grants the Nobel Prize in Literature; and the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded not by a Swedish organisation but by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, as per Nobel’s own instructions which reflected the existence in his lifetime of “The United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway”, a personal union of the separate kingdoms of both nations under a common monarch and with a common foreign policy from 1814 to 1905.
And there you have the story behind the third reason for Oslo’s fame. Fun fact!
Just like this one to do with another world-famous Swedish institution – the pop group ABBA, the second best-selling music act of all time, after The Beatles. One of the two female singers in this quartet, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, aka Frida, “the brunette one”, is actually Norwegian. In the interest of full disclosure, and without in the least wanting to discriminate against Swedish blondes in general or the other girl in ABBA, Agnetha Fältskog, in particular – I always did like Frida better, for reasons unrelated to her passport and unsuitable to expand on here and now.
And speaking of nationalities, The Beatles, and the Peace Nobel Prize – last week Friday, 9 October 2015, was a special day as the 2015 winner of the award was announced by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a body of five members appointed by the Parliament in Oslo. By pure coincidence – or maybe not? – it was also the 75th birthday of John Lennon, tragically gunned down with four shots in the back by Mark David Chapman, a crazy “fan” who ambushed him on his return to his apartment in the Dakota building on the Upper West Side in New York City at 10:50 pm on 8 December 1980. Earlier that evening, as he was going out, Lennon had autographed a copy of his album (in today’s terms, I guess you would speak of a “playlist”) Double Fantasy, released only three weeks before, for his killer.
Chapman was sentenced to 20 years to life for second-degree murder. He is still in prison, with parole having been denied him eight times to date.
For me, this is one of those events where I will always remember where I was (in my student’s digs in Heidelberg, Germany), who I was with (my girlfriend), and what I was doing (listening to the radio while having breakfast), when hearing the news. I did not go to my morning classes that day.
In fact, it’s probably in my personal Top Three, alongside the murder of John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963 (playing tennis, alone, against the wall of our house in Casablanca, Morocco; my father called my mother from the office with the news, and she came outside to tell me, just as I was perfecting my serve); and the landing on the moon on 20 July 1969 (staring into the night skies with my family from our garden in Lower Hutt, New Zealand – I was very excited about manned space travel back then).
What are your Top Three?
I confess to having had to look up the date of the moon landing just now – but not that of Kennedy’s assassination. And you know why? Because there is a novel by Stephen King, published in 2011 and simply entitled 11/22/63 that centres around this event, exploring very intelligently the intriguing but in the end unanswerable question whether a time traveller from our present – transported back through a mysterious portal to the year 1958 with the knowledge of what would happen on that fateful day in November 1963 – should interfere, prevent the murder, and thereby change history. What if?
At the time of the book’s publication, The New York Times ran an interesting interview with Stephen King, conducted by Errol Morris, a maker of documentary films, who was in parallel working on the same theme, Kennedy’s assassination:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/errol-morris-interviews-stephen-king/?_r=1
Morris also reviewed the novel for the NYT Sunday Book Review (“Stephen King Goes to the Rescue of JFK”):
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/books/review/11-22-63-by-stephen-king-book-review.html
I found it fascinating to see how King mixed his fictional phantasy with historical fact – and in the interview he talks about the extensive research he conducted around this project – and how this contrasts, or not, with the approach taken by a documentary filmmaker, or an historian for that matter.
Before leaving the subject of time travel, please let me draw your attention to a major event to take place next week. On Wednesday 21 October 2015, Marty McFly will arrive in our midst according to Back to the Future Part II. If you have the time between now and then, watch the movie to see what the script writers in 1989 thought we would have invented and developed over those 26 years in terms of break-through technologies, useful everyday equipment, and fun gimmicks. I think you will then agree they seriously overestimated mankind’s ingenuity: we still don’t have flying cars, robotic dog walkers, or, importantly, hover boards – skate boards that levitate on a cushion of air. A lot of hot air, it would appear with hindsight.
But then, the year 1984 thankfully didn’t live up to George Orwell’s very pessimistic expectations in his novel 1984, published in 1949, either.
To quote Yogi Berra: “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
Meanwhile, back in Oslo, the Norwegian Parliament’s Group of Five Wise People awarded the Peace Nobel Prize to The Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet "for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011".
And while I seriously salute the efforts of the Tunisians to rescue a semblance of freedom and democratic structures from the Arab Spring that they triggered; that then quickly spread like a bushfire across the region; and that has since spectacularly gone wrong everywhere else – I have to admit I was disappointed on reading the Breaking News on the day.
You see, my money was on another candidate from the list of nominees: I was hoping for the German Chancellor, Dr Angela Merkel to be awarded the Peace Nobel Prize for 2015.
“Angie”, as her fans and followers in Germany like calling her (years ago, at one party conference of the Christian Democratic Union she leads, they actually played the eponymous Rolling Stones hit of 1973 as she took the stage, and it has stuck ever since), had been proposed for her contribution in February to brokering a truce between Russia, the pro-Russian separatist rebels, and the Ukraine, helping to deflate arguably the most dangerous situation in Europe since 1945. Raised in the former East Germany and fluent in Russian, it is said she “gets” Vladimir Putin – who, in turn, during the Cold War was stationed in East Germany as a KGB agent and speaks excellent German – more than other western politicians.
The deadline for nominations had expired before the avalanche of human misery making its way across the Balkans we have witnessed over the summer materialised, so her decision to open her country’s borders to anyone who would care to come and make it there – while the other “leaders” of European countries were either grandstanding on the minutiae of EU law, quibbling over immigration quotas to fulfil by 2020, or simply building walls and fences – didn’t even feature in the deliberations on whom to award the Prize.
I wish it had as I can’t imagine it would not have tilted the balance in her favour, and deservedly so.
Angela Merkel would have been only the second German recipient in my lifetime after Willy Brandt (1913 – 1992), the fourth Chancellor of The Federal Republic of (West) Germany, and the first Social Democrat holding this office, from 1969 to 1974. In his prior political career he had also been Governing Mayor of (West) Berlin between 1957 and 1966, years of rising tensions in the relations between the West and the Soviet Union which led in August 1961 to the erection of the Berlin Wall and the fortification of the 1,393 kilometre-long “border” between the eastern and the western parts of Germany – with barbed wire, strips of no-man’s land with minefields, and interspersed at regular intervals with watchtowers manned by soldiers under order to shoot to kill should anyone seek to flee from the Socialist paradise called the German Democratic Republic. Still many did, and many died trying.
As Mayor, Brandt hosted John F. Kennedy in Berlin where the American President held one of his most famous speeches. In front of 450,000 people, on 26 June 1963, he said:
“Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum ["I am a Roman citizen"]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is "Ich bin ein Berliner!"... All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner!”A quarter of a century later, as the Cold War was nearing its end, a very different type of U. S. President visiting West Berlin would hold an equally historic speech.
Standing on a podium in front of the western side of the Brandenburg Gate, on 12 June 1987, Ronald Reagan addressed directly the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union:
“We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”Reagan later on his speech added:
"As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner, 'This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.' Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom."Please note the use of the tricolon technique in both quotes from Reagan’s address (underlined) – he had great speech writers, one of whom years later became my boss, but that’s another story.
Anyhow, to try to retell Willy Brandt’s life and times and achievements in one blog post would be embarking on a mission doomed to fail. But because it fits in so neatly with the theme of the Peace Nobel Prize, I will point out that he had a special relationship with Norway and the Norwegians.
Born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm in the German port city of Lübeck on the Baltic Sea in 1913, as a very young man he already got involved with the Socialist political movement and fled to Norway in 1933 to escape the Nazis, taking on the pseudonym Willy Brandt and becoming a Norwegian citizen in 1940, by which time he had moved on from then German-occupied Norway to live in neutral Sweden. The first two of his three wives were both Norwegians. The second, Rut Brandt, née Hansen, was Germany’s First Lady during Brandt’s tenure as Chancellor, and a highly respected and well-liked one at that.
Brandt was awarded the Peace Nobel Prize in 1971 in recognition of his efforts to strengthen cooperation in Western Europe through the European Economic Community (a precursor of the European Union) and, more importantly, to achieve reconciliation between West Germany and the countries of Eastern Europe.
This Neue Ostpolitik (New Eastern Policy) – aimed at creating a degree of normalisation in relations with East Germany and also in reaching some kind of détente with the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Eastern Bloc (Communist) countries – was more than a little controversial as it entailed giving up the claim for all the German territories in the East lost after World War II and now mostly parts of Russia and Poland. And it was driven by someone who had fled his country in 1933 and, allegedly, worked with Norwegian resistance fighters whose aim it was to kill as many German soldiers as possible.
A seminal moment came in December 1970 with the famous Warschauer Kniefall when Brandt, apparently spontaneously, knelt down at the monument to victims, either killed or deported to concentration camps for extermination, of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during the German military occupation of Poland. Check out the photo that made it to the cover page of just about every print publication on the planet.
Time magazine in the U.S. named Brandt as its “Man of the Year” for 1970, stating, “Willy Brandt is in effect seeking to end World War II by bringing about a fresh relationship between East and West. He is trying to accept the real situation in Europe, which has lasted for 25 years, but he is also trying to bring about a new reality in his bold approach to the Soviet Union and the East Bloc.”
And in 1971, the Norwegian Committee awarded Willy Brandt the Peace Nobel Prize.
A huge fan of Brandt’s at the time, in my youthful enthusiasm I wrote him a letter to congratulate him, and through some twist of luck, I made it into the limited number of people to whom he actually replied.
To this day, I hold as one of my most cherished possessions (and yes, it has survived my traumatic recent house move, its related down-sizing program, and its drastic de-cluttering drive) a card, a piece of thick, luxurious stationery, embossed at the top with the seal of the Federal Chancellor and the words “Der Bundeskanzler”, and hand-written on it in black ink the following words (translated from German):
“I thank you for your note of congratulation on being awarded the Peace Nobel Prize. I am encouraged this is considered by so many as something that is to do with all of us. Best wishes, Willy Brandt”And there is a slight smudge at the end of his signature where obviously the blotter he used slid under his hand.
Pretty cool, right?
A man of immense civil courage who always stood by his convictions, Willy Brandt resigned from the office of Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany on 7 May 1974 after Günter Guillaume, one of his closest aides, was exposed as an agent of the Stasi, the East German secret service. A lot of other politicians would have stayed put and instead let some heads roll at the security agencies responsible for a fiasco of such epic dimensions.
In the hilarious satirical movie Burn After Reading (2008), directed by the Coen brothers, a senior CIA official coins a wonderful term to characterise an operation seriously gone wrong, calling it a “cluster fuck”.
Back in the present and after last week’s decision, I will now have to wait at least another year for Germany’s next recipient of the Peace Nobel Prize – just as I will continue patiently rooting for Bob Dylan to be given the award for Literature one day.
As I am writing this, a TV news show is running in the background – on weekends, they alternate with football games, as my wife will testify to with a degree of exasperation.
And I am reminded in no uncertain terms of another anniversary to be celebrated: 70 years of dictatorship in The Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea, marked by an equally frightening and pathetic show of military force and carefully choreographed mass hysteria in the big open squares of its capital, Pyongyang, where on normal days nothing much happens. George Orwell would have loved it.
According to the regime’s official website, “The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a genuine workers' state in which all the people are completely liberated from exploitation and oppression. The workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals are the true masters of their destiny and are in a unique position to defend their interests.”
By contrast, if you want to know everything about what life is really like for the subjects of the Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un (and his father and grandfather before him), please read the novel by Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son (2012), winner of The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013.
For the citizens of the South Korean capital Seoul, just a short missile’s flight south of the Military Demarcation Line that to this day serves as the last remnant of the Cold War and keeps the Korean nation waiting for the reunification Germany was allowed to achieve in 1990 (this one a happy 25th anniversary celebrated also only a few days ago, on 3 October 2015) – and which Willy Brandt was still allowed to witness, famously commenting: “Jetzt wächst zusammen, was zusammengehört.” (“Now grows together what belongs together.”) – I guess the scary side of those celebrations north of the border outweighed the amusement.
Then I saw an interview with the Danish (for once in this post, not Norwegian) politician Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former Prime Minister of his country and most recently Secretary General of NATO, philosophising about Article 5 of the NATO Treaty in the context of Russian incursions into NATO member Turkey’s airspace. The famous Article 5 stipulates an attack on one Member State is considered an assault on the whole of the Organisation, automatically leading to joint retaliation.
And finally, speaking of Turkey where I have friends, the bombings in its capital Ankara, claiming, at the latest count, 128 lives with many more injured, would be enough just on their own to make you feel bewildered, depressed, and hopeless.
In addition to all the wonderful music John Lennon left to posterity as a member of The Beatles, there are also a couple of songs worth remembering from his later solo efforts.
One is “Imagine” (1971) that became a ready anthem for anti-war movements everywhere. And then, at least for our context, there’s another one released in July 1969.
Following his untimely violent death, John Lennon was cremated and his ashes scattered on the west side of Central Park. Today, there’s a memorial in that spot, named after one of his most famous Beatles compositions.
“Strawberry Fields” was dedicated on what would have been his 45th birthday, 9 October 1985, by New York Mayor Ed Koch and Lennon's widow Yoko Ono. The entrance is located on Central Park West at West 72nd Street, directly across from the Dakota Apartments building. The memorial is a triangular piece of land falling away on the two sides of the park, and its focal point is a circular pathway mosaic of inlaid stones, with a single word, the title of Lennon's famous song: "Imagine".
Next time you come to The Big Apple, and if you haven’t done so already, go visit.
That other song? It’s the title of this post.
“All we are saying
Is give Peace a chance”
If we try, who knows – maybe we’ll like it.
