09/11/2019
Harald´s impact on the Fall of the Berlin Wall...
Many years before Vigdis Finnbogadottir became the president of Iceland in 1980, she was drawn as a young 26 year old theater student by Danish artist Kirsten Kjær in 1956.
This large portrait was given to the later famous feminist, environmentalist, and peace campaigner to keep for herself. In 1985, having been a very popular Icelandic president for four years, she phoned Harald Fuglsang, Kirsten's nephew, at the newly created Kirsten Kjærs museum, in Northern Jutland. She wanted to offer the drawing to the museum. Harald, very conscious of who she was and who she had contact with, spoke for a long time with her and then said: "as Iceland is geographically between USA and USSR why don´t you get Reagan and Gorbachev to meet in Reykjavik to finish this cold war??" She responded by at first laughing a lot, and then saying: "we are very small and neutral country, why would they ever come here...???"
Two years later in Reykjavik, mainly through the good relations between Finnbogadottir and the Russian president, she hosted only the second meeting between the two men. With help from their Icelandic hosts, who made their stay as convivial as possible, the presidents of the two superpowers got on surprisingly well, especially when they dispensed with all their advisors and talked face to face with only translators present. Vigdis also got on well with the ex-film actor Reagan. On a walk together, according to the local Icelandic paper Morganbladid, she told Reagan that there was no school to train a person to be a president, but that the stage had been the best preparation she knew, where she had learnt "to define life and society all the time". Reagan readily agreed and liked her so much that from then on he called her "my old colleague".
Gorbachev, years later in his memoirs, also stressed the theatrical nature of this famous meeting at the reputedly haunted Hofdi House outside Rejkjavik:
"Truly Shakespearean passions ran under the thin veneer of polite and diplomatically restrained negotiations behind the windows of a cozy little house standing on the coast of a dark and sombrely impetuous ocean. The accompaniment of grim nature is still lingering in my memory."
The meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev was the turning point in the Cold War: one year later in Washington significant agreements were made to reduce the nuclear arsenals.
This in turn lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall two years after in 1989.
Maybe Harald Fuglsang induced a little spark in bringing about this great change in history!
