Swedish News:

Azerbaijan won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest – congratulations Sweden! Birgitta Trotzig dead. Silvia’s investigation.  

• Azerbaijan won – congratulations Sweden!
  Azerbaijan is the winner in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which took place in Düsseldorf, Germany. But with Swedes as songwriters behind the winning song “Running scared”, and with Swedish choreography and Swedish backing vocalists – can’t we at least claim part of the victory? “We were part of winning the Eurovision!” Jessica Marberger, one of the Swedish backing singers, said after the win. Swede Rennie Mirro had made the choreography and Sandra Bjurman and Stefan Örn wrote the song together with Iain Farquharson. Mirro had also done the choreography to the Swedish contribution, “Popular” sung by Eric Saade (which placed third). “I’m very happy for them, they did a great job,” Mirro said. And Eli & Nikki, who performed the winning song, said thank you to the Swedes: “Just look at the beautiful girls, we love them! And thank you Stefan Örn, Sandra Bjurman and Iain Farquharson for the lovely song.”
  Listen to the song: Running Scared

• Birgitta Trotzig dead
  Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig has passed away at age 82. She was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1993, and was one of Sweden’s most celebrated authors, she wrote prose fiction, and non-fiction as well as prose poetry. Born in Göteborg in 1929, Trotzig studied art and literary history and began her career writing for newspaper Aftonbladet and literary magazine Bonniers Litterära Magasin (now defunct). She married artist and sculptor Ulf Trotzig and lived in Paris from 1955 to 1972, with her husband and during this period converted to Roman Catholicism. Through her conversion she gained access to various aspects of French culture and to Christian and Jewish mysticism. Recurrent themes in Trotzig’s works are death, resurrection and love. Among her novels are: “Sjukdomen” (“The Illness”), “Dykungens dotter” (“The Mud King’s Daughter”). She also wrote essays and articles on poetry, and works of prose poems: “Anima” and “Sammanhang” ("Contexts").

• Silvia’s investigation
  Queen Silvia has begun investigating her father’s past after it was revealed in a documentary on Swedish TV, that he took over a factory owned by Jewish people in 1939. “The queen reacted very strongly and has now with her family, begun collecting facts from both Germany and Brazil,” says Bertil Ternert, Director of Information and Press at the Royal Swedish Court. Walter Sommerlath, Silvia’s father, joined the German National Socialist Party’s foreign department in Brazil, while living there, in 1934. Four years later he returned to Germany. During Hitler’s aryanization in 1939, he took over a metal factory belonging to the Jewish engineer Efim Wechsler. “The documents produced about the aryanization, are of the kind that she (the queen) wants to continue looking into,” says Ternert. “She wants to know more about the background.” Walter Sommerlath died in 1990.