Guest of the Third Reich: Mare nostrum: New horisons

Review.
Foreword.

This chapter is a short introduction on the writer and how he came to be at Travelmünden at the 14th day of August. The German-Scandinavian Dichterhaus, writerhouse had been opened late that year, and thus Finland's Writer-Alliance [?] had had troubles to find someone to go; the vacations were already over. Because of troubles, the writer arrived day late and missed the Olympics at Berlin.

I'm tired. I sit on my luggage on a dark and empty terrace. Silent longing everywhere. Again I ponder the question that has been troubling me the whole sea voyage, on railway thru Denmark, on train ferry over windy sea between Gjedser and Warnemünden: why this trip? What do you think you'll find?

The writer hopes to find something new. Too many years he has been trying to write about his trip to London four year previous, to write down the many projects that had haunted him for years. But he had never succeeded. The Finnish political landscape was in heavy movement; the failed coup d'etat of the fascists in 1932 had depressed him and he no longer felt like writing.

And still I knew that in the world something was happening, something that people back home understood completely wrong. We saw the world like thru an old window; greenish, blurry and distorted. Revolutions right and revolutions left.. but back home everybody was shouting: old, tried traditions are the way to go! The most descriptive thing: the clergy changed from defenders to attackers! Confusion over terms. Ignorance, pathetic good-will, [...?], doing small movements in the middle of steely, determined, bi-polarizing world...

In the end the writer is let in to the house. Everybody else is in Berlin, watching the Olympics. The next day he met them; the director (Doctor Fred Domes) and hostess (Madam Lisa Hayn) of Dichterhaus, two German writers (Rubert Rupp and Count Ottfried von Finckenstein), a Norwegian (Doctor Eyvind Mehle), a Swede (Doctor Sven Stolpe) and another Finn (Master Göran Stenius). Each of them was important to the writer, opening to him new horizons.

The weeks at Dicherhaus gave the writer new strength. Again he felt like he knew where he was, and how to to hold the pen.