Gerhard P. Bassler, Vikings to U-Boats Wins WANL Rogers Cable Non-fiction Award

The Writers' Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Announces the Winners of The 2007 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards

St John's, NL: Patrick Warner, Winner, The E J Pratt Poetry Award for There, there, Véhicule Press, 2005, and Gerhard P Bassler, Winner, Rogers Cable Non-fiction Award for Vikings to U-Boats: The German Experience in Newfoundland and Labrador, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006.

The winners were announced at 2:30pm yesterday, May 15, at a special celebration held at Government House, St John's, NL. This year marks the 11th year of the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards. Winners were presented with a check for $1,500 and each finalist was awarded $500.

Judges for Non-fiction were Anne Budgell, Degan Davis, and Kathleen Winter.

Gerhard Bassler's original work succeeds in dispelling what he calls the myth of Newfoundland and Labrador's purely British heritage. He does it with a tone of regret for what might have been, if not for two World Wars. It was German-speaking Moravian missionaries in Labrador who first created a written form for Inuktitut. German technology imported from Lunenberg influenced dory design in Newfoundland. Roman Catholic Bishop Fleming went to Hamburg to find an architect for his new Basilica in St John's. There were many more cultural and commercial contributions but Bassler points out that in this "closed society," Germans were always regarded as foreign. That is, until the events of two wars made things worse. Germans, even those who had done missionary service in Labrador for decades, were classed as potentially dangerous enemy aliens. The cloud of suspicion caused government authorities to deny Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich safe haven in Newfoundland. They had the same enemy, but they were too German to be welcome here. Bassler describes a small but vibrant German community, doing business, marrying, holding public office, and now gone. What lingers in Newfoundland is a stereotype created by wartime propaganda and faint traces of German presence in family names and Labrador Inuit who can still count in German.