Page 35 - Willi Distel Diary

Willi's posting in Boras, Sweden (Nov 1926-Feb 1927): learning Swedish, a difficult shop-sister, a lonely Christmas, and leaving for lack of a visa. [needs a human eye]

Translated from Willi's German.

1 November 1926 - 15 February 1927. Boras, Sweden. A small, thoroughly Swedish industrial town that offers absolutely nothing. The start was very hard because of the language, yet I very quickly won customers over, and speaking the language came quickly too. I worked in a small shop on the second floor. The proprietor, Marinus, was on the whole very nice to me, but shrewd and cunning, as showed itself when the visa difficulties arose. His sister, Ester, was an ugly, nervous piece of work; but soon I was carried along, and after some hesitation I took everything I could get cheaply from that woman. When I wanted to leave she wept, and the words "Jeg ar inte sjuk" - "I am not sick" - threw me into agitation, especially as two days before she had said everything was in order. Hot was the fight for my freedom, all the more since the woman has a hysterical streak; for the last three weeks I no longer spoke to her at all. In the end I had to leave the town because I had no visa. The food was truly Swedish, but good. The one I had taken to my heart was little Olle, with whom I often went walking. Christmas and New Year were very bad days. I got to know the Modersaehl family, and Gille Moderson, whom I thought highly of; Soedergren and Bidred were acquaintances too, and Bidred brought me...

People: Willi Distel, Marinus, Ester, Olle, Familie Modersaehl, Soedergren, Bidred

Interesting facts

Where Boras is. Boras lies in western Sweden, inland from Gothenburg. By the 1920s it was one of the country's leading textile and clothing centres, which fits Willi's note that it was a small industrial town.
Work permits between the wars. A foreign worker in the 1920s needed the right visa and residence papers to stay and take a job. Willi keeps running into these rules across Scandinavia, and here the lack of a valid visa forces him to leave town.
A lonely first Christmas abroad. Swedish Christmas centres on close family gatherings, so a young foreigner with no relatives nearby could feel especially cut off over the holidays, as Willi records here.
The journeyman tradition. Willi was on his 'Walz', the old German custom in which a trained craftsman spent years travelling from town to town, taking short postings to broaden his skills before settling. It explains why he keeps moving on after only a few months.