Table Of Contents

MY WAR – PART 1 1944-45

Table Of Contents

THE VOLUNTEER SYSTEM

LABOUR SERVICE

MILITARY SERVICE

THE RUSSIANS ON THE BORDERS

WITTSTOCK THE PARACHUTE TRAINING CAMP

MARCHING ORDERS

THE ITALIAN “THEATRE” OF WAR?

THE FINAL RETREAT

LIBERATION OR PRISONER OF WAR?

In the 1940th our school was visited by a group of officers “who looked us over”. They were SS officers and there were a number of boys with yellow hairs and blue eyes whose names they took down. I did not realize then how lucky I was to have been dark among a larger number of blue eyed boys.

There was a system to get volunteers. If one volunteered for military service one could get a short deferrement in order to finish ones school examination. In the end they got you anyhow within  the same time because the “Labour Service” (Arbeitsdienst) was shortened from 6 to 3 months for those who volunteered.

I volunteered for the Air Force partly because I liked glider flying and partly one did not get into the direct frontline service immediately, at least so I thought.

After a medical examination they discoverd that I had a very slight heart problem and was not fit to fly. They suggested therefore the Airforce Communication Service, as wireless operator etc.  This also sounded better than the infantry in the cold prospects of winter at the Russian front.

LABOUR SERVICE

During the summer of 1944 (at the age of 16 years – or not quite 17 years old) I was thus inducted into the Labour Service. I think this must have been a kind of public relations ploy because we were put into the open, flat countryside together with lots of civilian Polish citicens and we had to dig ditches across the fields of the wide open landscape

These were very deep ditches often with water on the bottom. They were supposed to keep Russian tanks from moving across the fields.

But I think these ditches were meant to keep the people of occupied Poland from thinking because we were all dead tired in the evenings and nobody had the energy left to analyse what was happening all around.

After 3 months came the transfer to a basic military training camp at Weimar. There we had some typical noncommissioned officers  who were supposed to crush us into the Prussian way – or what I understand most European military minds thought was neccessary to change individual people into a collective mass.

These were the more normal noncoms

But we also had quite normal noncoms who came directly from the Communication Services and who were more human-like because one apparently could not have only the non-thinking types to change us into soldiers with a special function (which required some kind of maintained own intelligence).

After 3 months of basic training, it must have been early October 1944, the Eastern front came nearer and nearer. Even the Western front came nearer. But one did not think so much about the Western front.

It was a funny situation to say the least. In the moments when one had a clear mind one knew , of course, that Germany, having started the war, now had lost it. But these momemts of clear mind were short and sporadic. Normally one was enclosed in a blanket of propaganda suggesting that the victorious end of the war came nearer and nearer.

At that time this was not obvious for us who had grown up in Nazi Germany. Looking back now I understand the effect of modern mass communication.

Even today modern mass media get a powerful grip on the collective mind: often black is made white and white is made black. It was a similar mechanism then, only used for completely senseless ends.

There are many forces even today using this method, but they believe their ends are not senseless. And to day we have a possibility of salvation because the information blankets arrives from different sources and some people have the chance to see both sides of an issue - though not many, I admit.

Now back to the Russians. Shortly before the end of our 3 month military training we were shipped to a large staging camp where new young soldiers were distributed to any kind of army unit which had lost many soldiers.

There was a long queuw slowly moving forward to the selection group. The only question they asked:”.. do you want to jump as a paratrouper or do you want to go to the infantry ..”. We were not given much time for afterthought.

However, I thought quickly that they had to train you to jump from a plane which will give me a bit of respite. What a choice jumping from planes or going to the front?

WITTSTOCK THE PARACHUTE TRAINING CAMP

I was sent to the Paratroup training center at Wittstock in the North of Berlin. One could almost hear the sounds of cannons from the East.

This must have been the end of October 1944. Wittstock at that time was a special place. Here were stationed Germany´s first jetfighter and we could hear and see them flying. These were the few planes in Germany still getting fuel. I remember the first jetfighters because one looked into the sky in the direction of the sounds – but the planes were already much further ahead.

Another group sent to Wittstock besides us younger “soldiers” were experienced pilots and other air personnel for whom there were no planes anylonger and who were now trained for some kind of infantry duties.

Here we got the beginnings of real training, we even had to pack parachutes and jump from towers about 6 m high because this equals the impacts if you use a parachute. We had to sign papers that we, in case of need, would jump without further training. There were even som aspects of commando training.

Because there were no planes for us it was decided that we would have to practice jumps from balloons. I did not sleep very well the night before this planned exercise. In a plane you do not see how high you are. In a balloon you look down all the time and see how thin the air is. I still find myself beeing in a balloon ready to jump in some dreams.

But next morning came contra orders. The balloons had to be used for real paratroopers who were trained a last time for their deployment to the Ardennes.

This was a peculiar unit. In my quarters were a pair of Swiss boys who were apparently somewhat ideologically infected in order to volunteer to the German army. But how? I remember them especially because one of them used to read loud from translations of Plato while lying on the bed in the evenings.

Suddenly we all got our marching orders we were put on a goodstrain but did not get any information about our destination. Of course, we expected to be sent to the nearby Russian front.

But we went Southwards and after a week, we were told that we were on our way to Italy. This trip took some weeks because the track was often bombed and had to be repaired before we could go on.

Either the veteran pilots had guardian angels or somebody tried to sabotage the war effort. Our trip to Italy cannot have had any military reason. We finally passed the Alpes at the Brenner pass and from Merano we had to march about 40 km a day until we reached Modena close to the Allied front.

We were outkitted in paratroopers uniforms with berets which was even then regarded a sign of the elite (though we were the greenest amateurs). We even carried the prestigious knife to be used to cut the ropes of the parachutes.

We were destined to “strengthen” one of the most prestigious elite units, the 1st parchute division, which had heavy losses during the fighting at Cassino.

But then came a new order. We, who came from the Air Force Communication Service, were sent to a normal army division (334) which was in cooperation with the 1st parachutes. There was a shortage of wireless operators near the front because their places of operation were often pinpointed by triangulation and bombed.

And some among us, who were thought to be able to be speedily trained, were put into a special frontnear school between regimental and battallion headquarters. We were in a narrow valley and the artillery from the front used to shoot over our valley. We were safe. Even airplanes did not attack us.

We used a large farmbuilding as the wireless training school and we were placed alternatively near the top of the mountainsides to learn to communicate with the base under difficult conditions.

Here, I started to listen to the American Army´s propaganda broadcasts while also listening to hear our own training messages. There was the threat of a death penalty if it became known that  one was listening to the Americans.

Among my curious experiences was that I had to get a new set of spectacles because my own were broken during exercises. Now I learned another thing about the military way. The new spectacles had to be prescribed at a hospital about 100 km North.

A nomcom of the lower ranks who also had some business there and I we got our marching orders. He was an experienced campaigner and he knew all the tricks of the trade. We had to hitchhike all the way and stopped early every day at the first and best village.

Late in the afternoon we went to the Army commander of the village area and reported that we had not come further that day. We got a stamp in our books and were directed to suitable lodgings. My travelling mate knew some Italian and we could usually buy very good food and wine.

This took us several days. After having reached the hospital and the authorities saw our ingenious, but legitimate itinerations on the books, they decided to give us a first class trip in a supply truck directly back to the front after our business was finished.

THE FINAL RETREAT

Soon after we came back to our unit the last offensive of the Allied forces started with a daylong barrage of artillery fire – after the relative quiet during the last month.

This must have been the middle of March 1945. The line of defense could not be kept and we received every day a retreat order to meet, say 80 – 100 km further North, at a place determined for our unit.

Our training was not finished and I got a special order to be attached to battalion headquarters and was provided with a new infrared transmitter which had never been used before and was very secret. I did not know how to use it but the idea was probably to keep the thing under the eyes of some officer responsible for trying out the new transmitter.

Of the frantic escape North I remember very little. Often our columns were attacked by airplanes but as there were so many targets the chances to be hit were small. Most often we drove by night.

I was assigned to a truck were a few types like myself were hiding behind som office equipment. One night we were shot at from the side by machineguns and tanks. Then it was quiet. I knew better but became curious and left the more or less safe truck to look at what was happening.

What was happening was that a US tank shot at us, a granate exploded nearby and I found myself after a moment of unconciousness in the ditch near our truck. I was wounded by lots of splinters in the legs and body.

Somebody put a dressing on the larger wounds and I was left in the ditch for some medics to fetch me later. My gun and the so valuable secret box I had lost and nobody cared or knew anylonger that I had it.

After somm time a number of wounded were collected at a field dressing station which had a doctor. We were put in some ambulances and together with the doctors and medics in their own transport we continued North. We drove by day and from a deserted winery we filled our ambulance with sparkling wines. This induced quite a happy state, even though we passed dead horses, burnt out vehicles and human bodies.

In that state we did not even get frightened when attack planes swapped down to shoot at us on at least two occasions. Fortunately they discovered in the last moment our large red crosses on the white vehicles and pulled their planes up.

Suddenly one day we saw two tanks across the road in front of us. The advance pincer movement of the following US Army had reached us.

We were placed in a farm yard near the road, our medics and doctors were taken as prisoners of war and we, the wounded here in the front line were not treated as prisoners but as fellow sufferers it seemed.

I remember especially an US sergeant who spoke German and he told us that he came originally from Hamburg and had fled Germany in the early 30th.

We were in the process of changing wine against chocolade when sudden gunfire came from the South. The US soldiers just waved and vanished. A larger German unit had come from the South and “liberated” us. Just as we had thought the war was over for us.

This new unit did not have any medics and our situation became worse and worse with increasing infections. I think one or two died during the first day of our “freedom”!

After two more days another advance US troop caught up with our medical convoy and we were immediately taken to an American field hospital near the front (MASH?), treated and sent on. I was put into an American ambulance and was shipped over difficult mountain passes to Florence where a large hospital for prisoners of war had openend.

Here we were immediately operated on by one American and one German doctor and I got heavy penicilline shots after the operation.

The doctors told me that I was very lucky as the largest splinter they dug out of my chest had narrowly passed the aorta. This was the first time we heard about penicilline which appeared as a kind of wonder drug to us stopping deadly infections.

This period in the hospital (60 days) seemed like the beginning of a new life, a rebirth. The strict discipline of schools and army in the totalitarian system was replaced by a chance to see everything from another side.

Of this I shall tell in the next chapter which I tentatively called “My War– Part 2”. But really I should call it “My New Life”.

MY WAR – PART 2
– MY NEW LIFE

Table Of Contents

CHANCE FOR A SECOND LIFE THE AMERICAN WAY

AN UNIVERSITY IN ITALY

THE TRANSIT CAMP AT PISA – LEGHORN

PROMOTION AT THE AGE OF 18

ALL THIS BECAME A GOOD SCHOOL

RETURN TO COLD AND HUNGER

I must have been among the youngest soldiers in Italy. At least I never met anybody who was younger. When I became prisoner of war I was still only 17 years old. At that time I also felt completely cut off from everthing that had happened to me before.

While still in Germany at the end of 1944 I had no news of my parents or my brother and sister even though they had my addresses. I did not know whether they were alive and had been able to escape from the Russian advance or not.

This isolation must have contributet to my open mind for new influences and values. Maybe for a kind of positive brainwashing.

I have tried to keep this story as factual as possible without too many philosophical deviations. But the following thoughts might explain some of my later peregrinations.

I must have thought a lot about the chances of survival to have survived the uncontrollable happenings of fate. The 2nd World War led to the premature death of about 40 milj.people.

Such numbers do not say very much. If you are in a group of 12 people and 6 of them are killed near to you by a shell you experience their fate immediately.

If you hear that 10.000 were killed in the fires of the last air raid on Hamburg it affects you emotionally about the same way as those 6 individuals, maybe less.

And you knew that the Army leaders on both sides during the 1st World War did not hesitate to send 1 or 2 millions from the frontline into death per year. It was presented to the victims as heroism! – an unescapble fate.

What I therefore felt very strongly was that all that happened during the war was a kind of a natural force, an unescapable fate for the individual embedded in a mass. All you could think of was to survive to the next day. This feeling of having escaped an unescapble collective fate must have formed my concious aim never to be part of a mass again.

Later, every time I felt drawn into a collective I wanted to excape. This attitude developed already during the time of my convalecence in Florence early 1945.

During this time in bed I read copiously. I must have read more than a hundred Readers Digests and journals and books besides newspapers which slowly gave me an insight into the thinking of the Americans, for better or worse.

After I left the hospital I was sent to a normal prisoner of war camp at Florence. Here we were kept in controlled starvation – with just enough food to survive. Maybe there were problems with distribution, maybe it was thought to be a kind of lesson.

But this situation led to ingenious behaviour to get more food.

As I was a wireless operator I pretended to be able to repair radio receivers when expert radio repair men were sought. Payment for such extra work were extra food rations. But the only time I had to prove that I could repair a receiver I was so fortunate that there was only a loose wire which I could fix.

Another extra food deserving work was to be part of a theater group visiting different camps. I was in charge of lights for the stage and also had a part as an extra in the background for such a group.

I do not know wether I am in the picture  in disguise or not

The third and best extra job was when when they were asking for an experienced and expert table waiter – and of course I volunteered. At that time I talked English very fluently (much better than now) which gave me an edge when seeking jobs.

I became table waiter at the officers mess at the US Army University Center of Florence. Here American soldiers could restart their studies before being repatriated to the US. There were professors from all the prestigious universities of the US. There was for example a Harvard Hall etc. The professors also ate in the officers mess.

As we were living on the campus, and not att the prisoners camp, we met many Americans who otherwise were under non–fraternisation edict during these first months after the war. After work we played tennis with some and I could use the huge university library.

At that time I noticed that the US negro officers, usually petty officers, always ate seperately at their own table. This did not conform with the ideal picture I had got of the US and I always gave them extra good food as a kind of protest. They sometimes blinked with their eyes in humorous appreciation.

After some months the University was closed and we had to return to our camps. But the library officer gave me permission to take back to the camp as many books as I could carry. I think I got full University reading material for several complete courses.

I remember especially the subjects of General Anthropology, Sociology and Psychology because they were quite new seen against my German background

There was a complete course in commercial Law. There was also a book on Writing and American literature. And of course the technical subjects which I was interested in: Civil Engineering and Architecture. I still have some of those books today. All together this was almost a complete university course in subjects I was interested in.

From Florence we were sent to the large transit prisoner of war camp at Pisa, called Leghorn by the Americans.

This large camp had about 3.000 tents with 10-12 beds in each. It was divided into 10 different minor camps. The Americans had the good idea to separate all officers to their own camp in order to avoid the building up of a new military hierarchy. There was also a special camp for SS and other personnel they wanted to watch and interrogate more closely.

The camps with enlisted personnel were in charge of German nomcom officers of low grades who had no official authority and had to keep order by persuasion.

There was also a seperate camp for those who had volunteered for work and deferred repatriation. Here I found myself.

As I did not know where my parents were I had volunteered for longterm work. I became translator for a German bankdirector whom the Americans had made responsible for the entire supply to the camp.

I became sick, it must have been serious, and was sent to a hospital for 10 days. After I returned the bankdirector had been shipped home to Germany and because I could speak with everybody they put me in charge. I was then 18 years old.

This was a fantastic job. Almost all of the German Army in Italy had to be shipped home via this camp.

The most valuable goods were kept at a large, highly protected warehouse. My experience in leadership I now got by trial and error. One must remember we had no other authority than our personal status and persuasion.

The first innovation I made was to look for a minor group who had no affilitation with others in the camp and who might thus be only loyal to themselves.

I found a small group of Latvians who had been drafted for civil work – and who had nothing to do with the war. But they got caught in the indiscriminate net and were put in this prisoner of war camp anyhow. They had a leader who was an officer in their own army and he promised to see efficient work done. After release they emigrated to Canada. The mistake with their status was discovered finally.

There was also an Austrian, with administrative background, whom I put in charge to support me as second in command to keep order among the papers. There were not many Austrians, I do not know why, but I knew that the mass of other prisoners did not especially like Austrians because most of them behaved as if they had won the war and had quite forgotten that Hitler was an Austrian.

I had never heard of the divide and rule method – but in retrospect it was a safe system.

I had my own jeep and a driver and could leave the camp anytime I wanted. I often went to the beach of the Mediterenean for a swim.

Part of the story is that most of Italy was run by prisoners of war. If not run, at least the more strenous work for the army was done by them.

There were German cooks for the US army kitchens, there were orchestras playing for the army radio or for dances, etc. Even the heavy work in the US Army supply depots was handled by them. Control, however, never left the American personnel.

In this regard I had an unique position: I had to order and sign for goods received for the large transit camp personally. The original infrastructure like roads, sanitation, tents, kitchens, cars etc. had been signed for by the American Officer in Charge but the subsequent mainenance and for all supplies I had to sign.

The problem for the Officer in Charge was that he had signed for huge amounts of equipment for the camp and was personally responsible. He had a whole office full of vouchers he had signed and he did not know where most of the things were or if they still existed.

During the war they could just send in a paper saying everything was destroyed by the enemy or otherwise and they were freed from economic responsibilities. But now in peacetime they had to pay for wilful losses – at least in theory.

My first task was to bring order into the assorted mess. By paying with goods from our warehouses I got the Germans in the US army supply depots to file receipts and mark material sent in as unusable. There were huge trailers going back and forth between the depots and the camp (mostly the same goods but different receipts until everthing was accounted for).

After this I had carte blanche from those in real authority. In order to get extra deliveries to our camp I sometimes had to sign for goods for the black market for one or the other high US officer. My moral attitude was it was OK to do most anything which benefitted the prisoners of war – the soldiers camps, not the officers.

One larger sized truck with sugar on the offical black market could have got me personally a small farm or house in the town complete with all the necessary papers. And there were many trucks with sugar, flour and meat – a fortune.

In retrospect I cannot understand why I did not do anything to benefit myself personally in this way. I certainly could have formulated excuses if I look back.

But there must be some basic concience which it is difficult to cross. At least when one is young and idealistic. Later in life I did not have those opportunities anymore so the question of such huge temptations did not arise and it was easy to be moralistic. But most likely the inhibitions are still working.

The Swiss Red Cross had a radio service where one could leave search messages which were broadcasted all over Europe.

My mother left a message that she was looking for me and I left a message that I was looking for my family.

In Munich there was a service trying to match the messages. They did not always get the spelling right but one can see fromthe card that  the message arrived in due course at Schwanewede even if it was misspelled.

Suchdienstkarte from Munich

RETURN FROM WAR 1947-49

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SCHWANEWEDE AND BREMERHAVEN -

APPRENTICESHIP AND STUDYING

FIRST QUALIFIED ENGINEERING JOB – DÃœSSELDORF

The year of 1947 was very bleak in Germany. There was no food, no heating material and many homes were still not rebuilt. My parents had been relocated to Schwanewede a small village in the North of Bremen. They lived in a temporary wooden barrack.

As I had been working for the US army in Italy as prisoner of war, and had a letter of introduction, I immediately got a job as clerk for the liquor supply storage for the US enclave of Bremen.

Bremen, though situated within the British zone of occupation, was an enclave under US sovereignty because Bremen was used as the American port of supply for their occupation forces in the South.

However, I had to think about the future and easy jobs with the US Army did not provide me with a professional education. I had thought in Italy that I should become an architect or building engineer. I liked to draw and paint a bit but did not believe in or dream of an artistic future.

As my formal school eduction was limited by the war I could not enter higher education. Anyhow, my wide responsibilities as a youngster at the age of 17 and 18 in Italy made it very difficult for me to start again at a school for children.

As I already had taken my commercial school and secondary school matriculation at the age of 16 before an official board of examiners I thought I should continue to be an autodidact which suits me much better, even if the system usually asks for papers.

This is my first building site with fishing trawlers in front

Basically I had to start at the bottom and began as a masonry trainee. As trainee one was not an apprentice but received full (more or less full) wages.

Of course, I did not start anywhere but selected the workplace with care. At Bremerhaven the large fishing fleet of the the Nordsee company had to rebuild their headquarters. The fishing trawlers lay at their quay right beside our work place.

The fishing harbour was totally enclosed. But we who worked within the harbour and had our sleeping barracks just outside had free passage.

Here a sound trade was established. We got fish and fishoil in exchange for alcoholic drinks of all kinds which the men on the trawlers believed they needed more than anything else in order to survive the cold and storms of the North Sea and the seas around Island.

We in our turn exchanged the fish and oils with alcoholic beverages from all over Northern Germany. People came from far away because the train fare was very low and the food prices were very high. The market established a price considered fair by everyone

We learned not only to build walls and ceilings and roofs - but also to clean and salt fish in small barrels for our exchange trade. And we ate fish everyday in all its forms and disguises. For many years afterwards I could not eat fish.

There were no machines in Germany yet.
We had to lift and draw everything by hand

A large portion of my trade was for my own family for their own consumtion but also for trade in their turn because the fish liver oils were very much in demand because of the difficult food situation.

There was a parallell market all over Germany in order to enable the people to survive. But this was also the beginning of my family´s general store after the war.

Very soon I did not have to work all day on the building site but started to write the reports on time and material. Which in turn required me to follow the more advanced technical and economic aspects of building.

By the way we had very little machinery and much had to be done by sheer hand labour. We even had to carry bricks up the many stories or push wheelbarrows up the slanting transport inclinations. This was a very healthy introduction to the profession of building.

As I mentioned before I was very much inclined to be autodidactic. I read all evening and even nights all kind of books on mathematics, structural engineering, chemistry and building materials, etc, etc.

I still have some books on civil engineering and architecture from my time at the US Army University of Florence where I had access to the huge university library. When the University was closed down I could take a suitcase full of books to the next camp.

It was very easy for me and usually I read very fast. Even today I can reconstruct how to calculate stresses in complicated structures because I had to do it for myself in the beginning without help from anybody.

I was not the only one to prepare myself for a more advanced education among my roommates in the barracks (dormitories with two ot three beds above one another). But the others prepared for more formal studies. They were not spoiled by the American attitude... or what I understood it to be.

I later got a letter from one of my roommates who had become a very well known civil engineer and owner of a prominent civil engineering firm.

After the period of self studies, job training and administrative experience with the company of Plötner I placed an ad in the journal Building Market (Baumarkt) in which I told what I knew and that I had studied for myself. I received an offer from the firm of Dräger from Düsseldorf. This was a small building firm with about 50 employees and the owner wanted to have an assistant to help him with “everything”.

In such a small firm one had to have continous contact with the owner and with all the workers. There was one larger project in the river harbour of Düsseldorf: building the second, third and fourth floor above a manufacturing plant making marmelades. This work was done while the factory went on producing at full capacity. The rest were new garages and a large storage building for some kind of manufacturer, and 3 or 4 reconstruction jobs on private buildings destroyed by the war.

Around the time when I started my new employment Germany had just carried out its currency reform. Everybody received only a very small amount of DM. Even companies did receive very litle of the new currency.

In order to have everything going we had to write invoices 2 or 3 times a week, specify the work done and get the cash immediately.

Then we had to turn around and pay the workers and suppliers immediately also 2 or 3 times a week. Here I learned that one had to price the foundations very high and the roof very low. In this way one could get more money during the earlier stages of a project.

Looking back I still cannot really understand how the entire economy could get going. But it did. And it grew continously.

I manged my job very well – to say it myself. But later I also got letters from the company confirming this and saying they should have seen the heavy stress I had to work under at my first job.

The heavy work load must have crushed me. I must have come to some kind of black out. Today there are certainly fancy words for the condition.

I visited my parents and simply did not return to the job an left Germany for Italy. As we did not have any passports in Germany this was quite some idea – if I had any thought about it at all. But the story of my year in Italy is an own and new chapter

ITALY 1949-50

Table Of Contents

CROSSING THE ALPS ILLEGALLY

MERANO THE FIRST STOP IN ITALY

ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME

THE UNDERGROUND ESTABLISHMENT OF ROME

MY EVERYDAY LIFE AND BUSINESS IN ROME

THE SOUTH – ANOTHER ITALY

CATANIA – A POSSIBLE STEPPING STONE TO AFRICA

FOLIO DE VIA OBLIGATORIO

I did not take any pictures while I was in Italy. But I have the picture Postcards which I sent home to my parents. I also have a number of documents.

From a place near the Castle Neuenschwanstein and Garmen-Partenkirchen
I went to Austria illegally over the Alpes – near the Zugspitze

In front of the high rising mountains of the Alps lies the small village of Fuessen. Here I stayed a few days to think about the best way to cross the frontier to Austria. All roads and paths were supervised and closed. The only way was close to the top of one of the highest mountains near the Zugspitze which is the highest mountain in Germany.

One morning I started early. Behind every rock formation one imagined the customs- or border police. I often got quite anxious even if not very much would happen if I was caught. I imagined sometimes how refugees must have felt fleeing from certain death before and during the war.

On the way down after presumably having passed the border I had to descend using a ravine with falling water. Here happened the first minor accident. I lost my left heel from my sturdy shoes. I had to pull off the other heel not to limp. Surprisingly the shoes held together until I was in Italy.

I used to tell everyone that I walked all the way. I walked the first week always staying away from roads. But in reality after having come quite a distance from the German border I bought a ticket for a bus which took me more than half the way. But then I felt unsecure and started to walk again. First westward and then South.It seemed so far that I have always felt kind of justified to say I walked all the way.

Now walking in these circumstances meant that I kept on the high ridges to the left or right of the main valleys. But keeping to the ridges or mountain slopes meant I had to go up and down all the way because there was always a minor valley between the place where you were in the morning and the place you wanted to reach for the evening.

I was alwas afraid that the people in the main valleys would inform the police that there was a suspicious character walking on the road. But with the people living in isolated farms high on the mountains I felt very secure.

I told them the truth, anything else would have been suspicious. I told them that I was from Germany without a passport and on my way to Italy. That I wanted to buy some bread and stay over night in some shed. Most often I payed for the bread only and got much more without having to pay for it. Most often I could sleep in the house and not in a shed. These isolated farmers were really guestfree.

However, the further South I got the more difficult it became to understand their Tyrolian dialect. The farmers on the Italian and Austrian side had the same dialect and those high up on the mountains still had an archaic way of life.

The family and guest ate from one large central bowl each one dipping in with ones own spoon. You drank milk from your own cup. The bread usually was very hard and had to be soaked in the milk. Bread was baked only once or twice a year.This were wonderful meals after a hard day.

Sometimes the guest, me, got to sleep on the oven in the main room. In olden times this was the favorite sleeping place – and now while the nights still were cool it was a favorite of mine too.

The roads high up were of course no roads but narrow paths going up and down in steep angles. Often there was a cross,sometimes two, at the most dangerous places with an inscription like:.. This is in memory of Seppl or Hans or .. who fell to his death in anno XX. Often there were even fresh flowers under the crosses. It kept you thinking.

Going from one night's farm to the next was also strenous especially on those days when you could see the next farm just across a valley as if you could shout to them and you might think this was easy, and then you had to walk and climb all day, up and down, to reach the next farm in the evening.

The pass which I thought might be easiest to use was high up on the mountains beween the Swiss border and the Dolomites. Betwen the Swiss border and this mountain range was a valley with railroad and streets to the normal border crossing.

I do not know why but one day I got into my mind to walk a part in the valley. The first thing happening is of course that the local policeman saw me coming down from the mountains. Everybody here knows everybody else and he was curious who I was. Of course, I had to tell him the truth. Anything else would anyhow have been unbelievable.

I had been brought up in a Prussian environment with the belief that the buraucracy and establishment is always following its own rules. Good or bad, whatever. I now experienced the Austrian, more laissez faire attitude. We went to the police station, he offered some coffee and looked at his books to see if I was in there. No police was looking for me.

What he said in effect was that he had not time to write all the reports necessary to send me back and I could go. Don´t tell anybody that I have stopped you. But you won´t go very far because the next policestation is near the border and they stop everybody. In other word he said be careful.

This has had a profound influence on me. I have often when in a position of some kind of authority been inclined to oversee minor mistakes. I thought that the Habsburg monarchy in this area was well established for many centuries and did have its strenght through tradition and not so much discipline. The Prussians authority was newer and they had to use more discipline. Its just a thought, of course.

The crossing of the border to Italy was dangerous. The mountain passes were very high and on the highest part there was still snow. Not much though. After a day of strenous walking and climbing I had almost reached the top when suddenly dense clouds or fog arose and one could not see further up. It also became very cold but no wind. I was dressed for spring and summer and could not find shelter.

I decided to go back to the last base camp a farm in a side valley. I think I was quite unconcious part of the way. Walking and falling like a sleepwalker. But I did not give up and reached the farm. Here I stayed for 3 days until the next try which went very easy. It was sunny and for the time quite warm.

Coming to the Italian side was a profound experience. The sky seemed to be twice as high, it was a pleasant mediterranean warmth and I felt 10 years younger. Maybe not quite ten as I was only 22 years old then. I believe this kind of experience is what many travellers of olden times must have felt and which contributed to the continous attempts of the German tribes to invade the Lombardian area.

Merano the first stop in Italy

The people were the same as on the Austrian side with the same dialect. After a few days of walking, as before, on the slopes above the valley I crossed the valley and I reached Merano which is situated at a cross point where the valley from the Brenner pass reaches the valley of the river Adige.

Quite a lot of my saved money was used up and I had to find work to replenish my funds. I don´t remember how but it must have been accidentally that I asked for work at just this farm half up the mountain and looking down on the town of Merano. People here might help because they did not like the Italian authorities and this was a way of demonstrating this. However, this farmer was special. He was a prisoner of war in Siberia during the First World War and he escaped to China mostly walking. It did take him almost two years. He was not much impressed with my short walk across the Alpes.

He put me to work on the many grape bushes which needed a lot of pruning. But what I remember most vividly was the cutting of grass by hand with scythes where I had to compete with seasoned farm workers and who made it a sport to see if they could break me. But I survived which impressed the girls whose resposibility by tradition is the raking and gathering of the grass on the drying stands.

After two weeks I thought that the money was sufficient for the trip to Rome and I said good bye to my new friends.

St Peters Place and Cathedral

By now I had discovered that Italy had been an escape route for Germans on their way to South America directly after the end of the war. I did not know very much and was apparently quite naive. The first address was a small monastry in Venice. I thought as they had apparently helped others before they might be able to help me finding temporary work. What they did after inviting me to lunch was to give me an address in Genua. This was also a small monastry which supposedly could arrange some work in the port. I discovered later that these monastries were related to establishments in Croatia now under communist rule and with German contacts during the war. I was later told that they were very suspicious of me believing that I was gathering information about them for publication. I was, however, the complete innocent abroad – at that time.

With this background it was in hindsight not very difficult to understand that they were sending me further on to Rome giving me the name and address of a monsignore a bit higher up the hierarchy. I still had enough money to travel by train to Rome. It might be interesting to note that the fact that I was a confessed atheist did not seem to matter.

Arrived in Rome I do not remember where I slept the first nights. But believe it or not I went later to the Benedictine monastry on Monte Avventino and I could stay in a small garden house near the entrance for a few  days. Later I sometimes went there to eat a free lunch and I even got a ticket to the Cathedral of St Peters for the main event during Anno Santo, the Holy Year, namely the creating of a Saint. The monastry had reserved places very near to the altar and I could follow the rituals very closely.

Another place to remember was a small free kitchen run by the Capucines. Most interesting about this place was that here one could find monks interested in debating and discussing most anything under heaven. I believe that I got the best volume about Dialectical Materialism, a now almost forgotten religion, and the Catholic refutation of it. The book was published by the German Jesuits Institute of Rome. I would have liked to read it again because it was the clearest philosphical reasoning I have ever read. But I cannot find it - even with help of the internet.

View on the Colosseum where I slept one or twice and
view on the Isola Tiberia with its hospital even for refugees

In Rome there were even other people than the Catholics. There was the World Council of Churches for exanple. I got some leads to jobs from them too. In Rome one could not neglect the churches. It seemed to me to be more a matter of organisation than religion.

The most interesting contact with churches in Rome was an invitation to all underground refugees etc in Rome to eat a Christmas dinner in the large Waldensian church near the Vatican. It was a moving and impressive experience. The Waldensians were one of the last heretic movements almost destroyed by the Vatican but now defiantly established in the lions den.

This is my Red Cross Passport and my Trade Union Certificate
 – even though I was illegal

There are many who have heard about the Red Cross Refugee Pass which has helped many withouth identy papers during World War 2 and thereafter. As I did not have a German Passport – there were none – I got a Red Cross Identity Paper.

I also had a paper from the Building Workers Union in Rome.I tried to be prepared if someone wanted to check my identity papers. This might have confused them sufficiently, I believed.

MY EVERYDAY LIFE AND BUSINESS IN ROME

After having looked at what one can do in Rome I decided to work on my own, starting my own business. I got in contact with a shopowner with a small shop and a very large cellar storeroom for wine production accessories on the Piazza Farnese.

At that time I did not know anything about a connection with Sweden of this piazza through the Order of the Birgittines, originating from Sweden, who have their headquarter just across the square. For me it had French connotations because of the French embassy and the French lilies on the fountains.

I had now got a carretino, a pushcart with wheels larger than I was. And I was established in the haulage market. For many month I transported often heavy goods mainly from here, but also from other shops nearby.

One haulage road was through the old town to the railroad goods station passing the Collosseum on the way. Another was to the Northern outskirts of Rome passing the fortress of St Angelo on the left to the springs of Aqua Acetosa where there was a bus connection to many country customers. The Jesuits who had a house just outside the Cathedral of St Peter were other customers who paid well in addition to the money from the shop. They transported their goods themselves from here to their wineyards.

When it was to hot at midday I went a few quarters to the Panteon near the Piazza Navone. The Panteon is an interesting building with its very large cupola. But to me it was even more interesting because it was very cool compared to being in the the sun on the outside. There was a bookseller who looked after my pushcart during my siesta inside the Panteon.

Even more attractive than the cool Panteon was what I thought to be Rome´s best icecreame vendor. As I came almost every day I got the largest possible cones at the price for medium ones.

Between the Piazza Farnese and Piazza Navone was the Campo di Fiori, the flower market, with is statue of Giordano Bruno who was burned alive here because of his heretical thoughts which were not approved by the church.

The same kind of ideological levelling can be found today. Of course, not everywhere. But if you are born in a free society it is often just a matter of luck. You could just as well have been unlucky.

I had now also solved the question of housing. The shopowner of the Piazza Farnese had a large fruit- and vegetable garden just outside the town. The basic idea was that I slept in a small garden shed and watched the ripe fruits from pilferers.

The garden went from one high ridge to a parallell one with a valley inbetween. On one ridge there was also a large water basin for watering the garden which was filled by pumps during the day for watering during the night. I used it as a luxury swimming pool during the evening when coming home.

The neighboring garden was owned by a high police officer of Rome. We used to chat over the garden fence in the evening. He did not have a clue of my illegal status, I thought. But in Italy one never knows.

There was a busstop nearby with busses from the city. On the bus you could learn about Italian temperament. I saw several times that two men got in a dispute, stopped the bus and went outside either to continue to shout at one another or worse.

After some months I wanted to go further south to see whether there was a way to Africa via Sicily. There is a saying curiosity kills the cat.

After having decided to move on and somehow try to reach Africa I believed it should be easiest from Sicily. In hindsight it seems a bit naive. But sometimes what drives us is a kind of mystical force, especially if one is young.

In Rome I had met a couple from Souther Italy. An Italian married to a German girl who lived far down on the heel of the Italian boot. In Lecce a town south of Brindisi. When they heard that I wanted to go south they invited me to stay a week on their farm.

When arriving there by train and bus I found that their farm was one of the largest old  estates with landholdings wherever the eye could see. But they lived like all the peasants around, though on a larger scale. The landscape was empty, almost bleak und dry under the sun with single olive trees, grass for sheep, low stone walls along all the roads, many of the curious coneformed stone huts for sheep and finally some isolated houses. The sheep shelters and houses all painted stark white.

When I went with the family to visit the town of Lecce I experienced how the people all regarded the landowners family with a respect one would think belonged to long gone times. There was an old fortress with tower in the center of the town which also belonged to family but which they did not use.

We went like everybody else to the local cinema which was quite small and the film stopped everytime the reel had to be changed. The people ate their food not only during intermission and the mothers breastfed their babies. This was very far away from modern Via Veneto of Rome, this was another world.

After the week I continued by train to Sicily. I went to the city of Catania with its vulcano, the Etna, apparently rising up directly at the end of the main street.

From the main street of Catania one has a gret view

Here I saw another aspect of living folk history. On the market there were not only puppet theaters for the grown ups and children but also older forms of entertainment.

The storytellers gathering a crowd around themselves were telling their often gruesome stories and pointing at pictures like we are now reading cartoon series. The crowds followed them intensely. I had to guess a lot because they spoke the difficult Scicilian dialect. But even I was fascinated.

The Italian story ends here abruptly. When I came back to the hotel the police was waiting for me. As always I had not presented my papers when registering. I was so used now to Italian laissez faire that I had forgotten all precautions.

At this time, however, there was a big manhunt under way for the bandit Guliano, a Sicilian mafioso, who had killed a policeman and who was hiding somewhere. That´s why there were regular controls at all the hotels, railroad- and busstations.

Of course, they had to detain me as I had no valid passport or residence permit as a foreigner. I think that I must have been the most peculiar prisoner in the jail. They did not lock the door which was left wide open and the director came several times during my two days stay to talk with me and drink an expresso.

I must have been the first atheist who instead of a passport had letters of recommendation from a Monsignore of the Catholic Church and a Protestant Bishop. Apparently to be an atheist is a challenge whereas to be a heretic is a crime.

After they had determined that I was no danger to the state the authorities gave me the choice to go to a refugee camp and wait for a visa and transportation to South America or to be sent back to Germany.

There was now a German government under Adenauer who had started to issue passports and I did not want to go to South America.

So I chose to return to Germany. I got an extradition decision and a free ticket to the border station to Austria at the Brenner. I was to report there within 14 days and was free to travel by myself. Now, on my out of Italy it was the first time that I had regular papers.

When reaching Germany and the police control I was greeted by the general amnesty given by the Adenauer government to all who had violated the prohibition to leave Germany.

BREMEN AFTER ITALY 1950-51

Table Of Contents

SCHWANEWEDE

GETTING A JOB

WORKING FOR THE US ARMY

SUNBATHING AT BRUNNSDORF

FESTIVAL OF BRITAIN

WINTER ACTIVITIES

Before I went to Italy 1949 the family still lived in the original temporary barracks in Schwanewede. Now they had moved a few hundred meters to another and more permanent area with barracks in a sand desert. Here my father had opened the first shop

Start in the Sand Desert and Several year later

After the war my mother and younger brother were placed as refugees from the Eastern parts of Germany in the little village of Schwanewede to the North of Bremen. Into this idyllic village with many isolated thatched houses came more refugees than there were inhabitants.

My mother was at first placed with a family which besides having a small farm plot also took care of a tiny post office and a telephone exchange. Here my mother helped a bit with both. Later my father and sister joined them and they got two rooms with a kitchen corner in a temporary barrack. They kept good relations with their host family which later led to the opening of post office service in part of their first shop.

This time I wanted to work more permanently in the building field. I went to the labour exchange to see what kind of jobs were available. I told them I was an autodidact and that I did not have a final school examination.

The official looked dubious but suddenly he remembered that the American Army had asked for a highly qualified building engineer for their Oil Harbour at Farge. They had already placed two such engineers there, one after the other, and both were immediately discharged because they could not do the work demanded. “Maybe you can handle them with your background with the Americans in Italy.”

I shall tell here what I did to get the job because it is interesting to see what might be important in getting employment.

First I had to find out what the problem was with those who were discharged. I understood immediately that the American needed in the beginning a specialist estimator.

There was a difference of opinion between the German government and the US Army about the value of this huge installation comprising a harbour for oceangoing tank ships, many pump installations, a railroad shunting yard and train filling facilities, huge underground bombsafe tanks for oil, two underground power stations, underground oil pipes, administration and techical repair buildings, etc.

This facility occupied many square kilometers in a dense forest. Actually it went from the Weser river as far as to our shop in Schwanewede.

I discovered that the previous engineers were too qualified. If you wanted to make a real evaluation as they did you had to work almost a year and still only get an approximation.

I thought that this requires a more political approach. I listened to the German government officials to hear what price they would expect. Then I got the Americans to tell me what they thought it was worth. There was a huge gap. This was the problem.

Because this was a military installation one could set arbitrary depreciations. There was no market value. They had a list of every installation and all details. From here I started with a final total figure very close to the American estimate because they occupied the facilities and they had won the war.

I only had to find a way to make my estimate look professional to save face for the German authorities.

I first gave a base value to the areal objects and the objects with volumes. Then I looked at the engineering components for each object and put an additional index value based upon the complexity of the installation. It looked scientific but was, of course, quite arbitrary.

When I looked at the final figures they were too high and I adjusted both the basic values and the specific values until the final sum was right to fit my first decision. This took me two weeks but I waited 4 and visited all installations and looked very serious.

This was before computers, and people were still impressed with spreadsheets – even hand made ones.

The Americans were happy and I got permanent employment as supervising engineer and chief of maintenance. The Germans had accepted my figures.

The difficult job was to get the job. Now after I was employed my practical experiences in Düsseldorf made me quite effective.

At Farge I had experienced German employees from war times who had maintained the installation even when they were bombed every month. As I could negotiate with all parties everything went very well even though I was much younger than everybody else.

  I was just 24 years old

The Americans had already before the invasion in the Normandy planned to use this FARGE oil facility and Bremen harbour to supply their army of occupation in Southern Germany. Thus Bremen became an American enclave in the British zone of occupation.

The German engineers who stayed at their places when the first US army troops arrived at Farge told me the Americans had complete sets of technical manuals and drawings probably supplied in advance by spies.

My two nearest German “leutenants” before what looks like a genuine US Army Post with its white painted stones everywhere.

It was interesting to see how the Americans managed their planning and constructions. When we needed a new building, for example, I had to get not only the drawings but also detailed requisition lists for every nail, lumber units, the number of bricks etc. etc. The problem was if you took too much to be on the safe side the higher bureaucrates did not approve the project.

This was a planned economy just as bad as the Russians. The solution was the same as in Russia: double bookkeeping. One had to build up secret stores.

The Americans however had in addition the American way to escape the planned economy when it became quite hopeless. They installed a new general and he started from the beginning and discarded all his predessors figures.

This work I soon could do more or less in my sleep and I soon found outside interests to fill my spare time.

At Brunnsdorf, about 4 km from Schwanewede there was a small lake in a forrest. Here the Bremen sunbathing club had its club area. I got interested and became a constant visitor there during the summer. One has to remember that nudism was a strong reform movement in the 20th in Germany and remnants had survived the Hitler times. For me the attraction must have been to be free of strong conventions and tabus.

We played a lot of volley ball besides swimming and I became quite good at it. There were many who also belonged to Canoe Clubs. Pictures say more than words as one can see.

The Brunnsdorf Lake Summer 1950

During the early summer 1951 I visited England during the Festival of Britain and, of course, also visited a club there.  

At the Themse River during the Festival of Britain 1951 and my admission card to Chestnut Grove Sunbathing Club of North Kent which I visited during my stay in London. Pictures from my visit to Chestnut Grove 1950

During the winters I went once a week to Bremen to train Judo with the then European champion. He used me usually to demonstrate new attacks and defenses which meant that I often came home half lame and blue.

Of this I have no documentation exept this picture from a party later in Sweden .
I sometimes liked to demonstrate how to fly and fall.

MY FIRST VISIT TO SWEDEN
THE SUMMER OF 1951

Table Of Contents

WHY A CANOE/KAJAK?

WHAT ABOUT SWEDEN?

START OF THE SCANDINAVIAN ADVENTURE

ARRIVAL AT STOCKHOLM

WHY A CANOE/KAJAK?

During ones life there are certain decisions influencing the future more than others. Why did I start canoeing?

I had a somewhat older friend, a schoolteacher in Bremen, who used to take his classes on adventerous trips with kajaks far out in the North Sea. He in turn had a friend, Rittlinger, who paddled down dangerous rivers. This friend wrote books and one of the books I read which influenced me was about his trip down the Amazone River, which at that time was a very adventurous enterprise.

My parents lived at that time near Bremen in the village of Schwanewede. The Weser river was not far away. Of course, I bought a collapsible canoe from “Klepper” and it did not take a long time and I paddled down the Weser river almost from its beginning.

My Canoe and my Tent

Even though it was raining and the wind was steady from the North in my face it was a wonderful and invigourating experience.

At that time I also had a dream to travel down some rivers in Africa. But if I went to Africa I might stay there. There seemed to be no future in postwar Germany at that time - 1950/51.

So, before going down South, maybe I should see the North: Scandinavia, Sweden.

I did not know anything about Sweden. But looking at a smallscale map in my world atlas I saw the waterway between Gothenburg at the western coast and Stockholm on the eastern coast. There were streams, lakes and canals straight through the country.

How to get to Sweden? At that time one needed a visa which was very difficult to get for a German. One had to get an invitation from somebody who guaranteed ones finances, one had to get a paper from the police that one had no criminal record and one had to promise solemly that one would leave the country after the visa expired after about 4 weeks.

We had only time for half the trip – from Göteborg to The Vättern Lake

I did not know anybody in Sweden. I do not remember why, but I had to travel to Frankfurt on an international train. By accident I found myself in a compartment with a young Swedish man. We started to talk, in English, and found that we had many common interests.

Apparently there was some unexplainable affinity and when I talked about my idea to paddle across Sweden he became interested and promised to the send the necessary guarantee.

What I did not know at that time was that he had a great future for himself. At that time he was chauffeur and general handyman to one of the dynamic shipping magnates of Sweden, Sven Salén, who had started his shipping empire with a small vessel on the lake Mälaren. Salén would later encourage my acquaintance as shipsbroker buying and selling ships all over the world.

Thus during the summer 1951 my Scandinavian adventure started. A girl from the Rhineland, a school teacher, who was my penfriend, and I decided to meet in Flensburg and from there ship the collapsible canoe to Gothenburg and travel by train to Gothenburg ourselves.

First at that time we started to look more in detail at the maps. There were numerous locks and in order to avoid the heavy toll payments we had to portage the canoe, tent and baggage around all the locks.

In the same way the French Canadian traders and hunters used to do when opening up Canada. By identifying ourselves with them we did not regard the portages as a tedious task but part of the adventure. It must have been good to be so young. I was 24 years old.

One of the first obstacles were the many stairlike locks of the Göta River up to the Lake Wänern. They were really impressive. The many locks later, regulating the canal, were more romantic than impressive.

The Lake Wänern is the largest lake in the South of Sweden. If the wind blows from the North it creates heavy waves breaking over the side of the kajak. However, we kept ourseles near the coast in order to be able to seek shelter on the beaches.

Here are  just a few glimpses from our trip

At one time we must have entered a prohibited military exercise area because we were shot at, almost, by diving airplanes. In retrospect I believe they used dummy ammunition - but even so .. But lets not think about it. Its quite a long time ago.

On the Göta canal between Lake Wänern and Lake Vättern we paddled in slow speed enjoying the passing fields, villages, mansions and locks. Stopping sometimes at country pubs or pastry houses during the day and putting up our tents in lonly places for the night.

There is not very much exiting to relate about our trip. The quiet rythm of paddling almost induces a state of meditation. This relaxation is for me the basic idea for paddling in the countryside. High Sea paddling on the other hand is different and one does not have to explain why.

This slow pace made our calculations for reaching the Swedish Eastern cost - or as much as we had calculated - wrong. And we decided to break the trip at the shores of Lake Vättern to keep our time table for the visas. This was also made easy for us because there was a prognosis for heavy winds and this lake was known to very treacherous. We were not prepared for High Sea paddling.

We packed our gear and sent it by train to Stockholm. We went also by train to have a few days there for sightseing.

The first problem was to find a place suitable to place our tent and canoe and the second was to acquaint ourselves with the city of Stockholm. I do not recall how we found Lillsjönäs Gård. This was a youth hostel owned by the city but run by IAL, the Swedish organisation for voluntary international work.

This hostel was in the East of the city in the direction of the airport Bromma. It was imbedded in a small park and had a view onto a small lake, thus the name: Small Lake Pensinsular Estate.

The hostel was near enough to the central city but far enough on the outskirts to give the impression of being in the countryside.

We put up our tent in front of the main house which was a large wooden building.

The best camping at Stockholm for us

When I understood that the hostel during the winter became an international cooperative I applied to stay and participate. The first step was to find a way to earn a living not having a working permit. This I´ll deal with a bit later. Not to mention the fact that my visa had expired.

My girlfriend left because her visa also had expired and she had to start her work. I, on the other hand, started my relationship with the Swedish authorities. I found very soon how the Swedish buraucracy worked. Every paper is sent to a large number of offices each of which had to have their say.

I made it a habit to visit each official dealing with my application. I did not think it was my right to stay and appreciated the attempt to limit the number of immigrants as I knew that the standard of living of the rest of Europe was so low as to put an immense pressure on Sweden.

On the other hand I had been living i Italy for a year illegally and without a passport because there were no German passports at that time. Thus my basic idea was that there is always a way. Which I also told the authorities.

The lingua franca at Lillsjönas gård was English and many officals at that time liked to practise their English (at that time I spoke English much better than now). In these discussions I learned a lot about not only the Swedish way of thinking but the buraucratic Swedish way of thinking which was very helpful to me later on.

My legal arguments were very weak. The contract that I would leave Sweden after 4 weeks I said was illegal and thus not binding because it was based upon morally undue demands as one would not get a visa without this promise. Any contract established under duress is invalid according to Swedish law. Of course, the argument was weak but I had to say something.

Twice my applications were denied but the third time they gave up and I got my temporary working permit.

LILLSJÖNÄS – WINTER 1951-52

Table Of Contents

IAL - WORKING FOR PEACE

THE IDEA OF SMALL GROUPS

THE LILLSJÖNÄS COOPERATIVE

THE ECONOMICS OF SURVIVAL

SOME NAMES FROM LILLSJÖNÄS

In the beginnings of the 50th the Swedish International Voluntary Work Camp Organisation, IAL had the mansion of Lillsjönäs, owned by the city of Stockholm, as a Youth Hostel during the summertime in order to generate money for is activities.

Lillsjönäs Manor

IAL organised International Work Camps and recruited Swedish volunteers to participate in camps abroad.

During the wintertime it opened the hostel to groups of young people as a self governing housing cooperative with lively study activities. I was lucky to get the chance to stay there during the winter of 1951-52.

The IAL´s way of organising activities in general was inspired by the Association of International Work Camps for Peace who in their turn were inspired by the American Friends Service Commitee a.o. IAL in Sweden had also close contacts with the Swedish Quakers.

THE IDEA OF SMALL GROUPS

Their basic idea for the leadership of camps and group activities was truly democratic. I understood that their approach was influenced by the Quaker idea of group dynamics. When starting a camp they did not designate a group leader. This approach they had also for our cooperative.

However, when discussing study activities and planning and carrying out work in a cooperative way there always developes a kind of loose hierarchy in a group by natural selection. Yet this authority could never become autocratic because of the underlying non-authoritarian ideology.

The groups numbered usually between 18-24 members. This small group idea must get its strength from being the ideal number for small human groups which have flourished for million of years in the survival of humans. However, we have lost our original garden of Eden.

The large hierarchical city and mass cultures of today establish Towers of Babel organising millions of people under strict structures of hierarchical leadership - very suitable for exploitation, mass hysteria and war.

Yet the IAL idea was to recreate such small groups and we who were fortunate to stay at Lillsjönäs became such a group.

Our “small group” - partying and discussing.

This winter we were 24 young people from 18 different nations, men and women. The next generation would have called it a collective - we a cooperative.

We had a common kitchen (you can imagine that there was kitchen duty to see that it always was clean - at least only more or less) and two large common rooms in the center on each floor.

One common room was for more quiet activities like reading, talking and meetings and the other for more active leisure like playing ping-pong och dancing etc.

There also was a small annex with several rooms (which burnt down during the winter).

The individual rooms openend towards the central common rooms.

We all worked during the day in all kind of jobs and spent the evenings together. At the weekend anyone might come up with sugestions for excursions for those who were interested. We went to concerts, the opera and for example to the Old Uppsala with its viking heritage.

..

The International Expedition to the Vikings of Old Uppsala

About once a week, usually Fridays, we invited more or less prominent and interesting Swedish speakers in order learn more about Sweden - Sweden which at that time internationally was known as being on the “Middle Way”.

As an illustration I shall list my jobs.

Before I had a work permit I had to work as a dishwasher in many restaurants where one could get in without showing ones papers. Usually one had to go to the next place whenever the question of papers came up.

As all this is proscribed after 50 years I can boast now that I became something of a chief dishwasher among other qualified personnell like medical doctors, teachers etc at the restaurang Regnbågen at Stureplan. This restaurang had a kind of dubious, or interesting, history during the war as a watering point of many foreign spies and agents.

Whenever the question of papers arose I quickly changed, for a few days, to a place in the old town. Later this became a Chinese restaurang and later still I somtimes went there quietly enjoying that now somebody else was doing the kuli work.

Finally, after I got a temporary working permit I could start working in factories.

One of the first jobs was pressing grammophone disk.

December to January, over X-mas, my roommate Brian from Australia and I spent the nights at the nearby building site of Blackeberg. Our job was to keep open fires going for the builder Olle Enquist to prevent the new masonry from freezing.

Thereafter I worked at a factory putting together outboard motors for the then famous engine manufacturer Archimedes.

While working there I was asked to participate in a much publicised corporate swimming event. The 50_men swim. One of the groups competing was from the Stockholm police, I remember. I did not do very well but because we were so many my poor performance was not noticed among the multitude.

Among the persons I remember especially is Henri Delpeux from Lyon. We sent one another  some picture postcards but had no contact later.

However, he gave me the name of his fathers brother in Paris to contact whenever I should find myself there. Which I also did which is part of my story about Paris.

Henri was interested in puppet theater and later I have learned that he became a teacher, wrote puppet theater plays and directed them. He also wrote widely acclaimed books for children.

My room mate Brian Hay from Australia, who later married Marlies from Switzerland - a room neighbor, I´ll mention later because Brian and I spent the summer 1952 paddling through the Stockholm archipelago from Stensund-Landsort in the South to Grisslehamn in the North.

Many of us took part in the Voluntary Work Camp at Stensund, where IAL helped to build a new, small dormitory för students, after Lillsjönäs closed down for the summer 1952.

THE OLYMPICS SUMMER OF 1952

Table Of Contents

STENSUND NEAR TROSA

IAL´S INTERNATIONAL WORK CAMP AT STENSUND

FROM STENSUND-LANDSORT TO GRISSLEHAMN

PICTURES SAY MORE THAN WORDS

VISITING HELSINKI AND THE OLYMPICS

ECONOMICS OF TRAVELLING

When we closed the International Cooperative of Lillsjönäs for the summer 1952 a group of us went on the the work camp organised by IAL at Stensund near Trosa about 100 km South of Stockholm.

Stensund is the adult educational institute and a kind of spiritual headquarters for the Health and Sport Association of Sweden.

I had some earlier contact with the Health and Sport Movement because of my interest in the German Sun Bathing Association and others connected with Canoeing

The Swedish Health and Sport Association - Stensund, Trosa

This Educational Center was interesting not only because it was owned by a popular movement but also that the rector Ottosen, the founder of the school, was a forceful personality. This was the third school he started. And the background is interesting.

He was earlier the rector for the Swedish Gymnastic Movements Central School and he protested violently that this movement was influenced and lead by people who had definite nazi sympathies. For this he was dismissed. I still admire the Health Movements people for supporting him courageously, at that early time.

Because many of the members were also vegetarians they were sometimes regarded as being kind of eccentric by the establishment. But some teachers went from here to national prominence. One of the younger teachers later became the national inspector for Swedish Adult Education.

Close to the main building we were working on a new, small dormitory for students of the school.

This is the largest part of the work camp group.
To the left is our contact to IAL, Gunnar Svensgård

I do not remember very much from our work. What I rember is that Brian and I now more in detail planned our trip which we had talked about a lot during the winter when Brian was my room mate at the International Cooperative of Lillsjönäs. Brian came from Adelaide on the Western coast of Australia. He was an industrial chemist.

Planning already in the Winter

At that time there was a ship owner on the Ã…land Islands, between Finland and Sweden, who had four-masted sailing ships, probably the last of their kind in commercial trade. The ships names were “Pamir” and “Passat”. They carried grain loads to Europe and now they were supposed to be layed off. This last trip was to be a race between the two.

Anyhow, the ships did not have enough sailors for the last return trip and the captain had to advertise for young adventurous men to fill the ships crew. Brian volunteered. He told me that already on the first day out of the harbour they encountered heavy seas, or more correctly heavy winds. And he had to go upp into the highest lofts to reef the sails. It did take them about 6 months to reach England.

In other words he was the most likely and experienced comrade one could think of to have as second man in the kajak while trying to cross the high seas.

I have to mention an other crew member who had come from academic life in Finland to sail as simple sailor to Australia. But as there were not so many people more experienced than he, after the first 6 months, he received his officers patents for the return voyage.

This experience he documented in a book “High Sea Sailing Ships” and we wanted to meet him in Finland.

Early one morning we left Stensund with some from our work camp and the school waving. First we went eastwards to the open sea. Landsort, also the name of the large light tower with its beacon, lies at the end of some islands and is open for the entire Baltic Sea with the winds from South and East.

After passing Landsort we went North. We kept always near the shores and in between all the smaller and larger islands protecting us from the high sea. First at the end of the trip we had to round the northernmost island and paddle across the wide open sea again to reach the harbour of Grisslehamn. From here we planned to cross the Baltic to The Ã…land islands and Finland.

This is not to be a romantic or lyric desrciption of paddling in the wonderful archipelago of Stockholm and I only present a few pictures and leave the rest to the readers imagination.

One day, in good time before the start of the summer Olympics at Helsinki, we left Grisslehamn after having been cleared by the harbour master, the customs officer and the border police. All those could be found here in this small harbour. Now those functions cannot be found here anymore.

When we left the weather was fine. But the sea here in the streights between Sweden and Finland can be very treacherous. The winds can blow up in a few hours which happened to us and roughly halfway we could not manage the heavy breaking seas with our heavily loaded cajak.

Fortunately for us two fishing boats were nearby and we were saved. They put our kajak on the fish in one boat and us besides. The storm was really bad that not only Brian with his experience and I became seasick but also one of the two crewmembers of the fishing boat.

Thus I believe my German passport from that time is the only one having a Swedish stamp: “Resan avbruten pÃ¥ grund av hÃ¥rd väder”. Voyage interrupted because of hard weather. I am still looking were I have this passport in order to put it in this documentation.

Here are some pictures from our 4 weeks trip from Stensund-Landsort to Grisslehamn Summer 1952.

While at Stensund some of us lived in our tents

During the trip we paddled or rested - for 4 weeks

For the evenings we prepared carefully

We had to reach Helsinki in about 10 days to make the Olympics. I sold my kajak to a summer guest in Grisslehamn and started to hitch hike in Northern direction around the Baltic Seas. It went slowly because the traffic was very sparse. When I came to the town of Haparanda at the border between Sweden and Finland I decided to take the train and thus could reach Helsinki in good time.

Brian decided to take the ferry boat from Stockholm to Helsinki because he wanted first to to meet his fiancy Marlies at Stockholm before we met again at Helsinki.

VISITING HELSINKI AND THE OLYMPICS

Finally arrived at Helsinki we had tickets for two days

We had, like seasoned travellers of old times, letters of introductions to people in Helsinki. One was to a young and well known film critic, Jerker Erikson, at Huvudstadsbladet the leading Swedish language newspaper of Finland. He in his turn introduced us to Jörn Donner, another young “advanguardist?”, who also invited us to tea.

The next evening we were invited to a supper reception at Brians ship officers home at Grankulla a town within the town of Helsinki. He had now become assistant professor again. Here a lady heard whom we had met the other day and she asked: “what did you think of Jörn?”

Apparently he had been her pupil at school and she said already as a school boy he could surprise you - whatever she ment by that.

After the Olympics I had to work again. I found employment for some 2 weeks at a Finnish ship yard, building boats as war reparation for the Russians.

As one can see from the picture I had learned how to manage The Scandinavian byreaucracy to get work. Even in Finland

And later after returning to Sweden I worked 2 weeks again at Stensund. This time, however, not at the Voluntary Work Camp, but for wages at the schoolfarm where I learned to operate an huge harvester. I think I must have managed the job quite satisfactorily. The inspector of the Stensund farm, Hasse Lustig, phoned me not so long ago to tell me that he had bought his own farm later.

BETWEEN SWEDEN AND SWEDEN 1952-54

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PARIS INSTEAD OF AFRICA

BURNING A BORDER STOP BETWEEN FRANCE AND GERMANY

SAARBRÃœCKEN IN THE SAARLAND

WITHOUT VISA TO PARIS

MEETING HENRY DELPEUX´S UNCLE

CHRISMAS 1952 IN THE VOSGES

RETURN TO PARIS WITH A VISA

WORKING IN PARIS

GOOD BYE TO PARIS

Earlier I had planned to travel to Africa directly after having visited Scandinavia. But in Stockholm Henri Delpeux convinced me that one had to see Paris before deciding to leave Europe. Thus I told everybody I would go to France after Sweden and not to call myself a liar I was forced to go to Paris.

I read in Helmut Kohls memoires that he was with a group of students from France and Germany who removed symbolically a border post in the spirit of European Federalism already 1950. Now, about two years later a French professor had organised a similar demonstration burning a border post between Weissenburg and St Germanshof. I remember vividly the festive atmosphere.

SAARBRÃœCKEN IN THE SAARLAND

My registered German residence was at Schwanewede near Bremen und the French consulate was in Hamburg. I sent in my application and told them to send the visa to the Saarland because i wanted to go there first.

I now know it is a mistake to tell a French offical what to do. I waited in vain so I told the consulate by letter that they forced me to go to Paris without a visa because I was one of those who burned down the border post between Weissenburg and St Germanshof in the large European demonstration.

Before going to France I wanted to visit the Saarland because my fathers family comes from there, from Dudweiler, a town near Saarbrücken the capital of the Saarland. I stayed at the very pleasant Youth Hostel situated in a park of Saarbrücken. Of course, I immediately tried to get some work because I did not want to live on my saved money. The first job was to load rubble from destroyed buildings on trucks. This is very heavy  work and the other workers were from the countrysides of Italy and Algeria and worked like hell to save some money to be able to go home with the savings.

Areal view of Saarbrücken

The second job was to build foundations for a new high rise building downtown. The excavations of deep holes had to be done by hand. Even this I could do very well being well trained. I mention this only to show that there is always a chance to work as long as one is healthy.

Social and labour policies in the then by France still occupied Saarland were very generous. When it was raining betweem 6 -6.30 o´clock.in the morning one did not have to go to work but received 80% of the normal wages. I still cannot understand why some times later the people voted for reunification with Germany instead of France.

Lodgings near Place Pigalle

Because I did not get a visa in time I decided to go to Paris my way. I looked at some maps and saw a forest on both sides of the frontier. I had my knapsack and not very much else. After walking a few hours I reached the nearest French village with a railway station and bought quite simply a ticket to Paris.

I don´t remember how, but I found half clandestine lodgings in an international hostel for refugees near the Place Pigalle. It was full with most interesting people and we slept on beds with at least 3 tiers.

Henry Delpeux had given my his uncles name and address but told mme nothing else. When I visited him I was first astounded to see the large office complex at the Champs Elysses. And having entered the office I found myself in what seemed to me a huge “audience chamber”.

Henry had forewarned his uncle and I was received in a very friendly way. I should mention that I looked like some kind of anarchist with my beard which must have surprised the clerks in the office.

We left the impressive table and sat down with coffee brought by the secretary. And we talked some hours about most anything of actual interest.

There was a lot of trouble with the communist trade unions and the party. But Henry´s uncle told me that he talked with the trade union and party leaders most everyday to see what was happening. He and many other industry leaders of France had been interned at Dachau together with the leading communists of France and both groups helped one another there.

He also told me that he just had returned from North Africa and had come to the conclusion that France could not hold the colonies anylonger and it would be best to act accordingly rather earlier than later.

He was a firm believer in a future federalistic structure in Central Europe because otherwise there was no future. This was interesting to me because he told me that he was during the year after the war the second in command in the French Zone of occupation in Germany under the command of the French General König who was not known to be a European enthusiast.

The first thing I had told him was that I had no visa and was in Paris illegally. This did not seem to disturb him very much. He gave me the name of the Police chief of Paris and called to tell them I would come to their offices.

When I finally arrived there the Police chief told me: “I have not seen you. There is nothing I can do. The best thing is that you go back to the Saarland exactly as you came.. and we will see that you get a visa sent to you there.”

I hitch hiked back to Saarbrücken and alas there was a visa waiting for me at the Youth Hostel.

But first I had to find a short time job to stock up my supply of money. This time I got a job as a secretary to write English letters mostly to publishers and authors for the leading bookshop owner of Saarbrücken.

Christmas 1952 I spent in a wonderful youth hostel near the border between Germany and France, in the Vosges.

Here I met a group of students from Paris who had taken a break from studies. In the evenings they sang, played music, and danced. We all also looked at old silent films. And I believe that the projector was vintage and had to be turned by hand.

This was the first time for me to really practice skiing. We made long trips, often the whole day and had food with us which we ate at a fire kindled with fallen wood. I became quite good at long distance skiing. But just in front of the hostel we also had a slope with one easier and one more steep side to it. I never managed either of them.

This is the Youth Hostel “La Roche du Page”
I took the other picture. It became quite artistic by accident

Jacqueline – a good friend from the Vosges – here in Paris

RETURN TO PARIS WITH A VISA

I do not believe in boasting or explicit spreading details of ones more intimate relations. Maybe there is not very much to be proud of because I usually used to run away as fast as possible in order to avoid entanglements. Those I mention are good platonic friends

The second time I spent in Paris after I had got my visa I stayed in the same internatiomal hostel near the Place Pigalle as before.

Besides sitting in cafees and looking, talking and writing over a cup of caffe for hours I had also to work.

I wanted to improve my French and I started at the Alliance Francaise which has been the starting point for many young foreigners.

Of course this does not prove how hard I studied but that I was there.

Like most visitors to Paris we used to sit in the cafees writing and talking. Yes, I spent a lot of time also in the “Deux Magots”, eating in the students bistros and during the evenings listening to jazz in the cellar bars.

This is the programme – early 1953 of the Circle

This International Circle of Paris met weekly in the house of the French Quakers and had very interesting subjects for their discussions which I regularily participated in.

I spent the winter 1951-52 in the International Cooperative of IAL in Stockholm. IAL, the International Work Camp Organisation of Sweden had close contacts with the FSF, the Peace and Arbitrage Ass. founded a.o by the Nobel Peace Price holder C.P.Arnoldsson. They also had contact with the Swedish Quakers.

IAL had also close contacts with the Youth Travel Organisation of Sweden owned by the FSF and I became acquainted with the French equivalent. One contact gave the other even if all looks very accidentally.

This was the pleasant part. But I had also to work to earn a living - or at least make my money from Saarbrucken last as long as possible. My student friends told me about paper collection. I dont remember whether I got a personal recommendation or if I talked myself into a job.

Every morning we gathered in central Paris and got a bicycle, or more correct a tricycle with 3 wheels and carrying platform. Then we got a licence with our name and everyone got some streets in central Paris. It really was quite easy. The people, and the concierges, were glad to get rid of their old newspapers. Usually they had already well packaged the paper.

Now, as I became a cykling expert I bought a very old cycle to use for myself in the afternoons. The problem was that the brakes were very bad - but it was cheap - and I had to learn to survive in the very French traffic of Paris.

As I liked very much to be in Paris I will not say anymore about the traffic at that time. Maybe it is better today.

After the war large scale charter travel was not known in Europe. But young people started to travel in large numbers and in many countries Youth Travel Organisations developed. I mentioned earlier the Youth Travel Organisation of Sweden (Ungdomens Resebyrå). In France they worked together with the Club Meditereane and with the Bureau des Voyages de la Jeunesse.

As I later organised exchange of study groups between Bremen and Stockholm the French organisation was interested to maintain contact with me.

In order to finish my story about Paris I want to tell about the final visit to Paris for many years to come – it must have been in the beginning of 1954. The Youth Travel Organisation of Stockholm was invited to Paris and they were told to invite me too.

We stayed ar one of the greatest hotels of Paris and were received by the mayor at the city hall. After a tour through the city we spent one evening at the Moulin Rouge with champagne and all, courtesey of the city and the next evening we were invited to a sumptious supper at the Tour d´Argent one of the most famous restaurants.

This was a real finale for Paris for me.

MY SECOND TRIP TO SWEDEN -1954

Table Of Contents

BY CYCLE INSTEAD OF CANOE

MY FIRST HOME IN SWEDEN

THE EUROPEAN YOUTH CAMPAIGN OF SWEDEN

THE SNAKE GIRLS

DIFFERENT SHORT TIME JOBS

HOW I GOT THE JOB AT HÃ…GELBY IN BOTKYRKA

The second trip to Sweden, which should prove to be my last, I started quite late in the summer of 1954. This time I choose the bicycle which at that time did not have any special gears or gadgets to make cykling easier. I had my tent and all equipment in bags on the cycle which meant the burden was quite heavy.

I do not know how many days it took me to Helsingborg in Sweden. I was quite well trainend and made certainly about 150 km a day easily. But the last day was a kind of endurance test. I made the distance between Helsingborg and Moheda in Småland in one long day. Here at Moheda Gunnars father, Gunnar från IAL´s days, had a small farm and we had planned to meet there.

This is Moheda in Småland

When I arrived late in the evening the family was busy harvesting strawberries on the fields (some kind of late second harvesting) and I though very tired helped. There was an aboundance of strawberries and I had never seen such rich fields. A large part of what I picked ended up – you can guess where..I did not need to eat an evening meal that day.

The next day, as always, I looked for a week of work and found employment on a small building site as a bricklayer. I later heard how the other workers even years later told stories about that young German who ate copious amounts of food during lunch time. There are many things one can be remembered by and perhaps this made a stronger and more lasting impression than many other, maybe more remarcable things, I may have achieved later on.

After having earned some money to replenish my travelfunds I said good bye to Småland and my friends there and travelled now by train (with the bicycle on the train of course) to Stockholm.

STOCKHOLM  AGAIN

In order to simplify the description of what happenend the next few years I have to simplify and split the narrative in four strands – or the reader should put the stories in their respective slots if I get them mixed up.

All shenigans to get the necessary permits for residence and work. My contacts with organisations I was interested in. My leisure interest and activities.Getting and holding a real job in the field of building.

In the beginning I had no permits and no job. In order to get a work permit you had to have a job. And in order to get job you must have a work permit. It's that simple.

In order to get a residence permit without a job one had to be a student. In order to become a student at the university one had to have the final examinations for entrance to the higher education. I, of course, did not have such papers.

I dont remember how but I found one professor kind enough to say he regarded me qualified anyhow and I got a special matriculation from the rector of the university.

This made me also a member of the student association of Stockholm which had their own house with lunch restaurant and library. Especially the library was useful to me. They had more than 30 books by the detective story writer Edgar Wallace.

These I read to learn Swedish. The translated texts were simple and he used everyday words. After every book I understood more because the words I did not know came up in different circumstances and soon one knew what they meant. After 30 books it was easy.

I also got myself inscribed at the Art School because I wanted to practice drawing as I knew most everything about building but had no extensive practice of drawing.  Now I wanted to work in an architects office instead of on the building sites.

Industrial Art School

In the list of what to do I forgot that I also had to find lodgings. There was a tremendous shortage of housing.

But I found  a place nobody believed was possible to get. I got a flat in the Old Town of Stockholm on its most central street: VästerlÃ¥nggatan at number 28/II.

At Home at Work

This is more than 50 years ago and secrets do not need to be secrets anylonger. The flat was owned by an alcoholic who was not allowed to stay in Stockholm. He was supposed to stay with his relatives at Gothenburg. But once a month they got so tired of him that he was allowed to return to Stockholm. The family kept a room for him in the flat and he used to make speeches to the populace in the street from the open window until he was sent back to Gothenburg.

I could get along very well with him. But the main reason that I got the contract was that I as a foreigner could not and would not take over the first-hand contract for the flat which a Swedish family most certainly would have done.

Some places have their special loci geni and the VästerlÃ¥nggatan near the Royal Castle was such a place. Quite accidentally and unexpectedly you might see an acquaintance from Paris, Rome or New York – this was at that time such a place where the lines of life sometimes met unexpectedly.

With my federalist background I soon visited the European Youth Campaign of Sweden which was also a kind of outsider organisation in the tightly knit Swedish organisational life. Many Swedes travelled abroad but Sweden was enough for them as an ideological base for life. There were a few internationalist, and those were very well known everywhere, and soon one came to know everyone of them.

Even today people wonder whether the European Youth Campaign was financed by the CIA. But what I know is that they were heavily financed by the Wallenberg family which is a curiosity in itself because the General Secretary was a Syndicalist, a professed half anarchist who told me that he kept a stick of dynamite under his bed not to use but as a symbolic relic. He probable joked because he, Bert, ended up as bank director able to enter banks without dynamite.

The Syndicalists are another story. I did not have any contact with them exept to talk sometimes with a German refugee named Rüdinger (who had written a book about Federalism which I found very interesting) and who was one of several editors of their newspaper “The Worker”(Arbetaren).

Besides Edgar Wallace this paper was my preferred reading because they used a very clear and simple language in their reporting. At the same time they had a section where most of the young gifted Swedish writers started and this section required more concentrated study which also was both usefull and stimulating.

At that time I was still the President of the Jeunesses F̩d̩ralist Europ̩ennes of Bremen. But I had decided to stay in Sweden in order to avoid getting caught up in the German hierarchical struggle Рa kind of exile in the proverbial biblical desert РUltima Thule.

So I had to invite my friends from Bremen to make an accepted sorti. The European Youth Campaign planned at that time a conference at Marston Hill and they extended invitations to those concerned from Bremen.

MARSTON HILL

Marston Hill, at Mullsjö in the darkest part of Småland of all places, was the home of the American-English Center and the Allwood family spread from here English language education, poetry, theater, and culture generally. Many Swedish poets had some of their roots here. Even Lars Forsell seems to have started with dramatics here.

  Marston Hill at Mullsjö

Anyhow, I made the transition in the Bremen organisation in an orderly way and also found lifelong friends here, especially I want to mention Charles McEaddy from the US.

The European Youth Campaign was also member of the Swedish Council of Youth to which most central Youth Organisations in Sweden were affiliated. I knew some of the people from IAL and UR who were also active in the council which meant that I was invited to many international conferences.

I think that I was an useful addition to their conferences, an addition who talked a lot but was not interested in possible power plays among these gifted young people who naturally also had to think of their careers.

Later I started or got involved with organisations in a more participary role: “The International Circle” (a social discussion club) and “The Indian Village Organisation” (a voluntary international aid organisation). But those merit their own chapters.

Between my lodgings and the Royal Palace just opposite the Great Church was a notorious coffee house. Its Swedish name was “Ormens Pigor” this is what Snake Girls means, or vice versa.

Pre conditioned at the “Deux Magots” of Paris I soon found myself sitting here some hours every day. Writing, thinking and later even talking. I found that this was a kind of meeting place of the poets of the Metamorphose group. Generally disrespectable as seen from the normal Swede´s horison, I understood.

A girl told me later that they first thought I was a police spy because some of them were almost the first to use narcotics in Sweden. I was blissfully unconcious of the deeper currents.

The same girl, from a very well situated family, invited me later to a dinner with her parents and acquaintances of her parents. They were probably also directors of larger Swedish companies with their families. Now I had understood that one had to thank the hostess for the food after the dinner was finished. I had to do that I understood. Understood read: misunderstood.

Later the girl told me that I shocked everybody because I said the food was almost good. I said “ganska god” – and in German ganska means “very” but in Swedish “almost”.

I was just now very much an active cyclist. My first job was at Skansen the museum park of Stockholm with its many historic buildings.

Of course, I did not have any working permit but nobody thought that one could have the audacity to look for work in such a central culture institution of Stockholm, of Sweden, and not have all papers in order. This postcard I sent to Schwanewede from Skansen to tell about my first job and the cakes

My job was very special. I had a tricycle and transported pastries from the central restaurant to all the different small serving places, caffés, all around the large park.Part of the wages was one or the other cake or ice cream during the day.

After two weeks the papers, or the lack of papers, caught up with me and I had to look for new work. This time I started my own transportation enterprise like in Rome. Mostly I got orders from a dental laboratory in the center of the town and cycled all over Stockholm with suburbs to dentists with dental prothesises. This seemed to be cheaper than to use shipment by motorcycle or car and faster than the mail.

These job permitted me to do other things during the day, study and talk but I would not get a working permit that way. The residence permit I had because of my now buraucratically registered studies.

I found a job as a dishwasher for the Stockholm Konsum´s personnel kitchen. I don´t remember how but they needed help and had good contacts with the authorities. They got me a labour permit as dishwasher. As nobody looks at the text on the stamp of the labour permit in the passport I now could start looking for a job at an architects office.

I asked around to get information how to go about getting a job as an architectural draftsman. One acquaintance said that Ralph Erskine at Drottningholm and Lars Magnus Giertz in Botkyrka were looking for help because they just had received important commissions.

It fitted my time schedule to travel to Botkyrka first. At that time there was a busline from Zinkensdam of the South of Stockholm to the church of Botkyrka and from there one could walk 3 km to the manor house of Hagelby where the office was

It was a warm and sunny autumn day when I walked for the first time through the gates to the impressive entrance of the building. I learned later that Lars Magnus Erikson, of the telephone company, had it build 1919.

Here i got my job as a building draftsman 
in the office of architect Lars Magnus Giertz

I said I had been mainly working on building sites but was now looking for work as an architectural draftsman. I was lucky that Giertz was not only a well known architect but also an unconventional inventor. Thus he did not ask for any papers but told me he had thought of a difficult spiral staircase with prefabricated elements. If I could do that drawing job I could start to work immediately.

It took me three days because this was a completely new design. Each step was to be a separate element to be produced at a factory and then put together on the building site. The projections were quite difficult to imagine. Therefore I first built a model with the different parts in plastiline and then I did the projections and the final drawings.

Giertz told me later he had difficulties to explain his ideas to his engineers who wanted a more conventional design. I thus got my chance to work for an architectural office.

THE GOLDEN SUMMERS

OF THE LATE 50TH

Table Of Contents

THE TETLEY TEA HOUSE

EVERYBODY HAD A SAILING BOAT

IT IS DIFFICULT NOT TO WRITE POEMS IF EVERYBODY AROUND DOES IT

VIKTOR MOSSBERG A COLLEGUE AT WORK

ARNE VITTRUPS SUMMER HOME ON INGARÖ

JAZZ A PART OF MY LIFE FOR SOME YEARS

Tetley Tea House at the South end of KungsträdgÃ¥rden, under the large Alm Trees, was during these summers a meeting place of all kinds of people: students, poets, writers, artists, diplomatic employees and so on. I spent a lot of time here and made a lot of friends. But many things fade away in memory and I have more fotographs – but will just show one or two.

In retrospect I do not really know how I had so much time as I was working very hard during most days and also went to a number of international meetings and conferences.  In the beginning I was still living in the Old Town but later I had the first flat in what was called the Experimental Building at Östberga, a southern suburb.

Yael and Eddy Grünberg, a young couple of folk singers from from a theatrical family of Tel Aviv and Doris Denning whose French husband is to the left of me.

Of the many people I must recall a pensioned engineer, with whom I also could talk about some of the things we did at work, and who after a heart attack got his doctor's orders to take everything very, very easy and in order to relax start to draw miniatures.

It was astonishing how he could draw faces with just a few distinct lines. I tried to imitate him but it requires special skills which I never mastered.

Even though the Tea House was a focal point we met in different other places with always shifting composition of the groups. We met at the Coffee House NybrogÃ¥rden opposite the Dramatic Theater, a the Bar of the Riche Restaurant and the Bar of the Opera Cellar –  besides the Tea House.

I did not really have enough money to spend at the bars so I had to sit with one drink all evening. But I gave the bartenders and doorguards lavish tips which made them remember me and open all doors. At that time there were not the new rich and famous crowding the watering holes like today.

When I later sometimes went to the Rotary Club at the Opera Cellar or to a conference at Riche the same doorguards had not forgotten me and it amused me to see the astonished faces of my new collegues.

It seemed to me that everybody in Stockholm had a sailing boat. At the end of 1955 I bought one very cheap. From the insurance papers I see it was under 8 meters lång and had 23 square meters sail area.

My first longer tour was when I sailed against the wind from the Lake Mälaren to the open waters via the Hammarby canal. At the most narrow strech I had to row and paddle, which I could do much better.

A few times I invited as many friends as could find a place in the boat and we sailed early out from Stockholm. The last time we were very late and we had not reckoned with the wind dying away late in the evening. It became darker and darker and colder and colder.

At last we started to burn a newspaper as a signal, a motorboat came to our help and pulled us in to Stockholm. Since then I have never dreamed of having a sailing boat like everybody else in Sweden seems to dream about.

After so many years I can only recognize Eva Rudling and Uncas Serner. Uncas was not only a friend but also my lawyer. Eva was at that time an art student, became later an international fashion model and finally a well known international photographer.

Eva has written her autobiography: “If you are not Matisse, don´t paint”.

These are pictures from one of our excursions by boat

I told before of a youg Swede whom I met quite accidently on a train and who gave me a written guarantee so that I could get the first visa to Sweden. His name was Björn Rudling. He is now a well known ships broker. The curious fact and it proves that the world is very small s that Eva Rudling was his sister.

Uncas Serner helped me once to try to defend a young African from Liberia. He was a professional boxer and married to a Swedish girl. When he walked through Stockholms streets with his wife he could hear the occasional passerby say derogatory words about his wife, to express what was said carefully.

He sometimes turned around an gave these people a knock out quite understandably considering the words. But, of course, forbidden. For a professional boxer his fist is a weapon and cannot be used like by anybody else. He was finally convicted of assault and expelled from Sweden. We could not do anything for him unfortunately.

Later Uncas helped me with another matter at my work – establishing a foundation for Lars Magnus Giertz.

Eva on the other hand was good at organising parties and she helped me several times. But I heard from her later only by the ocasional postcard. The last one was from a photo modelling trip to Sicily where the local peasants were the picturesque background to the cosmopolitan photo sessions.

Usually my different worlds did not intermingle. The social life was one world, the organisational contacts another and my work the third.

A dilettante is a person who is interest to work in artistic fields, but not as a profession. In olden times the name dilettant was not regarded with the slightly derogatory connotation as today.

So I liked to see myself as a dilettant in the old sense but I never thought that my exercises were more than exercises.

One has to keep in mind that the associations with some of the real poets and artists was a bit infectious.

Two booklets with poems of mine of the Golden Summers of the 50th
– came even to the attention of Radio Hamburg who presented some.

Viktor Mossberg in Djursholm  and his
Family Summerhouse in Dalecarnia

Viktor Mossberg is a very gifted silversmith. When I met his friends from the art school they told me that Vicke was the most bohemian of all students. However, while all the other students went around dressed trying to look like bohemians he, the genuine one, was always dressed formally with a tie.

At that time he worked part time as a model builder at the architects office at HÃ¥gelby where I worked.

He had also his silversmith workshop there. The illustration is from the Swedish Flag Day of 1959 at the families summerhome in Dalecarnia.

At this time, having left the art school, Vicke was the president of the Conservativa Youth Organisation of Djursholm which in itself was the most conservative and richest community in Sweden.

We had a lot of fun together arranging parties, he inviting his friends from Djursholm and I my quite bohemian circle from Stockholm. Of course, we used the cellar club at the Old Town.

We were a number of friends who often spent the weekends at the summer home on Ingarö of Arne Vittrup and his wife Mireja from Columbia. Sitting on the terrass, talking and drinking. We were often drinking coffee prepared by Arne with artistic precision. Arne was then the Columbian governments sales agent for all Columbian coffee in Scandinavia.

Arne had his office at that time on Skeppsbron in the Old Town in the building which is now the headquarters of the Stenbeck Empire with Kinnevik, Tele2 etc. This is one of the more beautiful and prestigous office buildings with a view on Stockolm Bay with the incoming vessels.

Last I heard of Arne he was sitting in the sun on the terrass of his home on Mallorca. He still is the main importer of coffee from Columbia and has been the countries consul in Sweden for the last 25 year.

  Typical Afternoon at Ingarö

I do not remember when and how I met Jamila and Idrees Sulieman. Both came to Sweden after a longer engagement in Egypt and became good friends.

Like quite many Afro-Americans they had converted to Islam and had changed their names. This must have been a kind of personal protest against discrimination at home rather than purely religious, I believe.

Through their friendship I was introduced into their circle of musicians not only as a hanger on but somehow being part of the scene. After they had been playing all evening (for money) we used to meet after midnight at the very small Arena Theater of Gröna Lund where changing groups of musicians met late after work to improvise and play for themselves.

Of course, during the earlier evenings we listened to the visiting artists, most often at the Golden Circle, a music restaurant. At one or the other home I met also such different personalities as Josh White and Dizzy Gillespie.

SAD AND STRANGE

Idrees and his wife Jamila together with Margit Sundin wrote the music to my word. I still have the pleasure to listen sometimes to the song and being reminded of those times. That was the only time I got involved in that way – but the musician/composers had it registerd with STIM Just as with my poetry I did not think of myself as an artist – to be.

Idrees was one of the few trumpet players who could hold a tone for several minutes without break. This gives a very powerful feeling, stronger even than the most advanced improvisations.

Idrees and Jamila later moved to Denmark where they for many years were with the Danish Radios famous jazz orchester. I thus lost contact with them and their world.

INTERNATIONAL CIRCLE
OF STOCKHOLM – 1957-58

Table Of Contents

SOME PROGRAMMES

When I was in Paris 1952-53 I used to visit the Alliance Francaise and an International Youth Club. There we could participate in all kinds of discussions and lectures. This stimulating experience was probably the reason why I started similar groups later.

Another reason was that as an outsider, immigrant, one had no natural family backgound and ones friends became a kind of substitute family. As part of us did not speak Swedish very well we used to speak English but somehow became part of the Swedish scene anyhow, without gate-crashing.

August 1957 a group of friends started an Interntional Circle. We were F.Fleischer, Körgma, Mossberg, Nyström, Petterson, Szentpétery Wirmark and Colling. Later there was a managing group consisting of Joachim Colling(chairman), Frederic Fleischer(vice-chairman), Gabriella Lidbom, Bertil Petterson, Lars Palmgren and Peter Salzer.

We also had, being quite advanced?, an advisory board with Lars Erikson, Victor Mossberg, Uncas Serner and David Wirmark.

Lars Erikson, a contact from IAL, became later also the chairman of the Swedish United Nations Association and David Wirmark was president of the Swedish Council of Youth.

When I came to Sweden the second time 1954 I had found a home on VästerlÃ¥nggatan 38 in the Old Town of Stockholm. Quite close there was the cellar meeting place of the Old Town Association with Vera Sjöcrona as its energetic organiser and public relations genius. We could use her place “Alle Mans Katt” at low costs for our meetings.

It might be of interest to se what kind of programmes we had: The printed invitations usually concluded  “Contributions to expenses include tea, biscuits, wine, cheese and bread”.

“Importance and methods of cultural exchange”

Speaker:

T.Tallroth, Director of the Swedish Institute, responsible for the administration of Sweden´s cultural exchanges with abroad.

“Africa today and tomorrow”

Speakers:

Ã….Zander,

Director of the State Board for Export Credits, who had recently conducted a market survey in Central and East Africa.

O.Tandberg, a young Swedish journalist who had investigated discrimination at South African universities (he became later secretary of the Swedish Academy of Sciences).

David Wirmark who at that time was president of the Swedish Council of Youth and who recently had visited Ghana on behalf of WAY, the World Assembly of Youth (he became later Swedish Ambassador to Zambia and Mexico).

“Manners and morals in Sweden”

Speaker:

Anthony Baird,

Of he English section at Radio Sweden who with some members of our circle had just made a television film of a discussion on this subject for a Canandian broadcasting company.

“The International Work of the Swedish Red Cross”

Speaker:

Henrik Beer, General Secretary of the Swedish Red Cross, just returned from a journey abroad. Film: Save the Childrens relief work among refugee children.

“Problems and Solutions in Swedish Architecture”

Speaker:

Ralph Erskine, the well known, and sometimes conroversial, British-born architect.

“Racial Integration - a moral issue of our times”

General debate. Here follows a typical invitation:

******************************************************************

Our members and friends are cordially invited to attend an evening arranged by the

on Monday, the 14th of December 1959 at 7.30 pm

Cellar Alle Mans Katt Västerlångg. 4 (entrance from side street)

For the Organising Committee:

        Jo Colling   Lars Palmgren   Peter Salzer         

******************************************************************

Besides the interesting activities of our own circle we had the advantage of being invited to visit always free of charge the newly started “Baldakin International Music and Dancing Restaurant” at The Folkets Hus of Stockholm. - I often thought that was because the founders saw us as a potential competion. But, of course, we had never such plans.

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCES AND CONTACTS AFTER 1959

Table Of Contents

AWAKENING AFRICA CONFERENCE AT MEM

EUROPEAN CONFERENCE IN SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN

CONFERENCE ON TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE

GOLDA MEIR'S VISIT TO STOCKHOLM

After my earlier contacts through IAL and the European Youth Campaign with the central Swedish Youth organisations I was often invited to meetings and conferences with some international character. There were not so many people interested. This is certainly the main reason why I was invited in the beginning.

And all those who were interested,in the different organisations, knew one another very well. And I came to know everybody.

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON VISINGSÖ

This seminar was organised with support from the European Youth Cammpaign organisations of France and England. At this time many young people were interested to find the ideolgical basis for a peaceful United Europe.

Visingsö is an island in the Lake Vättern. One has to go by boat there. Entering the harbour the first you see is the ruin of a fortified castle. The seminar was to be held at the Adult Educational School of Visingsö whose rector at that time was Uli Herz. He was a refugee from Hitler Germany and he also was a deeply convinced pacifist.

How he could be a pacifist I cannot completely understand having escaped the holocaust and only been saved by the convinced democrats who were prepared to fight to the bitter end for democracy and freedom.

On the other hand now in peacetime the pacifists might well be in the forefront for a more peaceful future.

I still have the list of participants from many countries and curiously there was even one participant from India.

Uli Herz became later a wellknown journalist with the Swedish National Radio and Televison Company. But during the war he was an internee because of his pacifistic beliefs. – The authorities expected he would undermine the defense will of the Swedish youth. He was internee nr 7 together with some active communists.

In Sweden I had by way of the European Federalist Youth and earlier by working with the International Voluntary Work Camp Organisation (IAL) also contact with the National Council of Swedish Youth.

Early 1960 I received an invitation to participate in a Scandinavian Seminar about “Awakening Africa”. This seminar was to be held at the Castle of Mem which belonged to the National Union of Rural Youth.

Their international secretary was Nils Erik Bramsvik whom I later had close contact with. He was involved with an acricultural school in Ethopia which was financed by collections of money among the Rural Youth.

The organisations behind this seminar were the

Swedish Central Committee for Technical Assistance (which at that time was a non– governmental organisation with most of Swedens popular Organisations as members), The National Council of Swedish Youth, The World Assembly of Youth (WAY) – which was the non-communist organisation gatherings youth organisations all over the world, The Norwegian WAY organisation, The Danish WAY organisation and The Icelandic WAY organisation.

I mention this seminar because at that time not many people in Sweden were engaged in or interested in questions regarding black Africa. And those who were, all knew one another.

Here I met two young Africans from Ghana and one became my good friend. These were Fred Nartey, a biochemist researcher at the University of Copenhagen and later assistant professor, who worked on the improvement of the Yam which is an important rootfruit in Africa. And the other was Kwamena Phillipps a young diplomat who had studied in England at Oxfords Exeter College and who later became an important Ghanain diplomat.

He often came to Sweden to visit me and some other friends. We had many discussions and he opened my eyes early to the immorality of the Wests role in Vietnamn. Kwamena died far to early of a badly handled heart condition while being stationed in Bryssels.

It took me a long time to understand the family structure and inheritance principles of Ghana. Material goods are inherited through the mothers line via the maternal uncle. The valiant spirit is inherited via the father. The idea is presumably that wealth is not accumulated on only one hand but within the larger family group.

The inherited positions of governmental power were also inherited via the mother in order to avoid the earlier bloody disputes regarding the real father!?

One day I got a frenzied telephone call from New York. At that time Ghana was in the Security Council but was also going to chair the General Assembly.

Apparently they had got the fixed idea that the Tandberg Tape Recorders were best and I had to buy one at Stockholm and ship it by air freight from Arlanda to New York the same day. They gave as reason that there was no Tandberg available in New York and Tandberg it must be. I always suspected that the real reason was that they were afraid to get a doctored machine in New York

At this seminar was also among others David Wirmark (Liberal Youth) who also had been with our International Circle of Stockholm where I was chairman. He also had been president of the National Council of Swedish Youth and later president of the World Assembly of Youth (WAY). He was a friend of Kenneth Kaunda during the freedom struggle and became ambassador to Zambia later.

Another time I was invited to a European conference in Schleswig-Holstein which was organised by a German organisation who had invited representatives from the Scandinavian countries. As often, I was asked by the National Council of Swedish Youth to be one of those representing Sweden.

Of the others from Sweden I remember only Ernst Lind, who was the international Secretary of the Young Eagles (Unga Örner) the Social democrats organisation for the very young. He lived later in Tullinge, part of the Botkyrka community in which I became party politically active. In Botkyrka he was chairman of the School Board for many years.

But I remember one participant from Norway especially. His story is interesting. During the war he was a very young resistance fighter who as a wireless operator was stationed at the harbour of Bergen sending reports to England, and who survived without being detected.

He told me that he recently travelled to England and when he left the ship was received by the customs police with great honours because they apparently knew of his wartime exploits.

He was now a leading official of the Conservative Youth of Norway. He wanted to be at this conference because he, as a conservative, wanted to reestablish contact with the new Germany because he felt Germany was important in the front against expansive Sovjet policies. Norway sharing 2a frontier with Russia felt very much at risk and wanted to have the European alliance as support in defense against Russia.

In other words he was prepared to give the new Germans the benefit of doubt. I remember though especially one of his remarks to me.

He said that even the new generation here in Germany is not so sensitive in understanding others. This institute where we are gathered now has a long history of the cultural struggle between the German and the Danish culture and language as this has been a disputed border territory. Why did they organise this conference here? They don't think. For my part it is just as well that I do not remember which Institute this was.

It was organised by the Swedish Central Committee for Technical Assistance, a non-governmental organisations, in which most national popular organisations of Sweden were members. (Though they were mostly represented by their International Secretaries and participated mostly with Good-Will and by collecting funds).

This conference was led by its General Secretary Sixten Heppling and held at Repbäcken, wherever this was?

Among the lecturers was also the former rector of the Swedish Technical College of Addis Abbeba in Ethiopia, Architect SAR Ingvar Eknor.

Curiously the new rector, wo had replaced him, was my former boss the architect Lars Magnus Giertz to whom I originally showed the ad that they were looking for a new rector in Africa. Of course, I did not expect the family to go to Africa because it would change everything for me, too.

But he and his family became very interested, and alas he was appointed. later he became chief Building Expert for the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa at Nairobi, Kenya.

Another interesting reflection in connection with this conference was the fate of Sixten Heppling. About this time the Swedish Parliament and Government became interested in the question of technical assistance to the “less developed countries”. A government department was established and the normal bureaucrats and politicians took over.

What to do with Sixten Heppling who had run everything effectively on a shoestring and knew everybody?

Your guess is right: They sent him as local representative to Afganistan  – like the ancient Romans sent Ovidius to, the then also far away, Bulgaria.

******************************************************************

The Students Association of Stockholm

has the Honour to invite

Jo Colling to a Lunch for the Foreign Minister of Israel

Mrs Golda Meir

in the Small Chamber of the Student House at Holländargatan 32

Monday the 8th of May 1961 at 12.45

After the Lunch Mrs Meir will

present in the Large Hall a

Public Address with the Title

“THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEW STATES

AND THE COOPERATION BETWEEN THEM”

******************************************************************

THE INDIAN VILLAGE ASSOCIATION

Table Of Contents

START OF THE INDIAN VILLAGE ASSOCIATION

SHARE CERTIFICATES

THE FIRST 100 MEMBERS

WHAT WAS REALLY DONE BY THE INDIAN VILLAGE PROJECT

BUILDING WELLS AND PUMPS

There was a building entrepeneur, Arne Vinnerlöv, who had a farm just where the Arlanda airport was to be build. He got a large amount of ready money when he was forced to sell it and he wanted to do something for the poor in India.

He and his wife had travellled to India and seen the life of the poor in the countryside. Their idea  was to start a small scale village project with a mechanical workshop, improved building activity and improved use of land.

They had contact with IAL the voluntary work camp organisation of Sweden which is the contact point where Hans Haste and I got involved.

Hans Haste, a social democratic writer, suggested as chairman for the project organisation a retired trade union president of the wood workers union, Knut Larsson, and somebody suggested me as treasurer.

Knut Larsson, or Wood Knutte as everybody called him, had been for some years the Swedish representative of the ILO in Genéve and as such went also many times to India.

Knut Larsson had gone the long way: he started as an apprentice in the woodworking industry and was as a young man a journeyman in his trade which meant he travelled abroad to work in many small woodworking firms as a carpenter and joiner.

I dont know what qualifications they thought I had because I certainly had no money, only organising talent. During a few years I had almost daily contact with Knut Larsson because the chairman och treasurer had to work closely together to run the organisation from Sweden. I came to know the prewar, wartime and postwar trade union work and the political life  of Sweden very well because he often spoke about his experiences and interesting life.

Hans Haste wrote a prospectus and we invited the public to support the project which was to send a group of young volunteers with landrovers, caravan and trailer complete with some basic equipment and machinery via Turkey, Afganistan and Pakistan to India. We all solicited supporters  for the project. The following is the impressive list:

The village selected and agreed upon with the local authorities was Dhanaura near the road North from New Delhi to Moradabad. Dhanaura had 4000 inhabitants at that time.

The trip went through empty areas which were regarded as dangerous by some and safe by others. Our groups went twice back and forth and the only problem was on the last return trip. And then it was not on the lonely roads in the mountain areas but within the city of Teheran. Here nobody expected trouble. The group was on a camping site while the city erupted in riots. The Swedish embassy gave them shelter until the riots were over.

I thought that such a project must have a clear legal status and keep good financial order. My suggestion to form an economic association, which is clearly regulated by law, was accepted. An economic association in Sweden is like a company with shares one can buy but every member has only one vote.

Of course, I subscribed the first share certificate in my name. You can see the list of the first 100 members here below.

We had a financial ground plate to start with by the donation from the Vinnerlöv family. We soon also had a large number of subscribers groups collecting money.

We were able to finance the project for three years and then transferred our investments to the local authority. We also financed for ten years the education of the two sons of our caretaker for the experimental house we built.

THE FIRST 100 MEMBERS

We offered to name a well after the donator of 2000-skr for the drilling of a well and we sold Tree Tickets at 10.-skr each for the planting of Mango trees. And we sold shares. This list shows the broad support for the project.

I think the editor of the report with the list of shareholders gave me the title director to make the beginning of the list more impressive. Everybody around knew of the modesty of my company

At that time I was still working half time at the Swedish Building Information Sercice and was "managing director" of my small limited company TECHNOCENTER.

WHAT WAS REALLY DONE BY THE INDIAN VILLAGE PROJECT

In the first group there were also 6 young members from an ABF study group in Östergötland who had prepared themselves to work with social projects. They wanted to give simple health care and to improve household methods.

They had saved money and bought a landrover and a trailer complete with such simple medicines and equipment as they believed were needed. In their studies they had help from an Indian who knew the countryside well.

The Indian Village Project could finance their stay in Dhanaura.

In the group recruited by the Association were different trades represented: builders, agriculturists and metal workers. Arne Vinnerlöv was the project leader. The basic idea was to give help to self help.

One of the first things we discovered was that even in such a small village there were very good craftsmen with skills often surpassing those in our country because we do not any longer have to have basic skills since machines do everything for us.

The problem was that there were no funds to finance small scale development. If you want to make a steel plough you need resurses to buy the steel and to feed your family during the production time. And then you must have a buyer who can pay you more than you put into the plough.

This is very simple economics which even the most low cast Indian knew. But if they wanted to get funds they had to borrow money from private money lenders who took exorbitants rents, thus establishing a slave like situation. If the people have no surplus for which to buy goods, they cannot sustain a market.

Our group on the ground saw clearly the need for small scale loans at low costs for projects directly supplying a local need. This understanding on a larger scale has helped many now.

Another problem was the buraucracy. There were many very well educated people who had nothing else to do but to administer whatever there was to administer, thus usually establishing problems..

Also the land reform did not work. Sometimes it was circumvented by established large families who kept their large estates together by giving every member a small plot.

More often central laws were not clear. Or if you got a plot of land today and started to invest – you never knew whether there would come a new law to redistribute the land again. Often to give it back to the former owners.

Anyhow, we had no plans to solve all the problems. We wanted to do a small scale effort stimulting to self help.

We rented space in the cooperative work shop and employed some metal workers and helpers and produced simple tools, agricultural equipment, wheel barrows and similar products for which there might be a market. We also bought more modern machinery for the work shop.

Together with their own, more traditional products of the work shop these were demonstrated at sales fairs in a wider area. At least our wheelbarrow design was adopted by other local craftsmen. Wheel barrows were often much more efficient than carrying loads on the head.

On the building site our builder Arne wanted to show that the mud brick constructions could be improved, by larger overhanging roofs for example. He also showed that burnt bricks could be joined together with mudbricks to get a more stable construction by not using cement.

One of the land reclamation attempts was to plant about a hundred Mango trees on a dry sand area, a desert. This area had ground water a few meters below the surface and the newly planted trees had to be watered for three years until the roots reached the ground water level.

This period is crucial and a poor village cannot sustain three years first and then two more years to the first harvest without return from the investment, which might explain why there was no follow up.

If you get a water well sufficient for one family you can probably get two harvests a year. You can also plant just a few trees. If you have one oxen the animal can be used for pumping water during the dry season while not being used for ploughing etc. Indian Village wanted to pump water by using pumps driven by oxen and which could be maintained by the village smiths.

But the local authorities insisted on using motor pumps which we believed were more difficult to maintain. Which was proven right after we left and the spare parts for the motor pumps could not be obtained.

Fortunately the trees could live by themselves by then. But further planting and new motor pumps could not be provided which also – besides lack of funds – contributet to the result that to day the remaining sand area is still a dead desert.

On the social side the Östergötland group was doing a tremendous job. Their landrover was used to visit outlying villages, and together with a local nurse distribute medicines and advice.

They also visited villages to discuss different types of improving kitchen appliances as i.e. kitchen stoves. Even here they usually worked together with local people because in India there were many people who knew everything there was to know about modern methods. Their problem was often to reach the population.

Doesn´t already the bible say that you can never be a prophet in your home village?

Another contribution was that the landrover could be used as an ambulance. If there was a grave accident or death threatening complications, i.e. at child birth, there usually was no local help available. Often the young girls from Östergötland had to give emergency help and transport people to the far away hospital.

DHANAURA REVISITED AFTER 12 YEARS

After 15 years Arne Vinnerlöv suggested a revisit Dhanaura to see what remained of our project.  About this visit a short report was published.

The problem of Dhanaura in relation to the living standard of the population is that the number of inhibitants had doubled from 4000 to 8000 in the last 15 years. Still enough is produced to keep the population alive. But to improve the level above the subsistance level must be almost impossible under such conditions.

Of the Indian Village project the planting of the mango trees was the most successful and enduring. Which makes the Vi´s Forest project in Africa something I, for one am prepared to support wholeheartedly.

Every mango tree gives about 300 kg fruit a year which can be a vital contribution to a family income. Just as important proved to be the yearly harvest of downfalling leaves on the ground which after 10 years has created sufficient humus to be able to plant other vegetables or grain in the shadow under the trees.

The experimental house with a combination of burnt bricks and dried mud bricks using only mud as binding between the different materials proved to be effective. Even after 15 years there were no cracks on the surfaces or between the materials. The foundation was made of burnt bricks and cement binding with a plastic isolation film.

The roof had a large overhang so that wind and rain did no damage to the walls. During these 15 years no maintenance was done or needed.

The wells the Indian Village project drilled down to the ground-water and further 30 m deep (and had to provide with pumps driven by combustion engines) were to a large degree unusable because the engines broke down some time after we left and were not repaired.

To a large degree the most lasting result of the project might have been the experience for life gained by the participants and their closest Indian contacts. This is also the idea of the Voluntary International Workcamps for Peace, which was in a way the starting point for this project.

And, at last all the collected money was used direcly for the project without drainage by bribes and unnecessary administration, which so often is the fate of assistance projects.

BUILDING AND EXPERIMENTS – 1954

Table Of Contents

THE OFFICE OF ARCHITECT LARS MAGNUS GIERTZ

LIFE AND WORK AT HÃ…GELBY

THE ÖSTBERGA EXPERIMENT

THE EXPERIMENT HOUSE

Lars Magnus was an architectural innovator and inventor. His maternal grandfather was the telephone magnate Lars Magnus Eriksson.

He gave me the chance to start working in his architectural firm  at HÃ¥gelby House in Botkyrka. Such a possibility I had been planning  and hoping for.

Lars Magnus Giertz

My first job description was as a building draftsman. Even given the fact that I could do my own calculations of stresses and similar it is quite obvious that I could not start to do my own constructions. The firm would have been liable for damages if there had been a slight mistake, which might have been excused if done by someone having passed the final examinations at the university.

I was early given very interesting drawing jobs which required technical ingenuity. I noticed that quite soon my time was invoiced as engineering hours spent on the job. But it took me about one year to get the wage of an engineer. But still the drawings were always correctly countersigned either by Lars Magnus Giertz or some other responsible architect or engineer.

This picture I took of HÃ¥gelby House  For a postcard to be used for the office

This was my workromm under the roof with a view on the lake.

During the first 6 month I did a lot of work drawings for different projects. My drawings were allright but there certainly were a lot of words misspelled. There must have been a shortage of good draftsmen att that time because nobody complained.

At that time two new young architects from Danmark joined the firm. They came directly from Denmark. They thought I could speak Swedish very well because they could understand me much better than Swedes. I also could understand them better than our Swedish colleges did. The explanation was certainly that by learning languages by the direct method one learns to guess and fill in by intuition - whatever such intuition is.

On the other hand these two were in the beginning quite sceptic towards Germans in general as most people were at this time after the war. Both were also as student leaders active with sabotage in the wartime resistance. Within a short time, however, they did not any longer include me among those Germans they hated.

One of them was active in Danish student politics even after the war and by then engaged in combating communist influence in the student movement. He was never quite happy here and later went back to Denmark. The other became a well known architect in his own right and was for many years the official town architect for one of the larger communities near Stockholm.

There was also an elderly refugee from Sovjet occupied Estland who was a leading industrialist in his homeland before the war but was now librarian in the office. In the library there was also a large pool table at which he was a master, trying to teach us during the coffee breaks in the winter.

I mention all this to show that there was lively debate among all of us working in the drawing office on many subjects besides the technical or art work.

The office was on the highest floor of the Manor House. We ate lunch in the dining space of the kitchen together with the Giertz family including all the children. During coffee breaks in the afternoon during summertime we sat outside in the sunshine on the terrace with a view over the lake.

Sometimes I also went out on the lake in the small rowing boat to swim. Legend had it that Lars Magnus Giertz during a few years even had an airplane on the lake. But I never heard or asked who might have been the pilot.

The large project I worked on first was the experimental building site of Östberga in the South of Stockholm. Here the Cooperative HSB, the building firm of Skarne and the Architects Office Hagelby worked together in a unique cooperation under the direct leadership of architect Lars Magnus Giertz, HSB´s director Sven Wallander and the building firms owner Allan Skarne, with weekly planning and brainstorming meetings among those three.

The number of flats to be build was about 500, which were a great number at that time. The buildings were laid out on both sides of an oval road. The building cranes were planned to run on rails along this road. In the middle of the oval was a natural park with trees and bushes preserved.

This project was unique because all the rules and laws governing building in Sweden could be set aside. It was an attempt to test many radical new ideas together in one large project.

It was the first large scale, modern prefabrication attempt in Sweden. The inside walls were erected of about 1 meter wide concrete elements containing door openings and ducts for wiring. For these elements a small factory was built on site and the elements were lifted to their places by building cranes.

The main stabilising factor was a central tower for the spiral stairs which was poured in concrete in situ. It was these stairs which gave me my job originally.

The second more unique construction I drew was a roomsize table which was lifted into every room from the open front and which was the form on which the concrete floor was poured to stabilize the prefab elements.

The outside of the houses were to be closed by elements of the same size as the rooms. The room openings towards the streets were all of the same size. I had the task of figuring out and drawing the joints between these elements. This was very important because prefabrication demanded exact details, and at that time plastic and silicone joining materials were not sufficiently developed and longtime tested.

Another interesting innovation I drew for one construction engineer was a gliding form for the stairwell. This was nothing new, but the stairwell and the form had to be designed to lift also a building crane which was lifted together with the forms.

The building cranes on the street were not quite abandoned but not used for setting up the elements and other details for the houses. After only a few month this method was adopted on almost all the new builings under construction in Stockholm, and you could see cranes going up on all the towerlike stairwells.

When the first house was finished the architectural office opened a local office on the groundfloor and I moved from the Old Town to the top flat of this experimental building - about which there are many stories of which I only will mention a few in the text later.

At that time I was mostly working at the Östberga office. Which meant that I was often working in the same room where the brainstorming bosses had their meetings. They probably believed that I did not understand the workings of the Swedish bureaucracy but I heard and learned much more about the system than they thought.

Many of the building innovations of the time first came up here at Östberga. One day came an inventor and small entrepeneur and showed us long tubes or ducts, made by spiral bonding of long metal sheets, a method he had invented,. The first were ordered for our project. Very soon you could see such ducts every where.

THE GIERTZ FAMILY GRAVE

The problems of heating were especially interesting to LMG. One aspect was the reclaiming of heat from the evacuation air. This is now done everywhere. But for Östberga this was a first. There were no suitable heat exchangers and they had to be invented and they were built at Hågelby. The first very large, mayby 2.0 x 2.0 x 0.40 meter and they were put into the experimental building where I lived. They were put on top as a lock of what in daily talk was called the Giertz family grave.

This grave was the result of attempts to develop methods of individually measuring energy consumption for every household. They wanted to try heating by gas. There were no suitable heating units for both warmwater and air and they had to be developed by an engineer from the city gas works.

Now the Östberga project did not have to follow all rules and regulations but with such dangerous innovations, using explosive gas, there was some authority demanding a safe construction. Besides the stairwell was build another well heavily reinforced and containing on every floor heating units for each flat. The roof was supposed to be open for an possible explosion  finding its way to the open air and this well was covered only by the heat exchanger made of light aluminum.

Later this family grave was closed with all components inside and a similar gasunit was placed in every flats bathroom.

I kept my personal social life about town completely separated from my professional life. But there was an exeption. I often had parties at my small 2 room flat. There could be between 20 and 30 guests sitting on the floor talking, listening to music and drinking the wine that everybody contributed.

When you had to go to the toilet and the heating unit started – it started with a bang like a minor explosion. Nobody got a heart attack - but it often came close. Many people in Stockholm knew Jo´s dangerous toilet.

When the project neared its end we all moved with the office back to HÃ¥gelby. But I lived for a long time alone on the building site.

The other people moving into their flats started legal proceedings because they claimed the experiments made the project about 10% more expensive than it would have been without the many experimental innovations. They all authorised a lawyer to procede on their account.

Now we were 3 who were living here but also involved with the project. We authorised a HSB´s lawyer to defend the project.

If I remember rightly we three won because everybody knew this was an experiment before moving in and the results were generally benefical for the development of many aspects of building in Sweden.

BUILDING AND DOCUMENTATION

Table Of Contents

BUILDING CLASSIFICATION COMMITTEE

THE INSTITUTE FOR BUILDING DOCUMENTATION

THE INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTATION CENTER

THE CIB ROTTERDAM CONFERANCE

THE SWEDISH BUILDING INFORMATION SERVICE

Different projects overlapped and the office started a new larger project. Because of the Östberga project, which was very large for its time, it was decided to produce a similar large project, Norra Haga, in the city of Västerås to press building costs. The local building firms in the 50´s were small. In order to get scale advantage four building firms were engaged to each build its part but according to common drawings.

LMG had discovered my organisational interest and I was appointed to write the minutes of the planning meetings with the owners HSB, the four building firms and the office staff. Writing notes concerning building activities was something I had already done very early for a project at Bremerhaven when I still was a bricklayer apprentice.

This time both I and the task was more advanced. I came to understand that those who write the minutes of meetings have influence by trying clearly to define the results of discussions if the meeting makes decisions but does not put them into a clear wording. As the spelling still had to be checked my boss had the last word if I was to free with my opinion.

Before starting his own architectural office LMG was director of the Swedish Architects Association, SAR. In that function he was the Swedish representative in the United Nations International Building Research Council, CIB. Within this large body he was elected chairman of the Building Classification Committee.

This was before the computer age and large random retrieval methods. Information retrieval had to be based upon logical hierarchical order of documents and indexing within these systems.

Within CIB all countries agreed to use the decimal classification system. Tables were printed not only in English but in many languages, even Japanese. This coordination was organised from Hagelby, the seat of the chairman.

In many countries some of the most gifted professionals were engaged in this systematic analysis of building knowledge, materials and methods. From England for example Michael Ventries an architect, who also decyphered the Cretean linear B script, was a visitor to Hagelby. Unfortunately he died in a motorcycle accident before I could come to know him.

The other Swedish member organisations of the UN International Building Research Council (CIB) were the Swedish Council for Building Research, a government department and The Building Information Service, a non-profit company owned by associations concerned with building activities in Sweden.

LMG was a member of the CIB because he was director of the Swedish Architect Association a position he left when starting his own architectural office. Because of his work in the Classification Committee he had been a temporary member – but now he had to leave.

I suggested that he should establish a foundation to finance an institution because according to Swedish law one could operate most any activity in the legal form of a foundation. We arrived at the name "Swedish Institute for Building Documentation" and the aim of the foundation was to be studying and developing building information systems in general and classification systems in general. Remember that since Linné, Berzellius and others systematic classification was a Swedish speciality.

LMG thought his family lawyer (Vicke Mossbergs father) might not be the right person to ask for help in such an unorthodox matter so I suggested my friend Uncas Serner as an exeption from my rule not to mix social and professional life. Uncas drew up the documents and the foundation was accepted officially as a non-profit organisation. With support from the other Swedish members of CIB the institute became a member of CIB. Thus the chairmanship of the classification committee could remain at Hagelby.

For my part this meant that I got two jobs (even two different rooms). I became Technical Secretary of the foundation as a half time job and working in the architectural office the other half.

Now LMG and the other Swedish CIB members became interested in establishing my professional status. As I still was a German citicen they wrote to the German Architect and Engineers Association (DAI) that I should be accepted as a regular member with them, because of my work with the institute and with experimental building projects, even though I did not have a formal graduation.

In due time I became a member and could now put DAI behind my name. This was actually not very important to me but it was thought to be desirable for our international contacts.

One day a young Dutch man came to HÃ¥gelby, just like I did a few years earlier, without long notice. But he had a recommendation from architect Dan Fink from Danmark who was the secretary of the Classification Committee. His name was Henri de Mink.

He had started to work with microfiches to reproduce manuscripts and books. This was a new technique and Henri had developed more efficient methods to photograph and to reproduce microfiches. Dan Fink believed in this development and wondered if LMG could help in some way. Vicke Mossberg had just moved his workshop and there was the possibility to move to the Garden House which he accepted.

Henri de Mink called his firm International Documentation Center, IDC. There was no direct connection to building documentation.

Henri de Mink had originally a Rotary scholarship to Sweden for one year. The club in Holland who sponsored him had at that time as president the Swedish ambassador to the Netherlands. This ambassador was now the highest official at the Royal Court of Sweden and as such a key contact with the  Kungliga Biblioteket, the National Library of Sweden. Henri de Mink got permission as the first person to copy old manuscrips and incunables to microfiches.

Later he copied and reproduced the Linné herbarium in England, old scientific journals from the St Petersburg libraries with a camera in Helsinki, old records from concilia a.o with a camera in the Vatican and he had cameras in several key cities until he had an enormous collection of microfiche originals and copies.

In the 1960´s he decided to move the entire collection to Holland and the sales organisation to Switzerland. His customers were all over the world.

To-day much of this and similar documentation is found on computers in digital form. But at his time this was a huge step ahead and the microfiches were used to great advantage in the distribution and retrieval of information. Many universities in developing nations bought much basic research material from Henri de Mink.

After de Minks moved back to Leiden I took over the space in the Garden House as storage for my company. And a short time later my wife and I moved to the large flat on the second floor of the House.

This I´ll write about in two different chapters as I have not yet written about our marriage. At present I am still concerned with Building Documentation and Information.

LMG was, as one of the Council Committee Chairmen, one of the more central figures at this conference. He also was a close friend of van Ettinger, the director of the Building Center of the Netherlands at Rotterdam. Van Ettinger was also the chief organiser of the Rotterdam Conference with more than a thousand participants on behalf of CIB.

A Picture Postcard I sent to Bremen from Rotterdam

Van Ettinger had always been a close contact for our Institute of Buildding Documentation and Sweden and the Netherlands often worked together.

One has to remember that the large member nations were the USA, Russia, China just to mention those whose policies had to be balanced most often. This friendship with Holland and van Ettinger continued to be important after LMG went to Ethiopia for Sweden and to Nairobi for the UN.

Van Ettinger had a central roll in the Netherlands because he belonged during the war to a secret engineering group affiliated with the Dutch resistance movement and working on detailed plans for rebuilding the cities of Holland after the war - and this behind the backs of the occupation power.

This CIB conference was also sponsored by the Shell Oil Company which could provide the space for inviting the entire conference to a main dinner gathering for all participants. The important work and reports and discussions were usually within smaller groups and the steering company.

I had no official function at this conference but I found myself being a kind of contact with others who also did not have any function. We kept together eating and talking on a secondary more private level. I only want to mention three of those contacts because I have them most vivid in mind.

There was an older, retired professor from the Technion, Israels Engineering University at Tel Aviv. He was one of the best known soil and foundation experts in the world and he had formulated some of the basic laws of soil (foundations). His name can be found in most Civil Engineering handbooks of that time. He told me that soil engineering is mainly science but there still is a rest of art.

However the Israeli delegation was lead by an energetic younger woman engineer also from Tel Aviv. When I saw their group together they were very respectful to the old professor but the youngsters were those in charge.

We often sat together because we talked in German. The professor, a pioneer of earth and foundation research, could not speak English very well and preferred German. He was one of the lucky who decided to leave Germany already in the beginning of 1933. He had later lost many of his friends in Germany and told me that he already then saw the danger from the new leaders very clearly – but could not convince his friends and some relatives to leave with him. Arriving in Israel he became one of the founders of the new Technical University at Tel Aviv.

Another acquaintace became the family Enrique Ruiz of the Philippines. He and his wife could speak many languages. Chinese, French, Spanish, and English besides the original Philippine language. Their languages reflected the different colonial and other influences on the upper classes in the Philippines.

His background was also most interesting. He first studied painting in Paris when he was very young. Back in the Phillippines he became a famous mural painter with many offical commissions.

He told me that he became dissatisfied with the architecture he was working on. So he studied architecture in the Philippines and became well known even in that capacitiy with many large projects.

He then decided that conventional building methods could not express the new forms he wanted to create. Thus he went to the USA (with his family) to study civil engineering and mathematics at the MIT and especially the advanced concrete construction methods with pre-tensed reinforcments which permitted advanced forms.

Now he was Dean of the National Architectural School of the Philippines and had also his own office. But as he was not in the United Nations or CIB buraucracy he had no formal function and thus found himself in our informal group. Returned from the conference he founded the National Housing Movement of the Philippines.

I had many later contacts with the Ruiz family by letter but they also visited me at least once in Stockholm. If I remember rightly one son of theirs was married to the Miss World from that time – who came from Finland which also explained their interest in Scandinavia.

The only picture from Rotterdam I still have is a picture postcard I sent to my parents from Rotterdam. I told them I had so much to do and could not write very much and that I just had come back from a trip for two days to the Dutch countryside with a friend from El Salvador.

He was of my age and had just finished his studies as a civil engineer in Germany. He was asked by some of his family, in some way part of the government, to participate in this conference but he had no official interest. So he also found himself in our club.

Another contact, but who was half on our level and half involved with the bigshots, was Ron Baden-Hellard of the British Polycon Group. He later became my partner in a small company in Britain which I left when I became politically elected as mayor of Botkyrka, a rapidly developing community, where also the estate of HÃ¥gelby was situated. But that is another story.

Not many month after the large CIB conference we saw a recruiting advertisement for a new rector for the Swedish Building College at Addis Abeba. Much of Swedish international assistance was at that time directed to Ethopia. Sweden had also a historic missionary interest in Ethopia.

LMG became interested and he was by far the most qualified to seek the appointment. Now came a time for readjustment. The Giertz family had to be prepared to move to Ethiopia with quite short notice.

The Institute for Building Documentation was transferred to one of the other CIB members - to the Building Information Service, and I was offered the job to build up the central information archive and its telephone service. Before, the Building Information Service was mainly concerned with exhibitions of materials and equipment.

The responsibility for the estate Hagelby was taken over by an older Giertz brother, G Giertz, MD. All leasing contracts of those having any kind of activity at Hagelby were confirmed.

By that time I had already started my own company, with domicile and office at Hagelby, in order to market a filing system developed at the Institute. I had called the company Technocenter Inc in order to indicate the hope for a wider market including technical services if needed – and possible.

After an initial period I arranged to have my position with the Building Service as a half time employment in order to develop my own company.

One task at the Building Information Service was to build up the archives according to the classification system from our Institute, and the other task was to provide telephone information service to laymen and professionals. The routine information to the public could be handled by a secretary whereas I had mostly to take care of the information to the professionals.

Of course, I had accumulated quite a lot of knowledge but realized soon that I had to find a way to get information from other sources than my head or our archive.

I had installed a number of telephones which could be used simultanously and I had set up a list from all over Sweden of real experts in many fields who were willing to help.

Often I could get very qualified knowledge while the inquirer still was on one phone. I usually said to the inquirer that I would get help from an expert. But sometimes everything went too fast and many probably got the impression that I knew everything.

I also had another pleasant task. Sometimes I had to chaperone important professional visitors to Stockholm around town and show them the important milestones in Swedens modern architectural and planning history from the 20´s and 30´s.

It astonished me that so much had become internationally known and admired. The professors of architecture had read about many sights and now wanted to see them. The Forest Church of Asplund was such a place and it rightly has been selected as one of UNESCO´s world heritage sites. I could name many more but this is not a dissertation on architecture and planning.

In 1964 I left the Building Information Service in order to devote myself for some time entirely to my own company.

TECHNOCENTER
AND COLLINGS SYSTEM

Table Of Contents

STARTING MY COMPANIES

STARTING TO SELL BY MAILORDER

1964 WE MOVED TO THE GARDEN HOUSE OF HÃ…GELBY

COLLINGS SYSTEM GMBH

COLLINGS EXECUTIVE AND MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS LTD

J COLLING & CO INC – USA

FATE ENDING MY BUSINES CAREER

STARTING MY COMPANIES

I was living in several worlds. My social life, my organisational life and my professional life based upon HÃ¥gelby were separate worlds. Friends in one did not know very much about the other.

When LMG left HÃ¥gelby for Africa I took over the sale of the filing system of boxes and folders developed at the Institute. LMG had a patent for a spline for a folder in which a label could be inserted. These labels were according to the cassification system developed at the Institute.

Like everybody else I needed I simple logotype and used my initials and the T for Technocenter:

I called my company Technocenter because I had the idea that we could sell also information by searching with the help of the classification system. With the advent of electronic information retrieval, at first with punched cards, this idea could not be handled by such a small company.

So I concentrated on selling the filing boxes and folders. After some time our customers wanted another spline and label holder which I contrived and I called the system Collings Filing System and the company Collings System in order to create a brand name because the boxes and folders could not be protected by patent. There was nothing very new about them.But I also kept the name Technocenter which I liked.

The filing boxes were and are produced by a factory in the South of Sweden, Alstermo, making mainly suitcases of fiber board. We got contact with them throught the National Banks Paper Mill situated in Tumba near HÃ¥gelby. They handled the destruction of old paper money and this pulp was sold to Alstermo for the fiber board. So I could boast of my boxes made of money.

For the folders the Tumba Paper Mill made a special heavy paper in a light blue colour. The folders were made at home by some family members of employees of the Paper Mill.

Both Alstermo and Tumba gave me 6 months credit enabling me to increase the sales volume. I have often wondered if I received these credit facilities because I had the firm at the Manor House of HÃ¥gelby, thus putting me on a certain social level and giving me status.

The idea of classless Sweden is of course only a beautiful idea. One has to remember that all this was in spite of being a "bloody foreigner" and having no own financial resources. I think the HÃ¥gelby backgrond helped.

STARTING TO SELL BY MAILORDER

At first I sold mainly to architects and building firms. Sometimes to building people in other types of large companies. I never could penetrate the purchasing buraucracy of the large companies. But my customers were specialists who did not have to ask permission to buy themselves what they wanted.

Because the purchasing people did not want to talk to a small, new company I also stopped talking to them. I became so annoyed with them, even if I could understand their policy, that if someone wanted to ask about special prices I often answered, that I had one pricelist for everybody and that they could come again if they could afford my boxes.

This was the starting point for me to sell only by mail order. At this time the Swedish Post Service could send unaddressed mail to all offices. There were 50.000 offices only and the price for each mailing was quite low.

I sent out an offer of a trial package of 2 filing boxes with a number of files, and I slowly discovered the secrets of mail order selling. Later I found out that I had been inventing the wheel all over again because there were books in German and English explaining all the things I had “invented”.

Anyhow, I gave every mailing a number and every answering customer got this number. Then I figured out what the costs for the mailing were and accounted for the gross profit until the sum was equal my expenses for a campaign.

Then I started a new campaign and used the old customers revenues to finance the general costs for the firm. And again and again. At the time this type of postorder selling was very unusual in Sweden and I felt like a pioneer.

Slowly I had a large number of customers without ever having to talk to the purchasing departments.

1964 WE MOVED TO THE GARDEN HOUSE OF HÃ…GELBY

In 1964 we moved from Östberga to the Garden House of Hågelby in the large flat above our store rooms. The store rooms had earlier been used by Vicke Mossberg for his silversmith work shop and later for the Microfiche Documentation Center of Henri de Mink.

I used my exess energy to expand the firm. One can do this by increasing the number of products sold or by increasing the area of the market. I thought that expanding internationally was more interesting.

From the year 1964 until the end of 1973 I worked (more or less) full time for my firm. During this time I started first together with my younger brother the German company and later together with Ron Baden-Hellard the British company. The US company never got a real start.

During these years I had some peculiar arrangements to facilitated my work. I had an office assistant who was married and had two children. She worked part time and could start and leave at times suiting the times required for her family.

In the store room I had another part time helper. He was an old age pensioner from work at the Tumba Paper Mill and now was part time janitor there for some of their staff dwellings.

He came by bus to work for us, packing shipments (for which the papers were prepared by the office assistant). He left with the daily truck for dynamite shipments for the Nobel Dynamite company which had large underground storage cellars in a forest South of Tumba and to which only he had the keys.

He was very unique in having a photographic memory. If you asked him about the weather for example on the 5th of August 1930 he could tell you the temmperature, the wind and amount of rain. With this kind of memory he could keep track not only of every box of dynamite but also my folders and boxes.

I almost forgot, he was also the treasurer of the cooperative funeral society of the workers at the Paper Mill. My wife tells me not to forget to mention that he was also very nice.

Now for the shipment of goods I had also an interesting arrangement. When I started we still had a freight railroad station at Tumba.

The local trucking company had a key to my store rooms and whenever there was a shipment of boxes from Alstermo they took them without asking us from the station to the store room and put everything in the correct place. When we had finished packing our deliveries to the customers they picked up the parcels from an outside shelter and delivered them to the railroad.

This arrangement was disturbed by the “development” of the transportation systems. First the freight station at Tumba was closed down. And then it seemed that the railway company no longer wanted to handle freight for small companies. Everything had to go by trucks.

COLLINGS SYSTEM GMBH

When starting in Germany we had very little initial capital and the funding was to 90% goodwill for the rights to manufacture and sell Collings System. By using the same mailorder methods as in Sweden we could very soon establish a volume of sales permitting the purchase of the heavy machinery needed to manufacture the folders and boxes in our own workshop.

As we were sending our advertising mail many, many times to libraries, research establishments and all larger companies it looked for some time as if we were the most important Swedish firm in Germany.

I could follow up the business easily by telephoning my brother and asking how far are we with the campaign 12? If the answer was 90% of the expenses recovered my recommendation was start campaign 13. Sometimes the campaigns were finished within 1 month - but sometimes it took longer.

If the trial orders for each 1000 of the distributed letters were two it took a while longer for us to be economically covered. But if there were three we were quite rich for a short time. Instead of the 50.000 letters sent out in Sweden there were 500.000 letters per mailing in Germany.

After few years my brother was able to buy my part of the company and I was very well paid for my goodwill.

Selling filing boxes is not a very inspiring activity. Later my brother got interested also in computer programming and wrote an own integrated program for bookkeeping, invoicing, wages and stockkeeping specially adapted to our company.

COLLINGS EXECUTIVE AND MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS LTD

After Germany I wanted to see if there was a chance in Great Britain. Ron Baden-Hellard of the Polycon Group whom I met in Rotterdam 1959 was my contact who wanted to see if we could sell the filing system also in England and English speaking countries.

At first we called the company Collings Executive and Management Systems (Logotype CEMS) which was later changed to Collings Education and Management Systems Ltd, with the same logotype. From the letterhead you see that our address was on the prestigious Regent Street.

This change of name was decided upon because the company also got involved with the training activities prior to the change to the metric system in Great Britain which was financially supported by the government, and the sale of an educational program about industrial relations from the Canadian Management Association.

 COLLING & CO INC – USA

After Great Britain I also started to expand to the US which seems to be the ideal market for mailorder sales.

I had met an American consultant working for a while for the Tumba Paper Mill and he visited us several times at Hagelby. During these visits the American plans were developed.

We registered a company in the state of Rhode Island (and Providence Plantations) and started with some shipment from Germany to the US when fate forced me to stop all new plans and I had to liquidate the company.

I also transferred all my shares in Great Britain to Ron Baden-Hellard.

FATE ENDING MY BUSINESS CAREER

The fate was that politics had finally caught up with me and one requirement was that I could not have any outside interest besides the job I was elected for and which was much more stimulating than selling boxes.

I had to leave the company and appointed my office assistant to be managing director.

We also had to simplify the distribution by letting the box manufacturers send our orders directly to the customers. This made it possible to maintain at least the Swedish company even if it was not expanding any longer.

There was a consolation. A government report stated that our boxes were the best on the market for the storage of journals in libraries. Many of the large research and university libraries were our customers and this report confirmed for our customers that they had made the right choice.

One of the advantages of using fiber boards, as compared to plastics, is that while it is impossible to stop a fire in a library using plastic boxes if the fire has taken hold of the shelves, fiberboard ignites much slower and the fire can be stopped.

But enough of boasting. Until the year 2006 when I was 78 years old, and again in charge of my company, I still had enough sales to enable me to get the latest computer equipment, which keeps me quite happy.

But I often think that if it were not for Windows and Bill Gates one would have more leisure times with all the adjustments to make all the time. At least I am not using Bill´s “Word” programme to write this. I am using “Atlantis” for which I want to make thumbs up.

As I am still writing after a tough year 2008 I have to say that I have stopped my commercial activities and the company is not active anylonger. My brother is shipping some orders from Germany. But maybe he has to stop also very soon. That´s life.

Maybe I write about some of the problems one can get after  the age of 80 in the next volume: Book II.

OUR LIFE AT HÃ…GELBY 1963–71

Table Of Contents

GETTING MARRIED AT HÃ…GELBY

THE ROTARY CLUB OF TUMBA

SOME LOCAL BACKGROUND

SOME ASPECTS OF OUR LIFE AT HÃ…GELBY

THE HISTORY OF BOTKYRKA – A STUDYCIRCLE

I met my wife, Teje, at an evening dance in Stockholm where she was with a student friend, in the earlier 60´s.

A picture says more than words. Now more than 40 years later it still says "Young and beautiful".

At first we lived together at Östberga and then at Hagelby. We knew by then that we would like to grow old together and get married.

I did not like to use the civil authorities for this. Interesting, because I later was marriage official for at least 20 years and performed several hundred marriage ceremonies. We asked a Rotary friend, the parson at the church of Botkyrka to perform a quiet ceremony in his home.  We were both not very religious, and I an atheist to boot. But he said you are members of the Swedish State Church, so it´s OK. His wife and my helper in the firm, were our witnesses.

THE ROTARY CLUB OF TUMBA

Some time after I started my firm I also began to get involved in local activities in Botkyrka. 1963 the director of the Tumba Paper Mill Eric Wahren asked me to be one of the founding members of the Rotary Club of Tumba.

In this way I became more interested in local matters instead of the international perspective we had at HÃ¥gelby. I now had many friends among the people active in the larger companies, in small bussiness and the local municipality. I still have a picture from the inauguration ceremony of the new club in the ancient church of Botkyrka from the 11^th century.

What I remember most from this ceremony is that then I still fitted into my tailcoat and dinnercoat. I always refused to buy larger sizes and did not really admit I needed them. As I did not think it proper to hire suits I later had to say no to several formal invitations unfortunately.

Our Rotary Club at first met at the old posting inn at Fittja on the old highway from Stockholm to the South and which still had its restaurant. As in all Rotary clubs the talks and lectures acompanying the lunch were informative and interesting.

By the way, I still have the minutes from an early talk of mine about our Indian Village project which I have mentioned earlier. Let´s assume that that talk also was informative and interesting.

After a few years our club moved to the officers mess of the Airforce airfield at Tullinge where we were served in splendour by the military personnel.

The officer in charge was , of course, a member. During some time I was on the program committee with Dick Stenberg who later became chief of the Swedish Airforce. Already then I noticed that Dick could handle at least three matters simultanely without strain and it would not have seemed strange if he had become a top diplomat or business leader instead of reaching the highest military rank.

For ten years I could keep my attendance at the club at 100% but then I became sick and my attendance became jut a bit over 60%.

SOME LOCAL BACKGROUND

Before L M Ericsson bought HÃ¥gelby it consisted of two farms. In the beginning of our time at HÃ¥gelby there was very little traffic by cars and trucks on the road passing HÃ¥gelby near our Garden House. L M Ericson had written in his testament, among many other conditions, that there should be no hunting of wild animals on the estate. Maybe the animals knew this because all the time there could be seen many elks and deers feeding very close to the road.

The first task he had was to find a suitable spot for the mansion. He had a wooden tower built which he moved from place to place around the lake Aspen until he got the best view from the future second floor. Unfortunately this was in the middle of a swamp.

Some of LME´s architectural experiments at Hågelby

There is a story that LME wandered from Värmland to Stockholm as a young apprentice in search of work, and when passing Alby was refused shelter. This is given as a reason why he later bought Alby.

Here at Hågelby some well-known persons visited in the past. The first well known woman journalist of Sweden, Wendela Hebbe, lived here for several summers. Eric Castegren writes that she here met writers like Jonas Love Almquist and the poet Herman Sätherberg (a son of the director´s family of the Tumba Paper Mill) who often also lived here during the summer. They communicated with flag signals to invite one another for meetings.

I

Youth Hostel of today with its Annex to the left
and the journalist Wendela Hebbe

to mention the vikings who are mainly known by their runestone left of a bridge over the small stream flowing out from the lake Aspen, or the bronze age people whose sites have been excavated nearby with a number of interesting archeological finds.

When looking around in odd spaces or under the roof of the mansion one could find remains from LME´s time. Old telephones and parts of telephone switchboards. He even had a small metal work shop in the cellar of which there were some remains.

The farm was managed by an agriculturist and in LME´s time had some of the best milking cows in the entire province and of course the most modern equipment.

LME´s testament had also remarkable provisions regarding the family. All his children and grandchildren received a large stipend for every child born, which might explan why the family became quite large as the time went by. Another condition was that Hagelby could not be sold by his daughter and the land not used as security for loans.

This was the reason why Lars Magnus Giertz could not become the real owner when his mother transferred Hagelby to him. But part of the land near what is now the E4 main road was not thus protected and he could sell that to the Mormons who planned to establish their Swedish tabernacle here. I found it a bit curious that nobody at that time had comments about the fact that the younger brother of a very conservative bishop of the Swedish State Church thus encouraged the competition in faith.

When LMG went to Africa the management of the remaining estate went back to the family. At the time when Teje and I moved into the Garden House at Hagelby the government had waived the conditions of the testament, and the family was permitted to sell Hagelby with all its grounds to the municipality of Botkyrka. They were interested because the area linked the Northern and Southern parts of the community. Our landlord was now the municipality of Botkyrka.

In the sales contract the family stipulated that the bust of L.M.Eriksson must be left standing in the entrance hall of the main building. If this condition is not kept the contract will revert back to the family. Even if such a condition cannot be enforced after two years, and everybody knows this, the municipality let copy the bust in plastics in a large number so that even if somebody steals the original the copies can be used to keep the promise.

SOME ASPECTS OF OUR LIFE AT HÃ…GELBY

For Teje´s first birthday at Hagelby I thought I would present her with a lovely, small black cat. This cat was expecting after some time and we got three small kittens. After a few days the mother cat went across the road in front of the house and was killed by a car. We had to bottle feed the three kittens and not only they became attached to us but we to them. With this we got a lot of work for us but also a lot of pleasure – not only from them but also their offspring under many years..

Teje worked at the Nordic Museum, as a guide in the beginning but soon there was an opening as a curator and as such she was responsible for interesting parts of the museum´s collection, like silver, pewter, copper and kitchen utensils.

For many years I had the time, and pleasure, to drive in the morning to the museum and often even to fetch Teje at the end of the day. There were no easy connections to go by train or bus from the country.

Our flat was quite large and we were later able to arrange a separate flat for her elderly mother who was very interested in gardening which gave us a beautiful garden in front of the house.

As building activities in the Norther part of Botkyrka grew the motor traffic on the road became very noisy and we  started to look for a new home. This time we wanted to own our own home.

Finally, in the beginning of 1971, we found a wonderful place in the South-East of Botkyrka at Sibble on the peninsular Näslandet, a large plot of 7000_m2 with lots of trees and a small summerhouse with a view on a bay of the Baltic.

THE HISTORY OF BOTKYRKA – A STUDYCIRCLE

One contributing factor for my involvement with local matters was a study circle I started. We had made our own programme about the local history. We met at first in our home and later visited other places that we decided on after discussion.

Picture of Runestone near Hagelby

We invited Erik Castegren, the author of the leading book about the history of Botkyrka as we wanted to use it as an outline for our studies and discussions. Castegren became so interested himself that he joined the group as a participant.

Another member was the then very young Sven-Gunnar Broström who worked as an engineer for the cartographic section of the municipality. He had a natural gift for seeing the tracks and remains of presumptive archeological sites from the iron, bronze and stone ages.

This ability he later used also in many parts of Sweden. His scientific contribution as an amateur researcher of prehistory was recently rewarded with a honorary doctors degree.

Mrs Schotte, the wife of the then director of the Tumba Paper Mill, was another participant and we thus got access to rare information about the paper mill´s history.

Of course, Teje was also in the study group as history was one of her academic interests.

From being mainly interested in the international activies emanating from HÃ¥gelby, as I did not want to get involved locally or even in Swedish matters, my interests thus got caught by a local infection which in time broke out. 

THE CENTER PARTY
OF BOTKYRKA

Table Of Contents

SOME BACKGROUND ABOUT THE FARMERS PARTY IN BOTKYRKA

THE BEGINNINGS OF LOCAL POLITICS

GETTING CAUGHT IN THE PARTY TRAP

ORGANISING FOR SUCCESS

NOT ONLY ORGANISATION BUT ALSO POLITICS

THE BUILDING COMMITTEE

THE CULTURE COMITTEE

WINNING THE MAJORITY

CENTERN NOMINATED ME AS MAYOR

This beautiful, "small" building was until the end of 1973the town hall of Botkyrka. Now it is the administrative building for the central Botkyrka section of the Swedish State Church

SOME BACKGROUND ABOUT THE FARMERS PARTY IN BOTKYRKA

In the 50´s there were about 7.500 inhabitants in Botkyrka. But the Swedish Farmers Party had only a small section in Botkyrka dominated by large estates and workers settlements.

In the 1950´s one could look at the few agricultural estates in Botkyrka and find that half of them "belonged" to the Conservative Party and half to the Farmers Party, or vice versa the local party belonged to them.

Being interested in organisational and ideological questions I came in contact with Gunnar Enquist the regional organiser of the Farmer Party in the Stockholm area during the 1920´s and 1930´s – who now lived as a pensioner in Salem. He told me many inside stories about the early times when the Farmers party tried to organize the small farmers and get influence in the agricultural sector which until then was dominated by the large estates and the Conservative Party.

In order to broaden the roots of the party he organised many local Women Clubs and Youth Clubs and also Rural Meeting Halls.

Earlier, though the women were counted as members of the party, their husbands most often cast their votes for them by proxy. There was one vote for every 15 members on the municipal level and one vote for every 50 members on the regional level.

Now, with independent Women Clubs each club had one vote for their chairwoman and an own vote for every 15 members. The regional party very soon discovered this and forbade him to establish more Women clubs because . . . - Anyhow one can imagine why.

However he continued. He was really a man to my liking and when he finally founded a new women’s club in Sorunda South of Grödinge he was dismissed on the same day from his position as regional party organiser. But by then there were women Clubs all over the Stockholm region and women had become a strong influence in the party, and not only as coffee cookers in the background anymore.

THE BEGINNINGS OF LOCAL POLITICS

The Farmers Party had only one representative in the municipal council of Botkyrka in the 50´s. The council is a kind of parliament and confirms the yearly budget and appoints the mayor and committees for the legislature period. There were committees for most anything. The School Board, Social Security, Building and Planning, etc.

It was at this time Lars Magnus Giertz joined the Farmers Party and he was elected chairman of the Botkyrka section. He once said to me his friends in Djursholm regarded this almost as a class traitorous behavior.

At this time the Farmers Party wanted to broaden its basis and find members also in the cities which fitted well in with the “Back to the Roots” movement in the cities. Thus began the process towards a center party and soon the name also was changed to Center Party.

The party wanted to work for all the small enterprises, not only agricultural ones, and with its country background also took up environmental problems which until then were totally absent from the party political debate in Sweden. At the next election, still in the 50´s, the party got 2 representatives in the municipal council, of which LMG was one.

In the rapidly expanding Stockholm region the party worked for a slowdown of expansion in the metropole for the benefit of the rest of the country. This was quite logical with its agricultural background but created an outrageous negative response from all other local and regional interests.

All this was something I only noticed «en passant» because I was more interested in the large international issues - as I did not want to become involved.

When LMG left Botkyrka for Africa at the end of the 50´s the inspector Bengt-Olof Bergström who operated the Hagelby farm become the new chairman.

GETTING CAUGHT IN THE PARTY TRAP

After having asked me all the years to get engaged in the party I finally succumbed. After all the 60´s were a time for engagement.

I thought that nobody in Sweden was interested to improve the conditions for small enterprises. The Center Party promised a new approach - and because the farmers were after all small independent enterprises working together in cooperative organisations they seemed to know what to do.

The party also propagated decentralisation which according to my understanding requires a federalistic structure in order to function efficiently. You cannot decentralise without a cohesive federative structure. Otherwise you get anarchy. But they did not understand this. The word “federalism” was generally anathema in Sweden – just as “neutralism” was sacrosant.

Decentralisation together with environmental aims to clear up the sewage from urban areas and industrial plants, this program seemed to be well worthwhile to fight for.

Apparently there were many young people in the urban areas who felt the same and the party got many new members. One group were those who were mainly attracted by the decentralisation of power and the environmental aims, another group were the children of farmer families who had no future on the land and who had moved to the cities but still had their roots in the same soil the farmers party had started to grow in.

ORGANISING FOR SUCCESS

Soon after joining I was eleced secretary of the party in Botkyrka with the inspector of Hågelby as chairman. The 60´s were a time when everybody wanted to participate and grass root democracy was the aim of almost all organisational activities.

The statutes of the Center Party were very flexible and permitted a maximum of participation of all members. As my company now almost worked by itself, I could devote my time and energy to see what could be done about the party in Botkyrka.

The communal organisation of the party was formed of local clubs. Also the local clubs of the womens organisation of the party could be part of the communal organisation – as could the Youth clubs.

I went about to start local clubs in the different districts of Botkyrka: to begin with in Tullinge and Tumba, until all parts of the community were represented organisationally, and not only as individuals responsible only to themselves.

The chairmen of the locals became members of the communal executive committee together with their vice-chairmen.

Besides the executive there were general assemblies of all members in Botkyrka at least twice a year. All members were invited to these assemblies and could put forward their ideas, suggest actions and discuss elections of functionaries.

That this did not develop into a Polish parliament, with shifting non-representative majorities or even anarchy, was achieved by the statuary rule that the locals had to appoint one voting representative for every 15 members.

Thus the chairmen on the executive could not forget their members if they wanted to be reelected but had to work in both directions: to get their members approval for the necessary compromises.

The same rules applied on the next regional level. The chairman of the executive represented the community organisation and there was one representative for every 50 members.

Around this time Botkyrka was to be united with the neighbouring community in the South, Grödinge, with 3.500 inhabitants. This was a region of small farms and a few large estates. The Farmers Party, now the Center Party, was quite strong here with an active Womans Organisation and a more dormant Youth Organisation.

The Grödinge Conservative party wanted to remain independent to the bitter end and underfinanced many investments. But the Center representatives were more realistic and voted for a union with Botkyrka as early as possible, as the end was legally unavoidable.

The older members in Grödinge had a much longer political experience than we in Botkyrka, and were often part of a governing coalition. In the 30´s and 40´s they sometimes supported a conservative coalition locally and a coalition with the Social Democrates on regional level.

Because of the conscious federalistic structure of the party organisation in Botkyrka it was quite easy to unite the new and the old member structure. Both felt they were part of the decision making.

NOT ONLY ORGANISATION BUT ALSO POLITICS

Much of the political debate was around the Regional Planning for the Stockholm area. The Center Party was demanding a slowdown of the Stockholm expansion, while the other parties were planning for an increase. There were even plans for doubling the population by a chain of new suburbs around the Lake Mälaren.

Even if the planning figures thus were copmpletely unrealistic and exaggerated there was a need for building dwellings for those already living in the Stockholm area. Botkyrka was near the border on the building areas of the town of Stockholm.

As we were newcomers in the Stockholm areas politics, all the other parties saw us as their “enemy”. We were heavily ridiculed mainly for our aim to decelerate the rapid growth of the city in favour of strenghening the countryside.

This barrage from all sides made us the underdog and many people who felt neglected and being also underdogs started to sympathise with us. This led to an increase in the number of representatives and my wife Teje who thought she was safe on the fourth place on the election list was also elected to the communal parliament, to her surprise and dismay.

I had the second place on our list and became at first a member of the Social Committee and the Building Committee. Teje became member of the Culture Committee.

THE BUILDING COMMITTEE

In the Building Committee we had to oversee, besides the more normal building activities in the South of Botkyrka, the planning and building of a new town in the North of Botkyrka for about 35.000 inhabitants.

Stockholm had started very early to plan for a “New Town” in Botkyrka without discussing it with Botkyrka. The city of Stockholm owned land in the Northern part of Botkyrka since the early 1900´s because here was the source of water for the South of Stockholm. This area is easily reached by the main trunk road from Stockholm to the South of Sweden, and the city subway ending near the border of Botkyrka could easily be extended.

Botkyrka demanded to participate in the planning and could offer land areas in Fittja and Alby. This gave the place for a New Town of about 35.000 inhabitants.

Stockholm and Botkyrka formed a limited company to plan and build a New Town. The Center Party was uneasy about these plans but did not object too strongly because there seemed to be a definite need for new dwellings.

Because there often were different political majorities in Stockholm, both the left and right wing parties from Stockholm and Botkyrka were represented on the executive board of this company in order to guarantee continuity.

Here the Social Democrates, the Conservatives and the Liberals of Stockholm and Botkyrka worked together. The Center Party was regarded as the enemy of expansions and kept out of this and other central bodies.

When building a New Town in England the government is responsible for finances of the new communities until the local revenues can carry the expenses for the new community. Only thereafter the administration passes to the local authorities. I obtained this information after writing the the Ministry of the Environments in Great Britain responsible for the New Towns.

The mayor of Stockholm, however, said in the planning prospectus that local government in Sweden was so well developed that one does not need such a solution. If there are deficits they can be bridged by expansion loans from Stockholm to Botkyrka at a very low rent cost.

I was not convinced and thought of a metaphore. A new community is like a new family.

A young family just married, getting children, building up a home, furnishing the home, buying a car and summer home and starting a new job at quite low wages – this family can work day and night and still cannot earn enough to pay for everything. Of course, a family can also start slowly and get everything needed at the time when the income is sufficient.

A new community, however, has to pay for roads, water and sewage, schools and kindergartens, for technical service, administration, communications etc from the very beginning. The taxation income from the often young new families cannot pay for all this.

Another aspect I discovered after having been on the outskirts of the plannning for the New Town was that it is wrong to use all available land. There has to be space for new additions for the next generation.

During my time in the building committee we approved the plans for Alby and Fittja which were two parts of Norra Botkyrka for about 12.000 and 9.000 inhabitants. An interesting fact of the administrative process was that all, or most, buraucracy was abolished and we approved the buildings on the basis of an overview plan. The final, detailed approval was given at the same time the roofs were laid on every building.

THE CULTURE COMITTEE

My wife Teje had a different fight in the Culture Committee. The builders wanted to demolish all old buildings and leave no cultural heritage in the name of reducing costs.

An unique large barn– and stable building at Fittja was demolished and the falsely given reason was decay. In order to placate the culture “fanatics” the new building of a Bathing hall and a Kindergarten received the outer forms and colour of the old building.

But the main building of the Fittja Estate, an old waystation on the road from Stockholm to the continent, was saved.

Another fantastic idea of the builders was to name all the streets with letters starting with the name of the early local village. In Alby thus Artemis, Antonius etc. Here the Culture committee succeeded to stop the brainless builders and the streets received names connected with the history of the village areas.

While we had the study circle about the local history of Botkyrka we discovered that the station manager of the Tumba railroad station was an early Nobel peace prize winner. He was totally fogotten locally and nationally, maybe because he took the Norwegian side during the politically tempestous period when Norway became independent from Sweden. Teje and I wrote a motion to commemorate him by naming a place after him and teach about him in our schools.

He was also a member of the National Parliament for our district (for the Lantmannaparti) in the 1870´s. This was the first modern party in Sweden after the constitutional changes 1861. He won against a candidate from the same party but who was not a peace candidate. The Lantmannaparti had split into a conservative pary and a liberal party and I consider this liberal party having been a predecessor to the Center Party.

Later Teje was asked by the Social Democrates to make plans for an immigrant museum in Botkyrka and it was suggested to add to the name of the the foundation for the museum: “in memory of the local Nobel peace prize winner Klas Pontus Arnoldsson”. The street in front of the railroad station was also called Klas Pontus Arnoldsson road.

This Culture Committee was special. I was new in Botkyrka. Earlier  nobody had cared especially about the local culture. As a new committee the largest party, the Social Democrates, placed here members newly moved to Botkyrka.

Thus the later Secretary of the National Labor Union, the Secretary of the Party and the Marketing chief of the Left National Building Cooperative were placed here.

According to Teje every one of them repeated almost verbatim what the other said. Fortunately one member, also a Social Democrate, was a teacher from Tullinge and really interested in local culture. He was later the main author of the Botkyrka Book, a cultural history of Botkyrka.

Another effort of the Culture Committee was a working group to investigate and suggest the possible use of the HÃ¥gelby Estate which the Botkyrka municipality had bought from the Giertz family. Teje was a member of this group and they suggested the formation of a Folkpark (Peoples Park) with cultural ambitions.

WINNING THE MAJORITY

The Social Democratic national government wanted to have larger municipalities in order to finance locally larger commitments. Thus they decided that even the community of Salem with about 12.500 inhabitants should integrate with the growing Botkyrka. Salem was a more conservative area and increased the number of conservtive voters. But such facts did not stop the central plans to go ahead.

The Center party nominated me to be in the group to prepare the unification of the communities. This group was called the Unification Delegation and was a kind of municipal executive parallell the the executives in the two separte municipalities. We had to prepare the structure of the administration and prepare a budget for the first year of the new joint municipality. We were able to place all employees in the hierarchy exept for the three top executives. Here we had to create an administrative executive consisting of three.

During the same period I was one of three auditors for the old Botkyrka municipality. In that way I got a very good overview of the administrative and economic structure of the new enlarged community.

The economics were deplorable because the builders from Botkyrka and Stockholm did not analyse the situation before starting the immense investments.

On a national level the Conservative and the Liberal Parties had come to the conclusion that they would never obtain a majority vote unless the Center Party was strengthened.

To our astonishement the largely convervative and liberal newspapers started to speak positively about the Cener Party. Not so much in the Stockholm area but generally. But this influenced public opinion even in the large cities.

Another development was that the national leaders of the Center and the Liberal Party advocated to investigate whether it was possible to unite the parties to a Liberal Center Party.

For our part this resulted in common group meetings of the Center and Liberal members of the communal parliament of Botkyrka before its monthly sessions. This stopped, however, when the national congress of the Center Youth Organisation decided to oppose the amalgation of the parties.

But one lasting result was that the Liberal and the Center Adult Study Organisations joined to establish the Adult Educational School (Vuxenskolan). We were somewhat larger and I became its first chairman for the Botkyrka section.

In September 1973 there was to be a new election and it was interesting to see what this new strategy resulted in.

One week before the elections the local Botkyrka Social Democratic paper attacked our chairman, the inspector of HÃ¥gelby, and accused him of mismanagement of the Garden of HÃ¥gelby – on its first page. This was probable supposed to offset the support from the conservative press.

They probably thought that we could do nothing on such a short time left. However, we printed a leaflet strongly denouncing the unfair and untrue accusations. This leaflet we distributed during the last day and night before the elections and we could do nothing more than to wait for the election results.

Quite a number of former socialdemocratic voters told me later that they for the first time voted for the Center party because even they saw the attack on us as unfair and untrue.

What happened? Early on the next morning I, having been the political leader of the election campaign, was wakened by the local radio and the national press with question how I felt about our large election result.

They told me we were larger than the Conservatives or the Liberals in Botkyrka and a similar result was obtained in the surrounding municipalities: Nynäshamn, Haninge, Huddinge, Ekerö and Södertälje.

Why this result even in Botkyrka - a low income community?

I believe that the forming of a larger community with Grödinge and Salem gave us more non-left voters.

The national campaign to strengthen the Center Party was another important factor – and not only our policies (even if many others of us hyperbolically thought that we had the strongest political ideas).

We were still largely regarded as an underdog and thus obtained the vote of many who felt themselves in the same role.

As we only hade a majority of less than 200 votes of many thousands the final factor was the swingvote because of the unjust attack on our chairman. This was a well deserved punishment by the voters.

There is also a curious observation I made regarding our election results.

The largest number of voters we received in the rural areas where you had farms, which is quite natural for a former farmers party. Then came areas with detached houses on quite large plots. Then came areas with smaller plots and individual houses build together (terraced houses). Thereafter tenements with 2-4 stories and the smallest number of voters we received in areas with high rise tenements.

This definite pattern of distribution of our votes we had all election years irrespective of if we had 16% or only 6% of the vote.

CENTERN NOMINATED ME AS MAYOR

Only a few days after the election negotiations between the parties began.

There was a pre-election agreement between all parties that there would be four councillors as political employees of the municipality. One councillor would be chairman of the executive committee and thus mayor. One councillor would be responsible for the more social sectors and another for the technical sectors. The fourth councillor would be nominated from the opposition and remain without portfolio.

Our negotiation group consisted of our chairman Bengt-Olof Bergström, our vice-chairman Bengt Holm and me as the parties secretary. Our Party had nominated me in full assembly as candidate for councillor and to get if possible the job of mayor.

I never participated in more speedy negotiations than at this time. Our coalition partners the Conservatives and Liberals said you are the largest party and you have to nominate the mayor responsible for the executive board and finance. You should also take all the important boards, like the School Board, the Social Services Board, the Environment Board, the Technical Services Board, etc.

The Conservtives only wanted to have their councillor as chairman of the Building and Real Estate Board and the Liberals only wanted to nominate the chairman of the Culture and Leisure Activities Board.

Our coalition partners, of course, knew of the hopeles economic situation because of the New Town and thought it a good idea that the Center Party should become responsible for finances in the executive committee and the important communal services which are close to the lives of our citicens. These certainly would suffer from the desperate economic conditions and make people blame Centern.

The basis for our coalition agreement was the continuation of the planning and building of the New Town in Northern Botkyrka for which the municipality had a binding contract with the city of Stockholm. In the development company owned by Botkyrka and Stockholm together there should be the same representation as before – with other words no Center Party delegate.

One month after the elections the Botkyrka Parliament confirmed our nominations and I was mayor from the 1^st of January 1974 for the coming 3 years.

Only many years later I was told by my friends that the chairman of our regional Stockholm organisation, Knut Nilsson, had called twice to dissuade our local organisation to nominate me in favour of an outside candidate provided by him.

Regarding this chapter of my anecdotes:

 Some years later I wrote also a chapter of the official history published by the Culture Council of Botkyrka: "Botkyrkabygd", The History of the Farmers Party in Botkyrka, page 262-267.

MAYOR OF BOTKYRKA

Table Of Contents

FIRST IMMIGRANT MAYOR IN SWEDEN

THE FIRST DAY 1974

GENERAL DEMOGRAPHIC BACKGROUND

LOCAL POLITICAL BACKGROUND

SEVERAL EXTRA APPOINTMENTS

THE MAYOR AND CIVIL MARRIAGES

THE LIMITS OF INFLUENCE

THE DEATH SQAD

TRYING TO CHANGE THE SYSTEM

I HAD A (SMALL) PART IN CHANGING THE SYSTEM

AN EYE ON THE REGIONAL DECICION MAKERS

FIRST IMMIGRANT MAYOR IN SWEDEN

To be the chairman of the executive committee of the municipality means that one is the mayor of  the community. I was thus the first immigrant mayor in Sweden for a large municipality for several hundred years, I believe.

I still spoke with a distinct foreign accent and German was not very popular in Sweden, understandably. The German accent or intonation is almost impossible to get rid of. There were several earlier refugees from Hitler´s Germany active in Stockholm in Radio and cultural fields and they also spoke with the destinct German intonation even though they had come to Sweden in young years and had extensive language training in their profession. I was always envious of, for example, Hungarians who had come to Sweden only a few years ago and spoke the language like the natives.

THE FIRST DAY 1974

Before lunch of the first working day of my new appointment I met with all the leading officials working for the central administration. I was also visited by the local taxi company´s chairman who wanted municipal support, by a gymnastic organisation which claimed to have been discriminated against by the former majority (for the last 50 years) - and during lunchtime a woman clerk committed suicide by jumping out of her office windown on the ninth floor.

This situation in slightly accelerated form continued for the next three years. I sometimes felt like a flight controller with 100 planes in the air and at least 6 usuallly on fatal collision course.

The New Town Hall from 1974 after the new coalition took power.
 Isn´t green the colour of the Center Party?

GENERAL DEMOGRAPHIC BACKGROUND

At the end of 1971 the area of the New Town had only about 1000 inhabitants and at the end of the year 1975 32000 inhabitants.

This was less than expected (44000) because there were fewer persons per m2 dwellings moving in. Probably because of the large number of empty flats smaller families moved into larger flats. There must have been a regional planning miss which the Center party earlier had ben warning for among general derision.

Entire Botkyrka had 1971 about 40000 inhabitants and 1975 71242.

Before starting on a more detailed account I only want to remind the eventual reader that this was the start of the oil crisis manipulated by OPEC, this was a period when the government of Olof Palme allowed an annual inflation of more than 10% for several years, with wage increases usually a bit higher, combined with a fiscal system which transferred the municipal taxes almost 2 years later than the municipal expenses occurred. This added to the demographic explosion of new young families moving into the New Town, with low incomes (and taxes) but very high expenses for social services etc.

This was also the time when the large mental hospitals were closed and patients expected to take their medicine at home, the number of prisoners in state jail reduced by large humanitarian free givings and the almost slum dwellings of the South of Stockholm finally torn down to give place for new buildings.

Already from the beginning I planned to get as much as posible for Botkyrka in this situation. I was free to act without thought of reelection (in view of the small winning margin) which gave me a definite advantage. In order to understand a few more parameters of the situation I have to sketch the background a bit more in depth.

LOCAL POLITICAL BACKGROUND

There was an electoral reform 1919 which gave one vote to everyone. This lead to a clear social democratic majority. The leading social democrates in Botkyrka were all working for the Tumba Paper Mill. But during the 1920´s they did not have people to run the municipality. Thus they nominated the chairman of the right wing conservative party as their standin. This was the father of the present conservative chairman who now was part of the coalition supporting me and our party. This must have been a strain on their political loyalties.

It gets even more interesting for me as the mayor. My Chief of the Economic Department was at the same time treasurer of the Social Democratic Party.

I say my because the political functions were very much personal. As mayor, in theory, I was in charge of all employees as formal head of the entire administration.

Of course, this was in theory and in reality there was a strong hierarchy and in practice the different department heads were guarding their position – being also under the special polical boards responsible for their sector.

The employed officials suggested decisions in writing to me, on their own responsibility. I could obviously not influence their opionion but there usually was a kind of mutual give and take.

I could, however, personally decide subjects to be dealt with. (They also could take up any other subject.) Most often the officials responsible for different sectors were first reporting to their political boards and the boards conveyed their political decision to me if the matter had to be decided at a higher level.

However as mayor I had to write the final suggestions for decisions placed before the Executive Committee.

The head of the Department of Social Services, one of the largest, was a former chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Botkyrka and my Chief of Information was a former secretary of another Social Democratic Organisation. I think this illustrates the background quite well.

Now, not to forget, The Chief of the School Department with more than 50 schools and several thousand employees was the  Chairman of the Liberal Party of Botkyrka. This party was part of the coalition supporting me but they also had as their agenda the aim to survive the economic debacle to come.

All other municipal committes, there are about 20, sort under the central executive committee, which thus is responsible for coordinating all activities – but each committtee also supervises the relevant department of the municipal administration within the rules determined by the annual budget.

These are some of the committees: Social Services and Child Care, Schools and Adult Education, Building and Real Estate, Central Building Committee, Streets, Traffic and Parks, Consumer, Health, Environment and Fire Department, Culture and Leisure with Sports (81 playgrounds and many ballplaying fields), Personnel, Auditors.

The EC is directly responsible for the total municipal economy and budget, longterm economic and physical planning, handling of catastrophes, unemployment, relations with the military and other matters which I have forgotten now after 30 years.

However, the function of chairman of the Executive Committee entailed many other responsibilities which I shall relate in some detail in separate chapters to try to simplify the story.

SEVERAL EXTRA APPOINTMENTS

There were a number of municipal companies owned together with neighbouring municipalities and it usually was required that the mayor represented his community on the board of directors this was to guarantee support for decisions made on company level but also usually of a major concern for the communities involed.

SYVAB was a major sewage treatment plant owned by Botkyrka, Huddinge, Stockholm and Södertälje and situated in the South of Bokyrka with a large net of sewage canals of different size and serving about 200.000 people. For several years from the start of the company I was on its board.

SRV was a company owned by Botkyrka together with Huddinge and situated  in Huddinge providing garbage and refuse haulage and treatment from all households in both communities. Even in this company I was on the board only during its first years.

SFAB was a district heating plant owned together by Huddinge and Botkyrka and situated in Botkyrka planned to be serving about 150.000 people.

Of this company I was chairman of the board of directors for 3 years and later as a member.

I was also on the boards of subsidiary companies like EFO Oil and EFO Coal beeing the buying and distribution agencies for fuel to the entire region around the lake Mälaren. During the oil period we were the largest independent buyer of oil on the spotmarket in Europe. We also owned the company OLAB a harbour and very large storage facility for the EFO area for oil (about 1 milj m³) at Oxelösund.

The boards of these subidiary companies usually had meetings together because the membership was partly overlapping and the general information of use for the common decision making. Of course, the voting was divided.

These boards of directors met together with the managing directors of the affiliated electricity producing and distributing companies and the large district heating plants and distribution systems. This work was of strategic importance for the entire Stockholm region.

I was also on the boards of STOSEB for many years. Most communities in the Stockholm area were owners of STOSEB – a company planning and coordinating energy supply to the greater Stockholm area.

Even here the managing directors of all the owner municipalities participated in these meetings which prevented fixed political ideas to influence the decisions as they were screened by those who were responsible to see them carried out.

This management policy enabled us to obtain the best results because the common aim was the lowest price to the customers and it was easy to compare the results for each municipality.

This engagement stimulated my interest in energy questions and I want to treat this subject more fully in a separate chapter.

I was never involved on the board of the Electricity Distribution Company (which was only active in the area of Botkyrka) though I could have an opinion regarding their priceing within the general political context.

From the above one can see that I believed it to be important to have influence in the important strategic positions. This is the only way to guarantee that we as politicians can handle the buraucracy.

But it is also important to keep very close contact with ones own group of elected representatives and with ones own party organisation explaining all important suggestions for decisions.

The most important aspect is that no party has a majority – which the members sometimes forget. Compromises have to be explained and accepted. If this is done normally, fully and consequently it was my experience that the members sometimes even accepted decisions which had to be taken by myself more or less on the spot.

As mayor one has to leave the strict party line and try to serve the entire community. This is a very complex situation. One also has to remember that there are many forces trying to influnce decisions. The different parties are not alone.

The mass media: newspapers, journals, radio, television have their own agenda. Mostly they want to have many customers and help groups or parties related to them. Even ones own party group sometimes believes what they say – even if it is fantasy. (I had an advantage because one of the local papers was owned by the Center Party).

The administrative hierarchy often has their own agenda in the process of decisions making which is somewhat exaggeratedly and humourosly illustrated in the BBC series “Yes, Prime Minister!” But most often they are strictly neutral.

A group which is not always neutral are the trade unions, but usually they were not unreasonable. It was my policy to meet all elected tradeunion representatives once a week before decisions were proposed in order to inform them -not to ask them about their opinion. I thought it useful that they knew what was going to happen in order to answer questions from their members.

Another important player were the financial institutes, banks and funds because we were in a difficult financial situation and living on borrowed money.

Local business, the large companies and the many small ones also had their contact committee.

THE MAYOR AND CIVIL MARRIAGES

As a ships captain can perform marriages, so  also can the mayor. I must have performed hundreds. Often a pair comes up to me on the  street and saying hello, do you remember us? You married us.

There are a few instances from this activity which have remained more strongly in my memory.

One Russian always had a bottle of Russian Champaigne and everybody nearby was offered a drink. I say always because he got married three times, of course, with divorces in between. But he married the same woman every time and I wondered .. OK, I wondered.

One time I married a Maroccan man and a young Swedish girl. There were two friends as witnesses. The woman witness was very well dressed and what one might call chique. I remembered that about ten years ago I married a similar young couple and I often had wondered what happened to them, especially the girl, because they were from such differen cultures. She replied "Everything went very well, it was us you married 10 years ago. We live half the year in Paris and half the year in Marocco."

Another time the ceremony took place on a boat in the middle of the lake in front of the Stockholm Town Hall. I remember also an open air ceremony on the top of a hill overlooking the Bear Lake. Or two marriages of couples from Montenegro.

The first couple came from the deepest countryside or hills. The witnesses had a large bottle of Slibowich, the strong balkan plumspirit. Everybody had to take a drink from the bottle. I too, not to be unsocial. (I thought of explorers who were worse off having to eat ants or snakes). The comment was "This is the last time the bride is allowed to drink strong drinks". I still don´t know how true that was.

Just the opposite on the social level was another marriage of a couple from Montenegro. This was in a restaurant and all were sitting around a horseshoe table. There were guests from far away, Denmark, Enland, USA and Yugoslavia. There was a famous rock- and folksinger etc. What I remember that not only she but almost everybody else was singing to one another. The relatives of the bride had stolen a shoe from the bride and the relatives of the husband had to buy back the shoe. When singing to (or addressing) one another the singer had to stand on his or her chair. I think the party went on for three days. Though, I left after a few enlightening hours.

Even after my period as mayor I continued with civil marriages until my pension time.

THE DEATH SQUAD

This was the inofficial, common name of the RAT or Rationalisation Committe consisting of the three leading officials, the chief of the Cancellery (administrative office of the EC), the chief of the Economic Office and the chief of the Planning Office all three under the EC. To this committee were affiliated the chief of the the Personnell Office and the leading three trade union representatives.

This committee was instrumental in structuring the placement of personnell of the two amalgamated administrations of Salem and Botkyrka. They also kept a strict lock on new recruitment.

These three officials could place everybody else but not decide who was to be the one leading official. Because, I as mayor was in theory head of the administration it was decided that these three should function as triumvirate - which worked very well because decisions presented to me had to be a compromise very well underpinned.

THE LIMITS OF INFLUENCE

In theory the politicians make the decisions. But there are many influences shaping the opinions underlying decisionmaking. First comes your own partygroup in the executive committee and the municipal parliament. Then there are the partyleaders of the parties constituing our majority and their partygroups. All their opinions are strongly influenced by the massmedia: journals, radio and television covering local questions often with their own slant. Finally there are the administrative hierarchy and the strong tradeunions.

After having formulated a proposal for decision I had to get the approval of the leadership of the other parties in our majority coalition. This often had to be a compromise with our own party’s line and for which I often had to fight for acceptance.

Very often the other partyleaders approved the compromise without having the definite support of their group which, of course, lead to my proposals being  stopped. Later I will give the most serious example. Luckily our party had a large basis in the rural part of the municipality whith many older members understanding the problems of complicated majorities. But nevertheless I became very fed up with my coalition partners.

An other interesting example about the influence of a mayor in the Swedish scheme of things is the following story.

As is well known the state sells alcohol which is a narcotic product. We know that at least about 3% of the population become addicts (the reason might be metabolic in many instances) and many of those become homeless or sit in public places drinking and disturbing the order whatever this might be. There is a moralistic attitude in Sweden which can be very tough on these unfortunates.

I thought that they should not be forced to sit outside in the dire winter cold but we should provide some kind of a shelter. There was an old building in central Tumba which we did not use so I suggested that we use this as a shelter for the homeless where they did not have to freeze during the day and could drink in more humane circumstances.

I had, of course, enough influence to get this building for the homeless. But what happened: The Social Services were naturally appointed to administrate this shelter. According to their ideology (and interpretation of national buraucratic rules they had the task to rehabilitate the drinkers and they decided this meant if one had drunk one could not stay in the shelter. So they still had to sit outside in the cold. My idea to let them drink inside in the warmth was efficiently sabotaged on the altar of Swedish morality.

TRYING TO CHANGE THE SYSTEM

When I became responsible for the ecoomic survival of Botkyrka and after understanding that the taxation income from a young population never could finance the largescale expansion I decided that we had to find a way to change the financing of developing communities in order to avoid being eaten up by the city of Stockholm which happened to smaller communities in the past like Brännkyrka or Bromma and many others.

I wrote to Great Britain to ask how their New Towns were financed. The Ministry of the environent replied that their British New Towns were financed by the government and transferred to a local democratic government only after the annual income was sufficient.

The prospectus for Norra Botkyrka took up this question and answered (Hjalmar Mehr) that local Swedish government was so well developed that the British solution was not necessary here and that Stockholm city ould finance the expansion by giving Botkyrka LOANS. Loans which of course increased Botkyrkas already huge debts. Stockholm could stop these loans anytime, which also happened very soon - maybe to embarras a non social democratic majority in Botkyrka. I would like at this point to mention that most politically active employees in Botyrka, especially social democrates, were strictly neutral. There were, of course, exeptions.

At that time I directed our Chief of the Economic Department, a socialdemocratic functionary in his spare time, to arrange a meeting with the socialdemocratic finance minister to discuss a possible national solution.

We never received a reply or acknowlegment. I guess the minister did not want to open the way for municipalities to ask the government for help. Or he wanted to strangle a non socialdemocratic local administration. Whatever?

Now this was a few years after the youthful revolt in Europe of the year 1968. It was obvious to me that the democratic process had become more a way to administrate the existing order and less a way to change.

In order to get changes and help there were local strikes and even hunger strikes in Sweden to get national attention. Nothing happens in a democracy, it seemed at that time, if there is not put some kind of effective pressure into the system – reason alone apparently does not suffice.

I simply decided to change from my more political administrative roll to a more revoltlike role to see if the system could be influenced.

My aim was to get national attention for the plight of a young developing community abandoned to itself by the powers of the land.

AlreadyArchimedes said that he only needed a fulcrum applied at the right spot to lift the world. My fulcrum became our municipal housing company. This company was partly owned by Botkyrka (majority) and partly by the (Social Democratic) Building Cooperative Riksbyggen (minority).

It was more or less a socialdemocratic company for which Botkyrka had garanteed all loans and now had to support the company which had huge deficits.

The municipal housing company «Botkyrkabyggen» was in serious trouble. A large percentage of its flats were empty and there was an unnormally large turn over of  families in the occupied flats. The company was loosing much money and the entire municipal solidity was under zero! There was no chance that the new young families could pay enough taxes to cover the losses and pay for the investments in the New Town.

On the other hand our people were working all over the larger Stockholm area which to me meant that the income of the entire Stockholm area should be the taxation base by a redistribution system. In regional meetings the richer municipalities representatives sometimes accused us of exessive spending. I could easily refute them by showing that their municipalities paid a larger social assistance than we, they paid more per school pupil etc etc. One moderate leader of Stockholm, later chairman of the national party, tried to illustrate our extravagance by ridiculing our fire department, we had six large doors while even New Yorks firestations had only four. He forgot to tell that three compartmentas were used as work shops and thus were cheaper than special extra buildings.

The fulcrum I used was the fact that the municipal housing company was an incorporated company with shares like any commercial firm and thus subject to commercial laws of insolvency. The likvidity showed that a balance had to calculated which only could be approved if the municipalitys parliament had decided to guarantee more capital if needed - which had not been done, yet.

At this stage the party leaders in our majority coalition approved that I contacted the Commercial Arbitration Center (Akkordcentalen) to see if the debts could be reduced. Most loans were from government agencies who had approved the loans without analysing the possibilities of repayment. They suggested a writeoff of part of the loans.

 Now the national government woke up and started to act. The finance minister (social democrate) invited  the other leaders of the parties in our coalition and the social democratic leader to discuss alternatives to my writeoff of the loans.

Behind my back they agreed to let Stockholm buy 40% of the company shares and additional loans to be granted instead. As this helped us temporarily I accepted this solution but trusted my coalition «friends» never again. Our period of majority rule came very soon to its end anyhow.

Curiously the board had appointed a new managing director, Riksbyggens most skillful troubleshoooter. I mention this here because we live since the 1990^th in a newly build condominium flat of Riksbyggen and after a new rightwing government stopped all previous housing subsidies the company had to apply for a reduction of loans. Our building had been put into the government's bad loan system and our loans were reduced with the percentage which I earlier had recommended for Botkyrkabyggen.

And who was a leader for this reconstruction company? Yes the same troubleshooter who had stopped my attempts to reduce the municipal loans. in the 1970^th . But all the time we were on good personal speaking terms in our Rotary Club.

I HAD A (SMALL) PART IN CHANGING THE SYSTEM

After the election the new social democratic leaders asked me to support a necessary increase of taxes. We felt we had to support everthing which helped our community to survive. I and my group voted therefor for this increase but we refused to discuss any political demands - we did at this stage feel that the political fight had been too hot to say the least.

Later we supported the socialdemocratic budget and had as main demand that the future increased regional help should be used to reduce the debts and not to finance  activities. Here it is interesting to note that the reduction of loans was shown in the annual balance only - the economic department had the right to pay off loans without requiring political decisions.

The moderates and liberals, our former friends, and the communists, friends of the social democrates, did not discover this for serveral years. However, as soon as they found out our «friends» wanted to reduce taxes and the social democratic «friends» wanted to increase spending.

That shows how much they understood. The moderates presented their first balanced budget much later after the owner of a large, successful retail shop became their leader who knew all about debet and credit - and not only about reducing income without reducing costs.

All this went on with regional and national mass media not only reporting but drumming to our attempts to waken the regional and national authorities to our financial problems which were not of our own making, well only slightly. It had been impossible to stop the expansion of Stockholm.

Our suggestion was a regional system to redistribute a small part of the regional taxation. If only half a crown (0.50kr)  

The national government had changed from Social Democrates  to a government with the leader of the Center Party as Prime Minister at the same time as we lost the majority in our municipality. The leader of  the regionl Center Party and our local Center  member of Parliament , later foreign minister, met with me to discuss what could and should be done for the poorer municipalities in the Stockholm region. They had no better suggestion than the regional taxation redistribution.

Our regional leader and the local member of parliament convinced our Prime Minister to appoint a one man committee to see what should and could be done. He appointed the leading Moderate Regional Councillor who had his electoral base in the richer municipalities North of Stockholm. Even he could not find a better solution and he proposed a legislation permitting the regional redistribution of taxation for a trial period of some years. 

I said to him that it must be difficult to keep the support of his rich friends and that he should ask the Prime Minister for an appointment as Governor as far away from Stockholm as possible. I said this more as a joke but several months later he was appointed as Governor  for a large region in the North where he became very popular and effective.

I am convinced that my (revolutionary) clamour about the helpless situation for Botkyrka contributed to the political opinion permitting a change of the system.

I WANTED TO KEEP AN EYE
ON THE REGIONAL DECICION MAKERS

For many years I was a candidate for the Regional Parliament for the larger Stockholm area (Landstinget). Mostly I became elected as the last suppleant. My declared aim was to keep an eye on the redistribution of the regional taxation income for the benefit of primarily Botkyrka.

Otherwise I did not participate (fight for my opinion) in the decisionmaking for medical services or transportation services for example for the larger Stockholm area. I had enough problems in my own community, Botkyrka. However, it was useful for a local politician to be able to follow what the regional decision maker were up to.

There were many principal decisions which I disagreed with, like the closing of all the larger mental institutions. I thought that new medication permitted the patients to live in the outside world but that the patients should have been attached to an institution which had a place open for them whenever they desired or needed its security.

Also the "old age reforms" (called euphemistically nobel reform) separating responsibility between the municipal level and regional level was stupid because both parts tried as well as they could to avoid responsibility. After stating my views I usually concluded "that as long as you support the redistribution of taxation do whatever you like". This was the most important question on the regional level for Botkyrka during that period.

AMATEUR GENERALIST IN THE FIELD OF ENERGY

Table Of Contents

MY FIRST CONTACTS WITH ENERGY QUESTIONS

FROM CENTRAL HEATING TO DISTRICT HEATING

AS MAYOR I HAD TO LEARN MORE ABOUT MANY THINGS

THE DISTRICT HEATING COMPANY FOR BOTKYRKA AND HUDDINGE

THE OIL AGE

EFO OIL - PURCHASING ASSOCIATION

OLAB - HARBOUR AND STORAGE FACILITY

THE FIRST OIL CRISIS

EFO COAL - PURCHASING ASSOCIATION

DIFFERENT PROJECTS AND INVESTIGATIONS OF INTEREST

Forsmark

Nynäshamn

Solar Panels for District Heating

Methane Gas from Deposits of Household Waste

Svalbard

Törnkraft

Government Advisor

TÄLJE ENERGI - DISTRICT HEATING FOR SÖDERTÄLJE

Hydrogen Conference

SÖDERENERGI - REORGANISATION ON A LARGE SCALE

EFO BIO - PURCHASING ASSOCIATION

MY FIRST CONTACTS  WITH ENERGY QUESTIONS

After 1949 I worked part of the time and from 1954 full time in Sweden as a mainly self taught building engineer. Before I spoke Swedish sufficiently well I worked in Sweden as a draughtsman at a place that was doing innovative work.

The work was an experimental project of 600 dwellings (flats) where we were developing and introducing prefabricated methods and experimented with other innovations for Sweden. I have to remind you that my boss was a grandson of the famous inventor LM Ericson and thus predisposed to work with innovations.

The heating system was based upon city gas. In order to save fuel every flat had its own burner for hot air and hot water placed in a protective tower with an opening on the top in case the contraptions exploded. I have shortly mentioned this in the earlier chapter on experiments.

An individual heating unit for every flat was supposed to encourage the saving of energy. The problem, of course, is that each flat had different heat losses and if one wanted to save it was possible to reduce heat from your unit and let your neighbour pay for your comfort.

There was also developed the first heat exchanger in Sweden (on top of the tower) for recovering heat from exhaust air. It was huge (2x2m) for a house with 8 flats. Todays exchangers are much smaller even for 80 flats and more effective. Todays recovery is mostly from air to preheating of the hot water supply.

As our exchange went from exhaust air to fresh warm air for heating all the rooms and as the separation of air flows was not perfect, everybody knew what everyone else in the house was going to eat for dinner. (I had flat in this first experimental building of the project). This heating concept was soon abandoned. But still it was experimenting on quite a large scale in the field of home energy supply.

I, of course,  was involved in a passive role only - but it was very interesting.

FROM CENTRAL HEATING TO DISTRICT HEATING

Reliable and sufficient energy supply to our modern society is one of the basic requirements for the functioning of almost everything. Until the 70´s not many people reflected about where for example the electric power came from. Everybody knew that you had an  outlet with 2 holes and if you put your contact there, alas, your radio worked and if you turned the switch on the wall there was light.

But now electricity was going to be produced by nuclear power plants and many people started to reflect.

Heat for buildings was largely produced by heating water by burning oil, mostly in small plants, and letting the warm water through pipes to the spaces to be heated (central heating). In urban areas the plants for producing hot water became larger and larger and the areas to be heated correspondingly so(district heating).

Some cities having such large plant discovered that it was advantageous to produce electricity themselves and use the heat from cooling the steam for the generators by distributing hot water, cogeneration. The city of Västerås (about 100.000 inhabitants) was a pioneer. The advantage nationally and regionally was that the peak period for use of electricity and for the use of hot water for heating were simultanous in the cold period.

However, the basic supply of electricity in Sweden was produced by falling water after high dams in many rivers. Thus the large state owned company producing and distributing electricity was called Vattenfall (Waterfall) now of European renown as Vattenfall Europe.

But to my relation with Vattenfall, if one can call it a relation, I come to at a later point in this story.

AS MAYOR I HAD TO LEARN MORE ABOUT MANY THINGS

Now I have to jump a few years. When I was working as a building engineer and technical secretary of an Institute for Building Documentation in Botkyrka I also got involved in local politics. My interests were environmental issues and small business. I suddenly found myself elected mayor of my now home municipality Botkyrka which at that time was in the process of doubling its number of inhabitants in a period of 5 years by building a New Town for about 35.000 inhabitants. (See the chapter on the Center Party if you want to know more about local politics).

Being elected mayor of a larger municipality in Sweden meant that you had to know most everything and to answer all questions from the press or your voters. Of course, you could not know everything in detail but you had to have a good overview over almost everything in your community.

There were also some areas of municipal responsibilities were several neighbouring communities had to collaborate. For example regarding sewage transportation and treatment or removing and deposing of household waste.

Usually there were formed commercial corporations owned by the communities concerned. Most often the mayors represented their community assisted by their local experts.

I was therefore from the start on the board of the sewage company owned by Botkyrka, Huddinge, Södertälje and Stockholm (called SYVAB)and the household and industrial waste disposal company owned by Botkyrka and Huddinge (called SRV), for example.

THE DISTRICT HEATING COMPANY
FOR BOTKYRKA AND HUDDINGE

The company which started my deeper interest in the energy sector was the district heating company (called SFAB) and was co-owned by Botkyrka and Huddinge. By agreement the chairman was appointed by Botkyrka because the central heating plant was situated in Botkyrka at the shores of the lake Mälaren which gave it a harbour for the supply of oil by boat which was used as main fuel at that time.

This is not supposed to be an article about the company but an article how I was influenced by my participating in discussions and decisions on the board. However, some history of its development is necessary.

The developers of The New Town Norra Botkyrka planned at first, after suggestion from Vattenfall, to heat it by electric radiators. Vattenfall feared a surplus of  eletricity after the planned 12 nuclear reactors went on line.

For the Swedish market seven reactors were sufficient - but there had to be at least 12 units (which were needed) to pay off the investments put into the project by important Swedish industries. This I was told by the CO of the manufacturer of the nuclear turbines by the way.

When J Sintorn, the best known manager of municipal energy companies in Sweden and regarded as the great old man of the industry, heard this he became furius and offered to lend his second in command, Halvard Gedung, to make an analysis of the price for a district heating solution based upon hot water.

HG´s suggestion was to build a district heating plant with cogeneration of electricity. To get an optimal size for the cooling of generated steam the neighbouring communities of Huddinge and Botkyrka should work together.  But Vattenfall did not want to get a competitor in the Stockholm area and suggested a longterm agreement guaranteeing a very low price for the electric power delivered. This was also accepted - but was to be kept secret. HG was asked to become the companies first managing director which he accepted and remained for 16 years.

THE OIL AGE

This was just before the first oil crisis and everybody used heavy oil with a large percentage of sulphur which did not burn but was spread all over the country with the fall out from the "smoke". At this time environmentalists started to work for a reduction of the sulphur in oil because the forests all over Europe started to become afflicted.

My party, the Center Party, was environmentalist, what later became called "green", and we tried to influence the opinion in support of reduced sulphur in the oil used in Sweden. My problem as chairman of the board was that our company could not by itself buy the more expensive low sulphur oil. There was also no majority for such a move.

I could, however, in newspaper articles and otherwise point to the immense sulphur exhausts from our plant and thus take part in the slow change of public opinion. Finally the laws were changed so that it became advantageous to use low sulphur oil for district heating plants.

SFAB had in between the plant and its harbour two underground oil storage tanks of 75.000_m3 excavated in the rock. When loading and unloading oil the harbour had to be surrounded by protective barriers because the Stockholm Water Works taking drinking water from the Lake Mälaren was nearby.

At the same time the communities and the public utilities for electricity and heat in the South of Stockholm started a company for the purpose of coordinating on a voluntary basis their policies. This company was soon changed to include all of larger Stockholm.

The company was called STOSEB and on the board were the mayors of all owner communities as ordinary board members and a representative for the opposition, non voting. At board meetings the ordinary majority members and their nonvoting seconds were sitting around the huge table and behind them the managing directors of all the electricity and district heating companies.

The managing directors often had prepared among themselves together with the chairman and vice-chairman the agenda for the discussion. As this was a voluntary coordination nothing was proposed which did not benefit all concerned and the deciding factor was a lower price to the consumer.

The projects often concerned only a few members of STOSEB. For example the sewage from the west of Stockholm and communities connected to this sewage treatment plant build a huge heatpump to regain heat from the sewage and lead the effluent 80 to 100 m under Stockholm in a tunnel to the Baltic Sea where it was treated a second time together with the effluent from communities to the North of Stockholm.

It was most interesting to follow the building of the tunnel under Stockholm and see the commercial advantages afterwards.

EFO OIL - PURCHASING ASSOCIATION

Another project evolving from STOSEB, and this time also the city of Västerås, was EFO OIL, The Economic Association for Oil Purchases (1973). At this time it had become somewhat difficult to find low-sulphur oil at low prices when trying to buy small amounts of oil for each plant.

Because more communities around the Lake Mälaren joined EFO the yearly purchases amounted to 2 miljon m3 which made EFO the largest purchasing agent for low-sulphur oil in Europe.

Because also EFO was a voluntary association EFO bought in its name but on the account of different members. When EFO had an oil tanker with oil to be bought on the spot market the members were asked how much of the tanker they would buy. The decision was made on the basis of need and price.

The board meetings were similar to STOSEB and accompanied by a lecture on the oil market and expected trends which was important to all members in order to decide correctly, i.e.guess more or less intelligently, at what time to buy and how much, in order to safeguard supplies for the winter. Purchasing decisions were, of course, made by the managing directors.

Whereas STOSEB´s board meeting were accompanied by a sumptious lunch from a top caterer in the conference rooms on top of Stockholms Electricity Plant the meetings of EFO usually were held in the best restaurants of Stockholm and accompanied not by lunch but an exclusive dinner with following mingling in the club rooms.

I believe that these more or less informal parts of the meetings contributed to ease major decisions made more formally. We came to know and understand one another better.

At that time I was a nonvoting member of the different energy organisations. As such I first used to state my parties attitude to proposals for decision, thereafter what I thought personally. If the voting member from Botkyrka, the mayor after me, was absent I became voting member for Botkyrka and after stating what I thought personally I voted for Botkyrkas point of view. Therefore the board also listened politely to what I had to say personally.

OLAB - HARBOUR AND STORAGE FACILITY

One other projects, also a subsidary company, concerned the shipping and storing of the huge amounts of oil. At Oxelösund there was a harbour site which could take the largest vessels able to pass through Öresund between Sweden and Danmark.

Here OLAB build the largest handling and storage facility for Oil in Sweden. In seven large underground reservoirs was space for 1 miljon m3 of oil which was half of the annual need of the affiliated companies.

The oil was of like quality and was owned and payed for by the members who had placed their order with EFO. With the huge amounts of oil and the possibility to wait until the marketprices were interessting the purchase prices were generally very low and also OLAB´s expenses were very low.

THE FIRST OIL CRISIS

Under many years the political establishment was not interested and did not know very much about the energy sector. The people involved in managing it behind the scenes were often called "The Energy Society" which was quite a closed group. The amounts of capital and cash flow handled by them, however, were immense. Because people were not interested many decisions of importance could be made based upon economy and not politics.

Now the political establishment was wakened by the oil crisis. But short term changes of taxes and regulations to influence the market made the long term planning for the energy sector very difficult.

One of the first important political decision was to change from oil to coal. EFO Oil became also EFO Coal and OLAB lost much of its strategic importance. However, the investment was already fully paid by this time.

EFO COAL - PURCHASING ASSOCIATION 

The now well established cooperation of communities and companies around the Lake Mälaren led to the astonishing feat that most plants could convert their heating plants from oil to coal within 2 years and instead of purchasing 2_milj_m3 of oil they imported 1.8 milj m3 of coal and the remaining minor part was oil for plants which could not easily be converted.

At this time the environmental concerns regarding coal had become stronger and the "smoke" was cleaned by using efficient particle filters.(The smoke which can be seen is usually only condensed water).

Also the larger plants permitted an advanced control of the burning process´s temperature which minimized the NOx output.

Swedens early concern regarding coal later gave Vattenfall a competetive advantage when bidding for the modernisation of the German coal plants in Eastern Germany.

The high output of CO2 could not be avoided but at that time we had not heard of greenhouse gases.

DIFFERENT PROJECTS AND INVESTIGATIONS OF INTEREST

By this time I believe Halvard Gedung had succeeded his old boss J. Sintorn of Västerås as the Great (Old) Man of District Heating. He became responsible for a large number of investigations. We on the board of SFAB were able to follow many interesting projects.

Forsmark:

HG planned for STOSEB a double pipeline, with a diameter 1.5m, from the Forsmark nuclear plant via Uppsala to Stockholm in order to heat the entire Stockholm area. This was a very economic solution and would have paid its investment within 5 years.

Vattenfall was part owner of Forsmark and did not want to reduce their electricity production capacity, even though it would have had a very small effect only. The government also opposed the project because of very diffuse reasons.

As Forsmark operated only with 30% efficiency the remaining 70% were therefore used to heat the fish and seals in the Baltic Sea instead of the population of Uppsala and Stockholm.

Nynäshamn:

Next came the idea to build a large plant near the harbour of Nynäshamn to produce methanol and ammoniac and use the heat to connect to the district heating grids of Stockholm and Södertälje. HG was asked to investigate the technical and economic consequenses for the district heating communities. There was no economic advantage and the project was shelved.

Solar Panels for District Heating

Solar panels cannot heat the hot water which is going out to the customers. But it was thought worthwhile to test different paneltypes to try to heat the return water.

SFAB installed therefore different types of panels near the return pipe from Tumba to Norsborg and heated the return water.

The tests were evaluated by independent research institutes but it was found that solar panels cannot contribute to the economy of district heating in the climate of Sweden.

Methane Gas from Deposits of Household Waste

SRV, the company which operates the deposit is responsible since 1991 for the production of methane and the compressor house. SFAB is responsible for the pipeline to one minor district on the outskirts of the main grid. Every year abou 4.000_m3 of oil is thus replaced by gas.

Svalbard:

Because STOSEB was a large player on the oil market it was decided by us to cooperate with some of the larger industrial companies of Sweden to investigate the possibility to find oil and gas near Svalbard. Swedish interest in the region had to be shown.

A company was founded and HG became its managing director. The company financed a series of trial holes with some good prospects for the future. But there was no need to go further with the project at this time. The aim to show Swedish interest had been obtained and a large part of the costs was regained by selling the trial reports to international major oil explorers.

Törnkraft:

Vattenfall became interested, finally, in cogeneration of electricity in the Fittja plant of SFAB. HG was our negotiator and I was part of a group of three to follow the negotiations. Vattenfall had a cottage from the 16th century in which we met near its huge central office building. In Botkyrka we met in the SFAB Fittja plant.

When we met in Fittja the managing director from Vattenfall stayed in his car until 1 minute before the meeting in order to arrive puntually. To me it seemed like todays top meetings of the G8. Most everything was prepared beforehand by the experts.

HG was like a chessplayer in negotiations and had calculated a marginal price for our heat (electricity) based upon the Swedish market if we only had  built seven nuclear reactors. Which was the number really needed. Vattenfall agreed finally this fact - but it had to be kept secret.

The plans for the new plant had to be approved by the Swedish parliament - and at the last moment the government decided to stop the project in favour of a large plant in Södertälje which had a harbout open to the Baltic.

Government Advisor:

The government had now become more interested in district heating and approved a budget for subsidies to communities which wanted to start or expand their district heating operations. HG was regarded as the most likely expert to be accepted by those seeking subsidies and he stayed two days a week in a government office to distribute the money.

Under all these special jobs he remained managing director of SFAB.

I list all this only to show that we on the board of SFAB were in a unique position to follow and understand? the vagaries of Swedish energy politics.

TÄLJE ENERGI - DISTRICT HEATING FOR SÖDERTÄLJE

After the governments decision to promote a large district heating plant för the town of Södertälje to the South of Botkyrka it was decided to build the plant so large that it could supply even Botkyrka and Huddinge and possible a larger area with district heat generated by coal.

The plant had its own harbour. For storage of coal there were built 2 circular vertical caves going down more than 80m. They were filled from above by covered conveyor belts from the harbour and the coal was transported from below to be burnt under the boilers. For protection from fire the caves could be filled with inert gas.

The most advanced particle filters were used and NOx emission was held at a minimum by controlling the combustion heat.

After an agreement with SFAB on prices (quite low as they were negotiated by HG) it was decided to build a pipeline from Södertälje to Botkyrka (1983) having a capacity to even supply a part of Southern Stockholm if so desired.

Hydrogen Conference

In order to follow possible developments for the future Tälje Energi´s, managing director Olle Eklund*), arranged already during the year 1989 an international conference on the future of Hydrogen as alternative fuel.

Researchers from Sweden, Germany and Japan participated. This was quite early and I have since followed the debate kring the "Hydrogen Economy".

*Olle Eklund was also secretary of the "Association of Friends of the Swedish Opera School of Stockholm" of which I was founder and president –
but of this I´ll write in the chapter on the Opera School.

SÖDERENERGI - REORGANISATION ON A LARGE SCALE

1990 it was decided by the owner communities to create a new company and to it transfer all production facilities from Tälje Energi and SFAB. SFAB and Tälje Energi remained as independent distribution companies.

SFAB kept the small enclave of Skogås which was actually off the grid in order to maintain their professional capacities and thus being able to speak to the producing company as equals.

EFO BIO - PURCHASING ASSOCIATION

The period of oil, the period of coal are now finished and Söderenergi uses now almost 100% biomass - keeping oil only as a reserve. They are buying directly or via EFO BIO.

But by this time I had already left the "fields of energy".

AN AMATEUR TOURIST EXPERT

Table Of Contents

TOURISM IN BOTKYRKA?

A NEW WAY FOR COMMITTE WORK: FOLDER PRODUCTION

THE BOTKYRKA TOURIST ASSOCIATION

HOW I BECAME CHIEF OF TOURISM

CONSULTANT: MY SECOND ROLE

FIRST PROJECTS: INFO AT THE E4 AND PICTURE POSTCARDS

THE FIRST YOUTH HOSTEL IN BOTKYRKA

SOME USES OF OUR MAIN FOLDER

MONICA CARLBERG PRODUKTION: CURRENT EVENTS

MAPS TO FINANCE OUR STUDY TRIPS

BJÖRN SANDBERG IN MEMORIAM

APPENDIX I: THE BOTKYRKA DATA ASSOCIATION

APPENDIX II: THE IMMIGRANT INSTITUTE AND MUSEUM

APPENDIX III: THE DEPARTMENT CHIEFS CONFERENCE

TOURISM IN BOTKYRKA?

One Sunday our group of elected representatives from the Center Party was brainstorming for new ideas. We tried to find ideas to improve our community without having to suggest additional expenditures. We had voted for the yearly budget and were bound to stay within the financial framework.

I do not remember who came up with this bright idea: but someone suggested if Stockholm can advertise its city for tourism, Botkyrka an area large almost as Stockholm but with more than 50% forests, fields, large estates, lakes, and a shore to the Lake Mälaren to the North and the Baltic Sea to South should be able to do the same.

Thereby encouraging and strengthening our commercial institutions in this field. We could also improve the conception many people had of Botkyrka as a problem community with many inhabitants with social problems (only partly true.) This was an image we had to project in order to obtain financial assistance from the government and the regional authorities.

Nobody, however could find fault with us for misleading information if we talked about our beautiful nature. Especially, if the commercial interests were the originators. Many companies had difficulties in recruiting personnel to move to Botkyrka because of the earlier negative publicity.

I thus wrote a motion to the Kommun Fullmäktige (the local parliament) with this suggestion. Very soon the Kommun Styrelse (the local government) replied affirmative and suggested me and a Social Democrate to form a minimum committee to look into this idea and suggest what could be done.

A NEW WAY FOR COMMITTE WORK: FOLDER PRODUCTION

I had my office as a part time employee of the Center Party on the same floor as the majority councillors. We had, of course, by now heard that many municipalities in Sweden had been looking at tourism as a possibility to increase local and foreign travel to their community. Thus we wrote to them all and asked them politely to send us their material. I thought that maybe 10 might answer. To everybod´s astonishment almost all answered and my office and the space in front was soon filled with splendid bureaucratic papers, binders and boxes. Apparently most of them were very proud of their tourist consultants paper work. I became desperate. I never thought that we should contribute to this pile of papers.

Thus we decided to use the meagre funds we had to prepare not another report but a colored picture folder of the kind which might be used to inform about and advertise Botkyrka.

This is the front and back page of our Committee Folder in English

When we prepared the folder (double A4 size) we became astonished about the imposing amount of information which could be put together. There were short articles about Sturehov, a 18th century manor complete with original furniture, there was the Lida Open Air Center, a rustic timberblock building designed by the British born architect Ralph Erskine, in the middle of the forests near a lake and the the former military air port, there was The Slagsta Marina for 700 boats at the shores of the Lake Mälaren, there was a skiing slope easily reached by the Stockholm subway etc. We listed also all medical service, shopping centra, swimming halls and open air beaches. soccer fields, tennis courts, etc etc. The beautiful Botkyrka Golf Club was represented by a picture.

When some of the larger local companies saw this folder they wanted to pay for a larger printing in Swedish to be distributed to all offices in the larger Stockholm area and an English translation they could use in their PR contacts. This made a considerable impression on the now leading municipal councillors.

Our report finished with a suggestion to employ a Chief of Tourism who should be financed by a basic contribution to cover his wages and minor expenses. The major information projects should be financed by those who enjoyed a direct  commercial advantage.

THE BOTKYRKA TOURIST ASSOCIATION

At the same time we had decided to ask restaurants, excursion organisers, regional shopping centers etc whether they would be interested to join a tourist organisation to be founded by us (..with me as chairman..to structure the first activities).

The board of the association consisted further of Björn Sandberg, managing director of Hågelbyparken, as vicechairman, Bernhard Söderström, partowner of Taxi Kuriren and managing director of the Botkyrka Bus Company and many others involved in the tourist activities.

My political employment was only for 2/3 of full working time and 1/3 was with my own small company (Collings System) which became one of the first members. Thereafter two of the largest employers, Alfa Laval and Tumba Bruk, joined because they wanted to contribute to the spreading of positive information about Botkyrka.

We had very soon more than 100 company members and a few interested individuals. We had a very low yearly membership fee. When inviting a new member we indicated that we might approach them for further voluntary contributions but only if a project was of direct interest and advantage to them.

Other local tourist organisations in Sweden most often required a quite high yearly membership fee. This lead very soon to the question: what do we get for our money? and to the demise of the voluntary tourist organisations or to constant attempts at reorganisation. We did not have that problem.

HOW I BECAME CHIEF OF TOURISM

To my astonishment I was approached by the mayor and the municipal director with the question whether I would consider an offer to become Chief of Tourism. Of course, I had become quite tired of the local and regional political debate: if I saw the heading of a paper and then the name below I knew what was said without having to read it.

After a few days consideration of the proposal I said that I as a long time active politician could not consider to become a municipal employee but would they consider to finance the Botkyrka Tourist Association to pay my wages and some basic expenses? and provide central office space. The employment should be only for a five year period and only 2/3 part time so that I could look after my small company like I had been doing in my earlier political job.

Of course, my wages should be on the level of the municipal councillers! and the budget for the Tourist Association would each year increase in the wage part if the councillors wages increased and in the expenses part with the official living cost index counting from november of one year to october the next.

After some deliberation these conditions were approved and contracts between the Tourist Association and myself and between the Tourist Association and the municipality drawn up. They were unanimusly approved by the municipal parliament (which was the first time that such a decision was not followed by a number of no´s and reservations).

There was no condition that I had to leave active politics but I had always been critical if leading employees of the municipality had leading political appointments. From the day of my employment I did not visit the meetings of the municipal parliament or the Center Parties decision making boards. My reason was that my polical friends might have different ideas than I and I would have to fight for my views. It was better for everyone to have me neutralized. I kept, however, the job of auditor in one local party organisation.

CONSULTANT: MY SECOND ROLE

As Chief of Tourism I was employed by the Tourist Association. However, the Kommun Styrelse wanted sometimes to ask me directly to carry out certain tasks and the contract with the Tourist Association stipulated that I sometimes should, if possible, work directly for the Kommun Styrelse as consultant.

I believe this role as a consultant was suggested because I had a broad experience of the functioning of the municipal and regional authorities and becaause of my good contacts with the small business community of Botkyrka as shown by the speed the Tourist Association had over 100 members. This was not a miracle. I was one of the founding members of our local Rotary Club, introduced by the managing director of the Tumba Paper Mill, and later I was for several years auditor for the local small business association.

Another example of such a projekt started by me in my role of consultant was the Botkyrka Data Association.

See the appendix to this chapter. as I have to start to talk about tourims.

FIRST PROJECTS:
INFO AT THE E4 – AND PICTURE POSTCARDS

The first project to show the new Tourist Association was the info we put up near the trunk road from the continent to Stockholm.

The second project was to print a number (10) of picture postcards from Botkyrka. In order to get public opinion behind the project we asked all inhabitants in Botkyrka to send in their pictures which they thought had a chance to be selected by the jury.

We received many pictures which made the selection very difficult. We, the jury, made some mistakes: a picture could be very suggestive as a photo but was later found to be impossible as a postcard.

But we produced a large number of further postcards.  Here below are two examples.

These cards we sold at a rebate price to shops who in their turn sold them with profit. Even accounting for our flops the project financed itself.

HÃ¥gelby was a village of farms with roots fom the early viking times. LM Ericsson build here 1919 his Manor House. Now HÃ¥gelby is a conference center and folkpark with a popular restaurant. Foto: Joachim Colling

Grödinge in the Southern part of the municipality of Botkyrka is part of beautiful Södertörn offering diverse forms of recreation and can easily be reached from the more populated areas of the community. Foto: Hans Nelsäter and Bertil Dahlby

THE FIRST YOUTH HOSTEL IN BOTKYRKA

There was only a small hotel in Botkyrka and many visitors to our established businesses had to stay in other communities. At this time there was no market to build more hotels. What could be done?

One of the members of the board of the Botkyrka Tourist Association was a photgrapher for the Swedish Tourist Association (STF) which administrated the Youth Hostels of Sweden. He was also responsible for membership contacts. As membership was related to the use of the Youth Hostels this was a very large organisation. In Botkyrka and Salem there were more than 3000 members who often used Youth Hostels in other communities when travelling.

A first step was to start a section in Botkyrka and Salem among those 3000 members. There were more than 500 who wanted to be active locally. The first action was to contact the Kommun Styrelse and direct their attention to the fact that their 3000 members used hostels everywhere else and that our community also should provide a hostel.

The mayor, of course, had used Youth Hostels occasionally with his family and was positive. But at this time it was difficult to find a suitable building. There was, however, an historic building, the first elementary school in Botkyrka from 1849 used even today as a school.

It was decided to use the school during the summer as Youth Hostel and during the winter as a school. It was interesting that the demands for fire safety were more stringent for a hostel than for the pupils of the school.

The left picture is the entrance to the Youth Hostel and the right the breakfast room and kitchen.

Photos: Joachim Colling

The hostel became very popular - but the teachers did not like to have to move their things every summer. We soon found a new building at HÃ¥gelby and the Youth Hostel moved there to be open all year round and to be operated under the HÃ¥gelby administration. The following picture shows the Youth Hostel at HÃ¥gelby.

Many years afterward the mayor and I received the
Swedish Tourist Association's (STF) Honorary medal.  

SOME USES OF OUR MAIN FOLDER

As we had to finance each information project by sponsors we wanted to reuse material if that was effective. The first folder was produced in Swedish but I do not now remember the sponsor.

We reprinted the folder in different languages sponsored by different companies and kept it up to date under the following years.

Photo (first page): Monica Carlberg

Japanese:

The large Japanese company Panasonic had recently etablished its head office for Scandinavia in our community. They had many regular visits from Japan (like government officials and delegations, Asian Chamber of Commerce groups, their own people an so on).

Panasonic used the folder widely in their PR work abroad to show where they were in Sweden. The translation was made by a Japanese woman journalist from Sigtuna.

Arabic:

Many translations to Arabic in Europe are made in the poetic, highly literary classical Arabic. We employed a Maroccan translator who used the vernacular version of Arabic which is accepted all over the Arabic speaking world.

In Botkyrka lived by this time a large, originally Arabic speaking, group of the Syrian-Orthodox confession who were very often small tradesmen.

By this time the Bernadotte Royal Family had sold its secluded Manor House of Malmsjö by the Malm Lake in Grödinge to one of the richest men in Saudi Arabia.

But even more useful was the folder about Botkyrka for Tumba Bruk's PR abroad. Tumba had for many years (secretly) printed the Saudi paper money and it was felt to be useful that they could show where and how beautifully the Tumba Bruk was situated.

I hope to have given an idea of what we meant by project directed publications. We printed versions of the folder in English, German, Finnish.

Francophiles often complained why not French? and our reply was: give us a sponsor.

MONICA CARLBERG PRODUKTION:

Now the question arose: how to advertise current activities of interest to visitors. The Culture and Leisure Activities Committee for many years had been preparing a monthly list (on yellow paper with black printing? well done but not very inspiring). This was distributed to all households in Botkyrka. The list was very comprehensive and the activities of the many clubs and assoiations in Botkyrka were thus publicised. It would have been stupid to duplicate and to try to compete. How could we improve this material?

At this time Monica Carlberg who had been responsible for information at the Culture and Leisure Activities Committee planned to establish her own production company in order to be free to work more creatively. Botkyrka Turistassociation was glad to work together with her and much of our printed material was produced by her.

This is Monica:   

With very little additional money this yellow monthly list could be made up as a colourful comprehensive journal for the summer month from May to September. When we suggested this, the idea was immediately approved and a minor increase of funds was appropriated. Additionals funds came from advertising by more commercial sponsors.

The journal was distributed first to all households in Botkyrka and to households in the neighbouring Salem, Södertälje and Huddinge and finally commercial interests financed a distribution to all offices (100.000) in the Greater Stockholm area. Our local activities were obviously of interest in a larger region and the companies felt that the journal reached prospective employees. This was carried out in the same way all the coming years. It is another example of how to use self financing projects and utilize other, more qualified personnel.

MAPS TO FINANCE OUR STUDY TRIPS

During an earlier yearly meeting of our Botkyrka Tourist Association I mentioned that we all were amateurs in this field of tourism and we learn as we go. From the floor it was then suggested that we should try to learn more systematically. After a discussion we decided to visit important and sucessful tourist organisations abroad and learn from them. According to the project idea I had to find the financing for this. Our principle was that we could not use our municipal budget for this.

Thus our company members were prepared to finance a map of Botkyrka with advertisements, whith all places of interest for visitors and of course including their ads. We had about 100 company members because we had very low yearly membership costs. When inviting a new member we had already indicated that we would ask instead for larger, voluntary contributions if a project was of direct interest and advantage to them.

Photo (first pages): Monica Carlberg

Other tourist organisations in Sweden most often required a quite high general yearly contribution. This led usually very soon to the question: what do we get for our money? and to the demise of the voluntary tourist organisation or to constant reorganisations. We did not have that problem.

I do  no remember how I got in contact with a German cartographer who had his studio on an island in the Lake Mälaren. He put together (at very low costs) the advertisements and the maps which we received free of charge from the municipal engineers. This project gave us a yearly surplus to finance our yearly study trip.

This map was folded together to the same size as our first folder and which the advertising companies helped to distribute.

Participants in the study trips were our board (representing among others a local taxi and bus company, a local restaurant, a Folkets Park, the municipal Culture and Leisure Committee,etc). Advertisers and our family members could participate if they paid the costs. Sometimes we invited tourist personnell (one) from one or the other neighbouring municipality or a leading representative from a company in the field of tourism in a neighbouring municipality. After the trip we printed a report to all our members which showed that we were on the right and professional road with our work.

Naturally we used these occasions to beat the drums for Botkyrka.

Our study trips went to Oslo, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Berlin (tourism exhibition) and Ã…land. We went to Tallin in Estland only 3 days after some Russian units attacked the local radio station. But Estlands tourist organisations were able to present their planned future work to us in the shadow of barricades around their parliament.

After my 5 year contract was nearing its end I was 62 years old and only only 3 years away from my retirement at the age of 65. My contracts were prolonged for this period of 3 years. This prolongation did not harm our touristic information development but did not improve it - it was more a period of administration and consolidation.

It is my definite opinion that an appointment for 5 years is the limit for a job that requires creative imagination and initiative. Such a job should be well paid but it is difficult to find the right person because it is difficult to know how a new appointee will work out. The people who appointed me for the first 5 years took a real chance. How well I did work out only they can answer. It must be similar for a company of fashion design to employ a new top designer.

I left, however, at the age of 65 as a honorary member of the Botkyrka Tourist Association.

BJÖRN SANDBERG IN MEMORIAM

My choice as sucessor was our vice president, Björn Sandberg, who knew the municipal administration and our commercial enterprises very well.

Photo: Joachim Colling

His administrative abilities and his creative flair was well documented as managing director of the Hågelby Estates Folkets Hus. My suggestion was accepted, after some lobbying (as Björn was known to be politically a social democrate, though not active locally, and we had a conservative majority at that time).

After beeing active for half of his period he fell asleep sitting in front of a TV and did not wake up having had a heart attack. I am writing this sitting on my bed in a hospital beeing 81 years old, waiting for a major operation, and am reflecting on the vagaries of fate.

APPENDIX I: THE BOTKYRKA DATA ASSOCIATION

One of the projects outside the Tourist Association was the Data Association and two regional exhibitions.

The background for the computer interest was that I had approved the purchase of a large (and heavy) experimental plotter from the Norwegian weapon factory Kongsberg for our real estate and planning department. We discovered that there were no programs for many of our basic drawing needs and our engineers had to make our own steering programs in Basic (on tapes). This established a close working contact with the national department for cartography who were also experimenting and some of our engineers were «bought» by other municipalities. We in Botkyrka were among the pioneers.

Our gymnasium at Tumba had also started computer training. But there were hardly any competent teachers. We sent two pupils from the final classes to participate in special seminars and classes at the Royal Techical University of Stockholm, and they in turn taught their own classes and their teachers. This was quite early in the mid 1970's.

About that time large companies in Botkyrka had started to use cad/cam. Alfa Laval for example started to buy the same type of computer controlled machines for their factories all over the world. The idea was to make drawings by computers and send these drawings with their programs for the machines to all factories concerned.

Our idea was to propagate for the use of cad/cam among the smaller companies in Botkyrka and thus hope for a competitive advantage for local business. At this time we started the Botkyrka Data Association to be the vehicle for our planned activities.

The members were the municipal experts, the large companies experts and quite a few smaller consultants. One, just to give an example was a refugee, professor of mathematics from Chile, who could troubleshoot the huge central Swedish government and bank computers when their own experts failed by fixing the computers on the lowest binary level.

Anyhow, we decided to arrange an exhibition, promoting cad/cam. The mayor of Botkyrka supported this activity directed towards our local small business. We were allowed to use the ground floor of the town hall for the exhibition as well as the nearby aula of the gymnasium for our seminars.

At this time there were as yet no important computer exhibitions at Stockholm yet and we could obtain many international experts to address our seminars (free of charge). This was a program of such interest that we sent invitations to all offices in the larger Stockholm area with reply coupons to book the different lectures. Most were fully booked. This was a novelty then, but is very common with exhibitions now.

Our main aim was, of course, to make Botkyrka known as an attractive place to establish small businesses, and at the same time introduce modern methods locally.

We arranged another exhibition with seminars the next year at the Folkets Hus of Hallunda in northern Botkyrka, also sucessful though  not as much as the previous.

After this time large, nationwide enterprises participated at the now established nationwide yearly exhibitions and our local initiative was no longer needed. Even our local, Data Association was dissolved.

This is just an example how the Botkyrka Tourist Association could be used to make Botkyrka better known.

APPENDIX II: THE IMMIGRANT INSTITUTE AND MUSEUM

Another example of my consulting job was the draft for an answer to a motion to create an immigrants museum in Botkyrka. The chairman of the local Socialdemocratic Party, Sture Hollman, had a suggestion for such a museum.

I was not asked at first, but my wife Teje because she was a curator at the Nordic Museum.

However, she had tried to collect items from immigrants for the Nordic Museum but found that it was almost impossible to get a meaningful collection. She suggested therefore that primarily there should not be a museum but an institute to carry out scientific research concerning immigrants in Botkyrka and to collect items connected to this research. Thus a small museum could be build up slowly and meaningfully.

At that point I got more involved. As the Institute for Building Documention at Hagelby, of which I had been the technical secretary, was based upon a foundation I suggested that the municipality should establish a foundation as the basis for such an institute. There is no reason to  explain all back and forth arguments and drafts for such an institute.

At the end of the 60th Teje and I had been elected to the municipal parliament and having discovered that the railway station manager at Tumba was one of the first Nobel peace price holders (1908), but was totally forgotten locally and nationally, we put forward a motion to call a street or park at Tumba  with his name.

It was a good opportunity to revive his name because the new institute should somehow have a link to an international and peace motivation. In the preamble of the charter we introduced therefore "for the memory of the Nobel Peace Price Holder Klas Pontus Arnoldson" which was accepted.

Teje's ethnology professor Mats Rehnberg, Matyas Szabo, an immigrant from Hungary, and other staff of the Stockholm University's Ethnological Institute affiliated to the Nordic Museum, supported the academic aspirations of the new foundation by helping to draft the scientific purpose and by placing a senior research fellow there. 

The Institute was placed at the Fittja Manor House in a part of Botkyrka with a predominantly first generation immigrant population. Its full name was «Foundation Swedens Immigrant Institute and Museum for Peace and International Understanding in Memory of Klas Pontus Arnoldson» or short «Swedens Immigrant Institute and Museum».

APPENDIX III: THE DEPARTMENT CHIEFS  CONFERENCE

As consultant I was invited to participate in the monthly one day conferences of the department heads for all  municipal departments. I remember especially two activities of this group.

One was a two day role-playing where one part played the role of inhabitants with their different problems and the other part tried to find solutions. This role-playing was monitored by a commercial management consultant company. One result was the aim to offer the possibility of contact with only one person to solve multiple problems where people before had to contact the different departments – which often was confusing and time consuming.

The other was a suggestion from the social service to offer a guaranty to get a daycare (kindergarten) place within three month. Botkyrka was the first community to give such a guaranty. This was possible by adjusting the number of available places continuously, closing down places where the demand decreased and opening others where the demand increased. This seems to be obviously sensible but was not practised before because the demands of the personnel for their own continuity came first and the need of the children second.

I also remember the training course in meditation for all the department heads which was ended with a three day conference of more or less continious meditation. The result was a much better personal contact between everybody where before often territorial disputes were common.

My personal experience and thoughts were the following. The mantra which facilitates meditation by suppressing all the thoughts which usually jump around the brain does not need to  be the one handed down by the teacher, But the mantra feels stronger if you know that the tradition had been passed on by a kind of apostolic succession from generation to generation maybe for more than a thousand years.

I had the feeling that the seemingly reduced activities of the brain invite a kind of adjusting and self healing. I came to believe, for example, that the drugs given to mental patients work mostly by their strong sopoforic effects and that the healing process is more or less an unconscious self healing. The same, I believe, is valid for psychoanalytic treatment which is based upon a terapeutic relaxation of the brain (on the couch) and the healing process is also a kind of self healing supported by some (any) kind of (rational?) explanation. Even schamanic trance seems to work in the same way. Of course, I do not know if I am right. But much in life is based upon beliefs and not exact knowledge

7
AN OPERA AMATEUR
- BUT NO EXPERT

Table of Contents

MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF THE OPERA SCHOOL

TURMOIL AT THE OPERA SCHOOL

KERSTIN MEYER BECAME THE NEW RECTOR

FOS - FRIENDS OF THE OPERA SCHOOL

AN HONORABLE END TO AN ANECDOTE

HOW I BECAME A MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF THE OPERA SCHOOL OF STOCKHOLM

It was the custom within the Center group of the regional parliament (landsting) to give everyone some secondary task. I was asked whether I accepted an appointment to the undercommittee for the disabled. I said yes, but after a few days the secretariate called and said the members of this undercommittee also had to be in the Social Service Committee which made me inelegible.

There was, however, an appointment open on the board of the Opera  School, part of the Stockholm University (working closely with the Stockholm Opera). Would I consider this opening? I said yes and was proposed to the national government which appointed me together with a second political choice, a socialdemocrate, by chance also from Botkyrka, Arne Bill the wellknown jazz trumpet player and band leader. His mother in-law worked at home for the Tumba Paper Mill to make the folders for my filing system (Collings System) which illustrates why Arne and I could easily work together even if we did not belong to the same political party.

From the disabled to opera singers? They did not even know that I was very interested to listen to Opera music and went to the Stockholm Opera every month during my first stay in Sweden (getting the cheapest seats under the roof). I liked to listen even if I could not hold a tune myself. But they knew that I could be diplomatic if needed.

This board of the high school consisted mainly of professionals from the opera world appointed by the government on suggestion from various professional organisations. The board consisted thus of famous opera singers, directors, conductors, dancers, students (I am not namedropping because these names have no bearing on my own story) and had lastly us two "political" appointees. Our roll was to keep contact with the department of culture and other involved public parties. But not  to try to influence details of the  teaching. The government appointed the rector on recommendation from the board.

This must have been the smallest independent university faculty in the world. There were about 32 students, 32 teachers (every student could keep his personal singing teacher) and an extended board of almost 32.

TURMOIL AT THE OPERA SCHOOL

The university building was a beautiful villa, neighbour to the Turkish and British embassies and opposite to the huge American embassy. To the South the garden had an open view on the waters connecting the Lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea.

Arne Bill and I came to the board while a period of turmoil had started at the school. The rector according to the allegations was not impartial and several students felt persecuted. There were more accusations of a personal character but the details do not have any bearing on my  story.

Two parent families complained formally to the prime minister who tranferred the complaints to the Chancellor for all Universities. The Chancellor wanted to get his  own independent opinion and started a more detailed investigation than had ever been done before, for this the smallest of schools.

He called the members of the board two by two for detailed interviews in the presence of his legal advisor and secretary. Likewise were called representatives for the students and teachers. I don´t think that he ever before had to take notice even of school janitor´s drinking habits. This special attention was probably because of the somewhat glamorous character of the school and its students and that the government was indirectly involved.

To show you that Sweden is a small, neighbourly country I´ll only mention that the secretary of the Chancellor was the wife of a Rotary brother of our Tumba Club and that she later kept contact with the school through Inner Wheel. The findings of the investigation were also Swedish style.

The Chancellor found that the allegations, accusations and general conditions did not permit him to rule for a formal discharge of the rector without much legal hassle, but as it was the boards responsibility to create better conditions, he could only mean to get a new rector after the present incubent's period was over.

This was clearly a task for the political board members because some of the professionals were long time collegues of the rector and  had difficulties to act decisivly. But the student board members were active because the complaints directly affected their studies and life. The students main representative (a very small but tough) girl voted, after hearing all students, for a new rector after the present period.

Arne  Bill and I  suggested that the appointment of a rector for the coming period should be advertised. For these ads we got a majority vote without to much problems because it was not quite openly said by us that there should be a new rector.  But the present rector had two heart attacks, real or pretended, at these sessions.

KERSTIN MEYER BECAME RECTOR

Kerstin Meyer, the worldfamous singer and opera actor (mezzosoprano) had after a throat operation to stop singing. She was at this time conducting master classes in Europe. She was approached to seek the job as rector which she at first was quite unwilling to do.

The board finally convinced her and was unanimously recommending her to the national government. After some deliberation and Arne Bills efforts to convince his political friends in the government to not prolong the appointment of the critisized rector she was appointed  rector for the Opera School.

One of her first popular decisions was to call the school "Opera School" again, after a period of unclear aims - for some years it was  called the "Musicdramatic School" which was not liked by the budding opera singers.

She also got the government to fund two professors for the school, one for indepth study with the students of the opera repertoir and one for the training of opera directors.

But with such internal work at the school I was not involved, of course. Though I followed the teaching with great interest. For example I could listen in to master classes by visiting "celebrities" or follow the teaching by the former conductors Curt Bendix (Royal Conductor) and Joseph Tjeck. Whenever I entered their rooms both stopped and told me and the students all about the good times in Berlin, Vienna and Prague where they worked before Hitler.

Kerstin Meyer wanted to open up the school to an interested public and on one Sunday a month the doors of the school were opened for interested (even passerbys) to listen to presentations by the students.

FOS - FRIENDS OF THE OPERA SCHOOL

At this time Arne and I discussed the forming of an Association of Friends of the Opera School to give these Sunday concerts a more directly interested audience. There was an Association of Friends of the Stockholm Opera and there were many who were interested to follow the development of the young students of whom many were to be the coming stars.

This group of friends grew considerably into a well organized organisation with me as chairman and Arne as vicechairman. Thus the school was no longer isolated from the broader public.  Kerstin Meyers own national and international network was, of course,  building up international contacts on the more professional level for the school.

One of the quite regular visitors to the Sunday concerts was the British ambassador (the embassy being a neighbor). He often took along visiting dignitaries. An interesting tidbit was the fact that the library where the concerts were held was the operating center for British intelligence during the war when the building was part of the embassy.

By the way the ambassador was also a writer of detective and spy novels he told me, of course, under a pseudonym.

One of the major events organized by the friends was the 50h birthday anniversary of Kerstin Meyer held at the Oscars Theater which was freely let for the event by the Sandrew company. Many friends of Kerstin, singers, musicians and backstage personnel among others contributed their efforts freely to make this celebration a great artistic and financial success.

The income from this evening was to become the ground plate for a "Kerstin Meyers Scholarship Foundation" through which Kerstin could reward and stimulate promising students, especially mezzo sopranos, of course.

Much of the sucessful organising effort for this evening was done by a very energetic couple being members of the board of the FOS. However, it is often the case that energetic laymen have difficulties to cooperate in a group and the other board members finally got rid of them. I found that I could much more easily appreciate and tolerate "difficult" board members as I had to do so often in my political work.

SOME DIPLOMATIC CONTACTS

Kerstin Meyer had received a high order from the British government for her world wide work to spread modern British music. Therefore she held a reception at her home in Uppsala to which Teje and I were invited. There I came to speak with the ambassador from Nigeria. I described the multicultural character of our schools and she expressed a desire to see them. I invited her.

After a few days she called and asked if she could take along also the ambassadors from Zambia and Zimbave, both women. Of course, this was easily arranged and we finished with a round trip through our countryside and a sumptious lunch at HÃ¥gelby.

Some months later Teje and I were invited to a dinner at the privata residence of Nigerias ambassador at Lidirngö. This dinner was arranged to express her thanks to the Nobel Foundation as the literature prices had gone to Nigeria and she wanted to thank the people from the Nobel Foundation for the reception they gave to this years winner.

In this small but illustrious company we were included. I was sitting besides the director of the Nobel Foundation and remember mostly that he told me that he went to work and home everyday by bicycle and sometimes even walked the long way Djursholm to the center of Stockholm and that he used his spare time to write books. Later he came to our Rotary club to speak about his books.

AN HONORABLE END TO AN ANECDOTE

I had to reduce my outside engagements because of health problems and asked to be excused from my responsibility in the FOS and to leave the chairmanship to a new leading personality. 

The board of the FOS therefore invited Teje and me to a goodby dinner at the Opera Källaren. On this occasion Kerstin Meyer and I were elected honorary members for our lifetimes. To our great surprise a small group of students came and sang for us at our table. We enjoyed this surprise very much – as much as did the many other dinner guests in the great hall. After my time very able and energetic people were elected to chair the FOS. The most recent ones were themselves well known opera singers. The school has now moved to new quarters, as part of the university campus North of Stockholm, and the FOS lives vigerously under new chairmen.

THE OTHER COLLING'S

Table of Contents

GENEALOGY

WHAT DOES THE NAME COLLING MEAN?

COLLINGS IN SWEDEN

COLLINGS IN GERMANY

COLLINGS IN BRAZILE

COLLINGS IN USA

COLLINGS FROM THE UK IN CANADA AND THE USA

THE COLLING COW

THE COLLING MAILING LIST AT ROOTSWEB

THE WAXWEILER MEETING OF COLLINGS

GENEALOGY

At first I thought I was the only Colling in Sweden. Then I discovered there was an Olympic gold medal holder in the field of Gymnastics with the name, my name? But with the advent of the internet I soon found that there were many more and I was not so unique.

With my retirement I also became interested in Genealogy. I believe that many seniors may be interested not so much in my story but in their own family background - and maybe become stimulated to study their own.

When I started there was not the gigantgic amount of homepages to search as today. Under the town of Botkyrka there were mostly  references to my own homepage even without asking for Colling. Now my name scarcely comes up any longer.

WHAT DOES THE NAME COLLING MEAN?

The Anglo-Saxon meaning of the ending «ing» is the offspring of or coming from and «col» can be Indo-European meaning a hill or dark forest. Some believe that col can be even pre Indo-European.

The Irish Collings go often back to the clan O'Coillean which means in the Celtic law a warrior or foreigner and seemed to have been anglocized to Collin(g).

Also  from the Greek name Nicholas, victorious warrier, derive names like Cole or Collin and many other variations.

The name Colling derives thus from diverse sources. Apparently the name has been adopted by many families without thinking what it originally meant.

COLLINGS IN SWEDEN

As most people do I started with one of the earlier search maschines to look for my name, Colling. The first result was an article by the Military History Museum about a midshipman Colling who directed the gunfire from the kings command ship towards the Finnish line of warships when the occasion arose, but without having been given the explicit order. This apparently decided the battle of Hoegland more or less in Swedish favour. The article said that it was, of course, represented as the kings (Gustav III) achievement.

The famous poet, musician and songwriter Bellman also from Gustav III times speaks of a blind flute virsuoso called Colling. There even were some legal academics at the University of Uppsala.

There seem to be at least three different Colling lines in Sweden.

Two started with  immigrants who came to Sweden as skilled craftmen (smiths) from the Benelux area (Vallonia). The family name was soon simplified from Collinet to Colling.

There were many more families, skilled labour immigrants, who became the human backbone for the growing Swedish metalworking industries. The decendants call themselves Vallonians in Sweden and almost  every Swedish family feels related to these earlier Vallonian immigrants.

The third line can be followed to a conscripted soldier who was given the name Colling by his commanding officer - there were too many Svensson already in the army.

This convinced me that it would be interesting to look at some families with the name of Colling to better understand migration on a worldwide scale.

COLLINGS IN GERMANY

I started with my own family. The Family comes from the Saarland between Germany and France. In the 17th century all church books were destroyed by fire in one or the other local border war. One Colling could be born with his first name JEAN and he died as JOHANNES -  or vice versa. One cannot go further back to trace this line.

But there are still Collings from this line in the border region betwen Germany and France. I happened to come to Sweden and my sister and brother stayed in Germany. One son of my sister married a Columbian building engineer but  they live in Germany. My brothers only daughter is married and lives in Bavaria which for a Prussian is a kind of foreign environment.

Teje and I we have no children and as the Catholic priest Hubert Colling of Waxweiler a cousin of mine, not having children himself, said to me there are too many people on earth anyhow. But there are still lots of other Collings around.

On the border between Germany and Luxembourg there is a river and on the German side is the town of Dasburg the origin of one of the Colling families widely spread in the USA, and on the Luxembourg side there is the town of Vianden, the origin of a Colling family spread widely in Brazile. Before tracing some of the English or British Collings I want to write about these two families.

There are some indications that there might have been a connection between these families. But my interest is more in the demographic development by emigration and immigration than bloodlines. According to the latest DNA researches we all are anyhow related to one small group of African emigrants passing from Africa to Yemen - one can call them Eve and Adam but they did not come from a paradise. However, one can call them just as well the first Collings or the first Anderssons. We are all related.

COLLINGS IN BRAZILE

To Brazile went first one farmer from Vianden in Luxembourg, who was quite poor, but after a few years he was able to arrange for his true love from Germany to join him. This Colling family grew in the land outside Porto Allegre.

I noticed that every generation had 10 to 12 children and conditions were such that most survived. I also noticed that the women usually outlived their husbands by many years. This means that the standard of living must have been quite good and also that the hygiene on the countryside must have been better than in Europe where the hygienic reforms of Semmelweis only slowly reduced the deathrate of childbearing women.

When the family association of the Collings in Brazile now has their large meetings there appear around a thousand persons including many doctors, lawyers, judges and businessmen - and the late Archbishop Colling was their president until his death - all illustrating an upward social mobility.

COLLINGS IN THE USA

To the USA emigrated two young brothers Colling, Henry and Nicolas,  from Dasburg to escape military conscription like many others around the time of the political turmoils of the 1848's. 6 years later their father and the rest of the family followed on the sailing ship Raleigh. I had documented all their offspring and listed the families on the Internet. This family had a meeting 1985 in Nebrasca with more than 350 participants.

I met Jerry Colling, a retired medical doctor, and his wife, both very much interested in genealogy, at the Waxweiler Colling Meeting. But more about Waxweiler at a place of its own.

One of their sons was an aeronautical researcher who later worked for the Cessna Airplane Company. I found a research paper from him on the Internet long before I knew of the connection to this Colling line. I only name him because there was another Colling in New Zealand with family roots in the UK who operated for some time a small air line and they came to know about one another through my mailing list.

At that time I published namely on my homepage a list of all Collings I had contact with and gave their background and email adresses. All this, of course before Facebook. Many Collings with common interests thus established contact with one another. 

COLLINGS FROM THE UK IN CANADA AND THE USA

Another group of Collings are the descendents after Cuthbert Colling from Durham county who went to Canada and sucessfully started farming there. During the civil war in the USA he was able to buy a large forested area there near the Canadian border.

His three sons later devided the land among themselves and started farming. One of them became a banker and justice of peace. He incoporated the town of Colling with its own railway station. One of the decendants is now a professor at a university. His sister provided much of the information.

 Cuthbert's farm in Durham

Most Collings who have their roots in Northern England believe that they are related to the Colling brothers who bred the famous Colling shorthorn cow and I want to use a picture of both, cow and brothers.

The cow I publish with permission from the Korean Diary Departments Virtual Cattle Ranch isn't this an example of international fame of the Colling Cow?

THE COLLING MAILING LIST AT ROOTSWEB

As I had listed  family lines of some Collings on the Internet I was often contacted by some or the other relative - but usually could not help. I sent them to the mailing list «Colling at Rootsweb» which I had started and of which I am still the listowner and moderator. There was often someone who could help. (Only the subscribers to the list can send emails to members.)

One remarkable happening on the list was the story of the «Baby Colling». In one of military airfields in the South of the US there was a very young couple who had a baby girl they had to give away for adoption. There was no documentation other than the girl was listed under the name Baby Colling.

After some time father and mother could marry and they had more children. One of their friends heard of our list and asked for help to find out more because the whole family was ancious to find the girl. 

A bit later the halfsister of the adopted Baby Colling contacted the list on her sisters behalf because her sister, now in her teens, had also become ancious to find her roots. We could unite both families.

THE WAXWEILER MEETING OF THE COLLINGS

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My  cousin Hubert Colling, grandson of one of my fathers brothers, is a priest in the Eifel mountains near Dasburg and Vianden and thus a natural link between the Colling families. During the year 1995 he arranged a meeting lasting several days. There were around 500 participants. About 160 Collings from Brazile came by an own chartered airplane. From the USA came among others Jerry Colling with  family, Jerry being a medical doctor and genealogist.

When we entered Waxweiler by car we were greeted by a festive banner over the street saying «The Bitsburg Brewery greets all the Collings». For quite a long time we tried to drink Bitsburg Beer wherever we could find it - by the way it also tastes very well.

SOME OF OUR TRAVELS ...

This collection of anecdotes from my more active time could be added to partly by giving more details in every chapter and by relating of what happened afterwards.

The "retirement" time is filled with so many activities that more than once one exclaimed: "How did I find the time to do all before?"

One explanation is certainly that one does everything very slowly nowadays.

At 82 yeas of age I am the chairman of our housing cooperative, which is easy because of the good help from other younger board members. In my Rotary Club I am an honorary member which means that I only have to  attend the meetings with topics of special interest to me.

Teje and I  have sold our cars and we use the taxi service for disabled persons. For shorter trips we both have electric three wheel scooters visiting nearby cafes, shopping malls and public services.

Our Eloped Scooter

One topic of conversation has become, not the weather, but all ailments, operations and such. But this I do not want to inflict upon the reader - even if it could be an interesting tale.

However, Teje and I were traveling earlier quite a lot by car, with touring agencies and with our house car. This is in a way another story but not so unique. We shall write about it on the internet for those few who might be interested.

With our housecar on Gotland