ture. When I picture him in my mind’s eye he is one of the ABBAboys, Benny, visiting from southern Sweden to explore a region that had been under Swedish rule once, before it went back to being Prussian and then, when he was there, Russian. He was not going ‘to a rich man’s world’ as Benny sang, he was going to the Wild East, and his mother worried whether she would ever see him again. It all turned out well, though, and he discovered that theWild East was indeed a rich man’s world, whether revelling in the primary sources for the history of Swedish rule or striking up enduring friendships.Wemight have seen each other, I suppose. I was in Sassnitz that summer with my aunt, and we often went down to the harbour to watch the white ships from Sweden. There is a only the smallest chance an excited young man from Sweden visiting the Eastern Bloc for the first time would have noticed a blond 4-year-old waving at ships. In reality it would be thirty years before we met and became friends. It is friendship founded on scholarship, and the high court of Wismar, which Kjell Åke discovered when he first visited Pomerania, and which he sprung on the academic community in his thesis. My first great love had been the Steelyard in London, but after a decade in their company the Hanse was beginning to pall, and academic life in Germany demands n the summer of 2018, it was fifty years since a young Swede in a light blue denim suit got off the ferry at Sassnitz to start a big adven- I part i • supreme courts 94 The Wismar Tribunal: A survey of the research 5. Nils Jörn
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=