The Sagrada Família and Hello Kitty

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 28 June 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes.

We hear the story of the largest unfinished Catholic church in the world and the creation of one of the most recognisable characters on the planet.

Plus, an amazing first hand account of the expulsion of German-speakers from Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War, the man behind Dignitas, the assisted dying organisation in Switzerland, and the son of a Guatemalan president who was overthrown in an American-backed coup in the 1950s.

Contributors: Mark Burry - architect, who was part of a team trying to piece together Gaudí's vision for the Sagrada Família. Madeleine Kessler - architect from Madeleine Kessler Architecture. Yuko Shimizu - the artist who designed Hello Kitty. Helmut Scholz - a Sudeten German, who was expelled from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War. Ludwig Minelli - the lawyer behind Dignitas, the assisted dying organisation. Juan Jacobo - the son of the former Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz.

(Photo: The Sagrada Família, in Barcelona. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson
0:09.4	the past brought to life by those who were there. This week we have an amazing first-hand account of the expulsion of German speakers from Czechoslovakia
0:18.0	at the end of the Second World War.
0:20.0	So we were there at the cargo station and we were pushed into the cattle wagon like cattle.
0:26.0	Also, the man who was the driving force behind the Dignitas Assisted Dying Organization.
0:31.0	I was happy that I can give a kick to foreign governments which do not allow freedom for their people.
0:40.0	And the Japanese artist behind the phenomenally successful character, Hello Kitty.
0:45.0	When I was a child, I got a small white kitten from my father for a birthday present,
0:51.0	and the memories stayed with me me so I decided to create a character from the little kitten.
0:57.7	That's all coming up later in the podcast and it is with a visionary artistic endeavor that we begin. For this we head to Spain. Here's
1:06.4	Vicky Farrangam.
1:07.4	You can't help but be awed by its majesty, its size, and its slight cookiness.
1:14.6	It's got a futuristic feel in a 70s way.
1:18.2	It's like the first cathedral on Mars.
1:21.4	The BBC presenter Steve Steve Smith describing Barcelona's famous church
1:26.0	Lascagrada Familia.
1:28.0	When its genius architect
1:30.0	Antoni Gaudi died unexpectedly in
1:33.4	1926. His followers were left with incredible plaster of Paris
1:38.7	models showing how the building should be completed.
1:42.0	These models were at a scale of 1 to 10 and 1 to 25.
1:45.0	They weren't sort of little vignettes.
	...

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