Thank you very much for sharing this. I was searching for anything about Patrick Leigh Fermor, and found something with Melvin Bragg as well. I remember the South Bank Show from TV when I was child. Those were the days, when TV was a serious media.
Really happy to have found this fantastic documentary on PMLF. I thought I’d seen all his stuff on here, this is about the best imo. I visited his house- viewed from the perimeter- on the Mani 5 years ago, it’s in a beautiful spot close to the village 🇬🇷❤
This was wonderful and captures a time that will never return. I don't mean a sense of that period but that there is no sense of adventure or discovery of travel as it was back then. The internet and net travellers have exposed the whole planet, why bother travel these days when wherever you go you simply meet your own kind. There is a homogenisation that has made previously interesting places almost a carbon copy of the place you just left.
24:08 just rewatched "ill met by moonlight" and i wondered what happened to the driver, i guess he either way he was done for, had he been let go , I'll suspect the would have been executed for losing a General. When i 1st watch the movie years ago, i thought nice story, obviously made up only to find it wasn't
During the capture of General Kreipe, the driver, Sergeant Albert Fenske, was coshed and was almost unconscious when the kidnappers left the scene. The plan had been for two guerrillas to take the driver on foot and meet up with the kidnappers on Mt Ida, but the guerrillas arrived alone. They explained that the driver had not been able to keep up with them and they had had no choice but to kill him. The body was buried in a lonely spot under a pile of rocks. Soon afterwards one of the guerrillas was killed by the Germans and some time later the other guerrilla was killed in the civil war, so nobody knew exactly where the body had been buried. About 55 years after the kidnapping the driver's remains were discovered by chance. A few years after the war a delegation from Germany arrived in Crete to organise the recovery of the bones of German soldiers who had been killed by the guerrillas in the mountains during the occupation. The villagers welcomed the delegates and gave them every assistance in locating the bodies and these were taken to the German military cemetery at Maleme, which is probably where the remains of Sergeant Fenske are now.
Not sure why the director kept superimposing music from Wagner's Siegfried -- set in the dank, mouldy forests of German mythology -- on the Mani land and seascapes.
