Sunday 29 August 2010

Joepie, October 1977: Frida found her long-lost father – she had never seen him yet and she didn’t know if he was still alive...

It all seems like a fairytale with a happy ending, but the story that we are telling you here actually really happened. And the key figure is none other than Frida, the red-haired singer from the Swedish group ABBA.
The German officer Alfred Haase has to go to Norway in the spring of 1944. The World War is still in full swing. But there’s not a lot of fighting going on there. Alfred and his friends have more than enough time to explore the neighbourhood. And that’s what they are doing. At one day, Alfred meets a girl from the neighbourhood. They fall in love with each other, and they promise to be faithful to each other forever. Plans are being made, the twosome is only waiting for the war to end. And then all of a sudden, Alfred is called back to his home country. The girl that he leaves behind is pregnant with his child, but Alfred doesn’t know. Frida is born. Her mother is being criticized harshly by her neighbors and she moves to a different area. Three years later she dies and Frida is left in the care of her grandmother.
Did the father try to look for his girlfriend after the war? Did he lose track of her because she had moved? It still remains a mystery. In all those years, Frida didn’t even know if he was still alive. It was rumoured that Alfred Haase’s legion was caught in a crossfire with the hostile air force on their way from Norway to Germany, and that no one had survived the attack. Those questions are now solved forever for Frida. Thanks to a German magazine, that published Frida’s life story, Haase realized for the first time that he had a daughter. He contacted Frida, who saw the man that gave her life for the first time.
“Of course, I knew ABBA, I was even a fan,” the good man said when he arrived in Stockholm. “But you can imagine how much of a shock it was when I realized that Frida... was my daughter...”
Frida’s father is a baker in Karlsruhe, Germany.

No comments: