Book review | The DNA test revealed: The Swedish writer’s father was a Finnish general who praised Hitler as a genius

Memoirs

Gunilla Boëthius. A lifelong secret. Finnished by Veli-Pekka Ketola. Bridge. 262 pp.

“All credit to the environment, but now genetics is on the rise,” writes the journalist-writer from Stockholm Gunilla Boëthius (b. 1945) in his memoir A lifelong secret.

“Mother was a family woman, I was a failed person,” the account continues. Silk underwear was found in the mother’s wardrobe, the daughter wore an acrylic dress.

A lifelong secret is a multi-polar biography: it tells about the author and his mother, but also about two fathers.

The secret is already clear from the text on the back cover. Gunilla Boëthius’ biological father is a Finnish infantry general SpongeBob Winter and not a Swedish public educator Carl Gustaf Boethiusas he had thought for 73 years.

The narrator weaves life stories together like an embroidery, where complex patterns are repeated in different colors. Layer by layer, new variations are found in the story and the tragedy deepens.

Boethius honestly and compellingly reveals a life-long secret. The story does not end with finding the truth, but develops new questions all the time.

The mother demanded that her daughter always stay in the truth. But the daughter understood in her seventies that the mother herself had been living a lie. When the entanglement begins to unravel, there are endless levels of lies, “ambiguous signals”.

The author does not get stuck in anger, but charts the wide range of emotions he has experienced. I understand the daughter’s fluctuating moods and a little of the mother’s antics. I don’t understand Talvela at all, I feel sorry for CG Boëthius at times.

The scene where Gunilla meets her 95-year-old half-sister is also touching A cricket. Holding hands, the women look at a photo of their common father. Much remains to be said.

Gun had been a daddy’s girl, the eldest child of an inexperienced bookworm of Boëthius’ old cultured family. Carl Gustaf had managed to marry the woman of his dreams, who had been in trouble.

Was the Swedish father a liar after all?

The daughter begins to understand why he suffered from constant stomach problems and suppressed rage. Why was he himself blond-haired and very different in nature from his father?

Gunilla Boëthius the story begins when Talvela’s relatives read her little sister Maria-Pia Boëthius the book Vitt och rött (2018) featuring Brita Andérsin.

The woman had been Talvela’s secretary. The name had also been found in the general’s safe in connection with the confession uttered on his sickbed: “I have a child in Sweden.”

Talvela died in 1973 and Britak in the early 2000s, but relatives found the child, Gunilla Boëthius, in the 2010s.

This immediately prompted a dna test, which revealed that he and his sister Maria-Pia were not full series. The journey to the past began.

With a gun remembers that the mother was depressed from time to time, for the longest time after her birth. He remembers that his mother regularly went to Helsinki to meet her relatives, left elegantly and beamed when she returned.

Now the daughter is sure that on these trips the mother also met Talvela, her biological father. The relationship continued from the 1930s until the 1960s. This is revealed by a photo taken at the Military Academy, where Talvela accepts the honor and “the mother stands out among the sparse audience”.

Once, 17-year-old Gunila also made it to Helsinki. Mother first took her to Stockmann’s beauty salon and then to Fazer’s cafe to meet General Talvela, mother’s former superior and admirer.

Nothing was said about fatherhood, but Gunilla’s plans for the future were surprisingly a lot.

More than fifty years later, Gunilla becomes interested in who this curious gentleman really was. He interviewed Antti Tuuriawho wrote Paavo Talvela’s biography 2021. He familiarized himself with the history of Finland by Henrik Meinander through.

Talvela doesn’t appear to Gunilla as a war hero, but as a terrifying intelligence officer who worked with the Nazis. Who wrote reports from Berlin during the Continuation War, Commander-in-Chief to Mannerheim.

Winter had settled Hitler’s next to me on the plane when he came to Marski’s 75th birthday. In his diary, the escort praised the Führer as a genius.

Etova also has the idea that “Talvela had just had time to say goodbye Himmler’s before the flight to Stockholm and my birth”.

And the daughter still asks what Talvela did after the war in South America, where many Nazis were also hiding. According to Boëthius, these connections have been clarified surprisingly little.

But the daughter also asks if Talvela was really her mother’s greatest love, not her first husband who died in the continuation war Nils Mickwitz nor the other spouse, the Swedish CG Boëthius.

Some of the relatives insist that nothing can be said about the relationship based on the surviving documents. So the final secret went to the grave and maybe that’s why the memoir is so fascinating.

Even the biggest of the questions remains unanswered. Why did the general who commanded the armies not dare to meet his daughter?