Snu Abecassis

Snu Abecassis (born October 7, 1940 as Ebba Merete Seidenfaden in Copenhagen , † December 4, 1980 at Camarate ) was a Danish publicist in Portugal. She was best known for her relationship with the Portuguese Prime Minister Francisco Sá Carneiro , with whom she was killed in a plane crash.

Life

Snu Abecassis was born as the daughter of the Danish journalist couple Erik and Jytte Seidenfaden. She was a half-sister of Tøger Seidenfaden . Her parents soon called her just Snu, a Swedish-Danish name for someone clever. She came to a British boarding school near London, where she met the Portuguese Vasco Abecassis. He then became a student at Harvard University while she was studying in Boston . In 1962 they married and moved to Lisbon. It was there that Snu Abecassis, who was shaped by liberal convictions, encountered the socio-politically tense situation of the repressive Salazar dictatorship. She then founded the Edições Dom Quixote publishing house and published works that were uncomfortable for the dictatorship on topics such as the birth control pill , the Vietnam War or the crises within the Catholic Church. As a result, Snu Abecassis was increasingly targeted by the PIDE secret police , especially after their publisher invited the Soviet author Yevgeny Evtushenko to Portugal in 1967 .

Especially after the Carnation Revolution on April 25, 1974, she moved in the flourishing intellectual and political circles in the country. She made the acquaintance of Francisco Pinto Balsemão and met Francisco Sá Carneiro , with whom she entered into a relationship. She ended her already dissolving marriage with Vasco Abecassis, while Sá Carneiro did not get his wife's consent to a divorce, from whom he had been separated for a long time. Snu Abecassis and Sá Carneiro nevertheless moved in together and appeared together in public, which caused a sensation in Portuguese society. On the one hand, the politician's coexistence with a woman other than his wedded wife was perceived as scandalous; on the other hand, the relationship between the Portuguese politician and the Danish intellectual is still considered a romantic love affair.

On December 4, 1980, the couple were on their way to Porto in a Cessna plane , together with Defense Minister Adelino Amaro da Costa and his wife. The plane crashed at Camarate shortly after taking off from Lisbon. All inmates died in the accident. It is still unclear whether it was an accident or an assassination attempt.

literature

• Cândida Pinto: Snu ea Vida Privada com Sá Carneiro . Livros d'Hoje, Alfragide 2011 ( ISBN 978-972-204-630-5 )
• Cândida Pinto: Snu silk thread. People's Press, Copenhagen 2011 ( ISBN 978-87-7137-301-1 ), online access to the Danish edition

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry by Snu Abecassis in the Infopédia , the online encyclopedia of the Porto Editora , accessed on December 8, 2013
2. ↑ Article from February 7, 2003 ( Memento of the original from September 6, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. of the daily Correio da Manhã , accessed on December 8, 2013 
3. ^ Article of December 9, 2010 in the Danish daily Kristeligt Dagblad , accessed on December 8, 2013