dormouse1953

I'm on a train going from Berlin to Prague and the train has just gone through Losovice. Looking for that on the map, I realise I'm going past Terezin.

 I subscribe to Sky Cinema and they show an interesting range of foreign language films.  The other night I was browsing through  the channels and discovered they were showing a Norwegian film called The King's Choice (Kongens Nei).  When I saw the subject of the film I was intrigued.

I like reading histories, and I get interested in the odd bits of foreign history that are not taught in British schools.  This film was about the German invasion of Norway in 1940.

The film centres around the four days at the start of the invasion in April that year, but has a prelude to give some background.  In 1905, Norway separated from Sweden and the Norwegians had a referendum and asked Prince Carl of Denmark to be their king.  He became Haakon VII.  His role was largely ceremonial.  This prelude is done as a series of captions intercut with old newsreel footage: the King arriving in Christiania (as Oslo was then called), opening parliament, his wife's funeral.

When Germany starts to invade, shore batteries sink two German warships which gives the government enough time to evacuate along with the royal family.  When the Germans take Oslo, Quisling declares himself head of the government in the absence of the elected government.  Quisling is supported by Hitler, but not liked by the people.

Curt Bräuer, the German minister in Oslo, travels north on Hitler's orders to meet with the king in a secret location to get him to accept a deal.  Bräuer knows that the king won't accept Quisling and tries to soft pedal on that, but the king says all decisions are up to his cabinet.  After Bräuer leaves, he makes an address in which he states that if the cabinet do accede to the German demands, he can understand why they would, but he and his entire house would feel it necessary to abdicate.  The war continues and the king has to flee into the woods when the hotel he is staying at is bombed in an air raid.

That's basically the end of the film.  More captions tell that after a couple of months further fighting, the king was forced to flee to England, where he was the rallying point for the resistance.  There's an epilogue set in a room in London in 1945 when he's preparing to return where his son and grandson come to see him.  (The grandson is the current King Harald V who is playing host to two members of the British royal family at the moment.)

The two star performances in the film are Jesper Christensen as the king and Karl Markovics as Bräuer.  The king apparently had back problems and is often seen curled up in pain.  Christensen has a pained expression throughout, only relieved when playing with his grandchildren, and always seems to be trying to work out what the correct thing is to do.  Conversely, Bräuer comes across as having good intentions but ineffectual.  He is seen slapping his wife in a moment of anger.

The final captions give some more information about characters.  Bräuer was recalled by Hitler just a few days after his meeting with the king.  He went into the army and spent nine years in a Soviet prison camp.

There is a minor character called Fredrik Seeberg, a green private wounded trying to hold back the German advance.  The captions say he survived his wounds and fought in the Continuation War.  It doesn't say on which side, though: with Finland and Germany or with the Soviet Union.

About twenty years ago I was in Oslo for a convention and afterwards I visited the Norwegian Resistance Museum, well worth a visit.  Norway has the distinction of being the only occupied country in WWII that was not liberated by the Allies.  On VE Day, at a pre-arranged signal, the Resistance came out of hiding and accepted the German surrender.  There's a picture of this.  The Resistance, all bearded men in parkas, look like a group of university dons out for a Sunday hike.

I'm reading a history of the War of 1812 at the moment, by Jon Latimer, published in 2007. At one point he refers to a naval encounter that took place "off Cape Canaveral (now Cape Kennedy)."

Except that its name was changed back in 1973. I suppose that saying a historian is living in the past is a bit of a cheap shot.

About this time of year I take down from my bookshelves a book I read a long time ago and re-read it, a different book each year.  This year I have decided upon Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess.  It is the centenary of his birth in February.

I bought the Penguin paperback edition not long after it came out in the early eighties and I think I read it in 1985.  As I started reading it last night, a piece of paper fell out.  I'm often leaving till receipts in books.  Waterstone's receipts fade to white very quickly, I've found.  This however was an ATM receipt.  And not from 1985 but from 2005.  (I don't think I even had an ATM card in 1985.)  Apparently, I used an ATM in High Holborn on 16th April, 2005, withdrawing £50.

I was so intrigued I went and checked my diary for that day.  I was indeed London, it was the day of the Science Fiction Foundation AGM.  Also that night I watched a documentary on television about the General Slocum disaster and that may have been the reason I looked at Earthly Powers that day.

The General Slocum was a steamship that was chartered for a church excursion along the East River in New York City on June 15th, 1904.  It caught fire, the life belts and safety equipent didn't work and over a thousand people lost their lives, the worst loss of life in a single disaster in New York City in the whole of the twentieth century.  I first heard about this event as the composer Charles Ives wrote a tone poem about it.  I've never heard it as it's rarely performed and never been recorded but he re-worked the explosion into the 4th of July movement of his Holidays Symphony.

June 16th, 1904 was the date on which James Joyce's Ulysses was set and the news reached the Dublin newspapers that day.  Characters refer to it.

Now, Kenneth Toomey, the narrator of Earth Powers, claims to have had a sexual encounter in a Dublin hotel room that day with the Irish poet George Russell, at exactly the time that Russell is supposedly discussing Shakespeare with Stephen Dedalus at the National Library in Ulysses.  I'm fairly sure that when mentioning that he was in Dublin that day, Toomey goes on to mention other events from Ulysses, including the headlines about the General Slocum.  So I suppose that is why I was looking at Earthly Powers that day in 2005.  No idea why I left the ATM receipt in it, though.

When I  was at the history museum  in  Seattle on Sunday, I overheard one of the guides tell some visitors that the Seattle World's Fair of 1962 (for which the  Space Needle was built) was the first World's Fair after WWII.

One of my father's cousins married a a Belgian woman and I remember getting a postcard when I was young showing the Atomium outside Brussels.  It's still there - I see it every time I take a train north out of Brussels.  I had at the back of my mind the idea that it was built for a World's Fair and  quick check on Wikipedia confirmed that there was a World's Fair in Brussels in 1958.  There is a complete list of officially recognised World's Fairs there, starting with the Great Exhibition of1851 in London.  Curiously, the Festival of Britain in 1951 isn't on the list and Brussels was the first after WWII.

I always find this song chilling.

Today is the 150th anniversary of Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomatox Court House.

I know there are people who find the procedures of the WSFS business meetings at Worldcons hard to follow.  It could be worse.  Something else I've discovered from Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire is how they did things in the old days.

In 438, the new set of Roman laws, the Codex Theodosianus, was presented to the Roman senate.  As Heather points out, minutes of such meetings have not usually survived, but on this occasion the minutes were incorporated into the publication of the Codex itself and one copy of this from the 11th century still exists.

After massed acclaim for the current emperors (there were two at the time), reminiscent of the rounds of applause at meetings of the Soviet Union communist party, the assembled senators had to proclaim, "We give thanks for this regulation of Yours" - 23 times.  Then "You have removed the ambiguities of the imperial constitutions."  This was also repeated 23 times.  "Pious emperors thus wisely plan" - 26 times.  There followed nine further statements about keeping copies of these laws and the like, no statement repeated less that ten times.

So, the Murdoch Mysteries returned to UK TV last night and the first episode involved a maiden voyage of a boat that owed a little to the film Titanic.  I was curious as to when it was set.

In the very first scene, someone says, "Happy Victoria Day", to which someone else replies "God save the king".  Now, Victoria Day is apparently a Canadian holiday celebrated on Queen Victoria's birthday in May, and came to prominence after the queen's death in January, 1901.  There was some indication that this was the first celebration after her death, and other chronology of the series would tend to agree with that.  The first season was set in 1895 and this is the seventh season, so May 1901 would be right.  (The fifth season ended with the celebration of New Year 1900, the only episode I think set in winter.)

However, the boat was called the SS Keewatin.  There was such a boat on the Canadian lakes, but it wasn't launched until 1907.  The boat on the show sank at the end (told you it was a bit like Titanic), so it was presumably not the same boat.

A side plot involved someone called Annie Taylor visiting Toronto.  She went over Niagara Falls in a barrel on her 63rd birthday and this was mentioned as having already happened.  According to Wikipedia, that didn't happen till October 1901.

The Keewatin had wireless telegraphy on board, which is just about possible in 1901.  (But would they have a black radio operator at that time?)

Still a fun show, though.

This morning there was hazy cloud.  It was still warm.  Not only that, it was humid.  I again tried walking up into the hills and saw some picturesque Austrian houses.  As I headed back into town around lunchtime, it was clouding up and there was the occasional gust of cold wind.  I guessed what was coming.

I went round the Salzburg museum, which had an interesting exhibit about the myth of Salzburg.  Up till the Napoleonic Wars, Salzburg and the surrounding area was an independent country, ruled by the Prince Archbishop, one of whom was the employer that famously gave Mozart grief.  But he was stripped of his ruling powers in 1803, Salzburg became an Electorate, part of Bavaria, and eventually part of Austria in 1816.  (As a Roman Catholic Archbishop, he was presumably not an hereditary ruler, although Archbishop Wolf Dietrich Raitenau did father 15 children with Salome Alt, for whom he built the Mirabell palace.)

After 1816, the area went into economic depression and Salzburg re-invented itself as a tourist centre, which is what it is to this day.

So, after this history lesson it was time to eat, and as I sat in an outside restaurant, the sky began to darken and you could hear thunder.  I had finished my meal and just finished my beer when it began to rain.  I was under an awning, so I was OK, but understandably, the staff didn't want to keep serving in the rain, despite American tourists insisting they wanted to be served under the awning.  They let me go inside and have a coffee before I settled the bill and then dashed back to my hotel.

Back to Munich in the morning.