Audio file 134-1

Wonga wants to speak about 1938 when Ernest arrives and Paris is on the brink of World War II, Wonga speaks of the Munich Agreement (mentions Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier, Adolf Hitler, Stalin, Franco)

Ernest arrived in late 1938 when Europe was on the brink of World War II; in his 1938-1940 diaries, Ernest writes of talk of war and strikes in Paris.

The Munich agreement was signed by Great Britain and France with Germany in 1938 which allowed Germany to annex a part of Czechoslovakia

Ernest struggles to remember a story of Sonja's friend who fought in the Spanish Civil War and was killed

Gustav Munch-Petersen was Sonja's Danish artist friend who was killed in the Spanish civil war

[tape stopped and restarted] Ernest recalls seeing English soldiers fleeing General Franco at Montparnasse train station, but Wonga questions this given the date; Wonga probes but Ernest cannot remember the details

The Spanish Civil War was a military conflict that ran from 1936 to 1939, ending when General Franco and the military junta seized power

[tape stopped and restarted] Wonga speaks of the Spanish Civil War (mentions Ejler Bille, Richard Mortensen, Sonja Ferlov) and of Linien member Gustav Munch-Petersen joining the International Brigade

The Spanish Civil War was seen by some to be a war of political ideologies, between the far left and the far right. The International Brigade were recruited by the Communist International to assist the Spanish Populist government

Ernest recalls that when he was still in South Africa, at the University of Fort Hare, when they heard about students in the United Kingdom refusing to fight; that his friend at the University of Grahamstown, Shapiro, compared the plight of Africans to the plight of European Jews

Ernest and Wonga speak of Germany after the end of World War I as an element of crisis leading into World War II

Some historians argue the terms of Germany's surrender of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles, had the unforeseen consequence of pushing an economically-stressed Germany towards World War II

Wonga theorises that the Spanish Civil War was the beginning of a crisis that ended with World War II, Ernest struggles to keep up with Wonga's account (mentions André Léon Blum); Wonga gets to Daladier returning after the signing of the Munich agreement, he asks Ernest if he recalled the atmostphere in Paris; Ernest does not think it's appropriate to include Wonga's details of the wars going into the memoir

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