ABBA stars grief over Nazi past that still haunts | Music News

ABBA singer Anni-Frid Lyngstad has opened up about the profound sorrow she’s carried since childhood, stemming from her father’s ties to Nazi Germany, as revealed in a new biography.

Born in Norway in 1945 to a 19 yr outdated mom and a German Nazi sergeant, Frida rose to fame in the Nineteen Seventies as a member of the Swedish pop group ABBA. Her father, Alfred Haase, was half of Hitler’s military in Norway during the battle, and her mom Synni fell in love with him, unaware of his current spouse and baby in Germany.

Frida’s mom confronted native abuse and shaming for her relationship with a German soldier, even before giving beginning. She was publicly spat at and labelled a “horizontal collaborator,” while Frida was known as “Nazi spawn.”

Following the battle, hundreds of youngsters born to German troopers and Norwegian girls, like Frida, have been shunned. The Nazis’ Lebensborn program had inspired troopers to father youngsters with “racially pure” girls, and Norway was thought-about prime territory.

In an excerpt from Jan Gradvall’s The Story of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover, printed on Mail Online, Synni believed Alfred would return for them, but he left and never got here back. Frida’s life took a tragic flip when her mom, Synni, died of kidney failure in 1947, just before Frida’s second birthday, reviews the Express.

She spent her childhood believing that her father had perished during the battle. It wasn’t until 1977, at the height of ABBA’s fame and when Frida was 32, that she came upon he was still alive.

This stunning revelation got here about when a German woman – the daughter of Frida’s half-brother – learn an interview and suspected that the singer could possibly be her grandfather’s relative. A gathering was subsequently organized in West Germany.

“I thought he was a nice man,” Frida commented, “but it still mostly felt strange to me. I was 32 years old and had a family and children of my own. Obviously we didn’t develop the kind of connection we might have if we had known each other my entire life.”

The e book also sheds mild on more personal tragedies in Frida’s life.

In 1998, Frida’s daughter Ann Lise-Lotte tragically died in a car accident in the United States, just shy of her thirty first birthday. Less than a yr later, Frida’s third husband, Prince Heinrich Ruzzo Reuss von Plauen, succumbed to cancer at the age of 49.

They had tied the knot in 1992.

In the autumn of 2023, Frida confronted one other heartbreak as her grandson Jonathan succumbed to cancer.

Frida shared her profound sorrow, stating, “It took a very long time. It took many years of incomprehensible grief.”

Amidst rumors of a third Mamma Mia film and the continued success of ABBA’s Voyage live performance expertise in London, Jan Gradvall’s new e book peels back the curtain on the group’s public image, revealing a personal historical past steeped in non-public struggles, tragedy, and resilience.

Jan Gradvall’s exploration of the long-lasting band, The Story of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover, is accessible from St. Martin’s Press.