Finnish Post-War Cultural Memory

1945/1989 and after

QUESTION

1. Why has the narrative of the Unknown Soldier managed to retain its grip on Finnish society?

TRAUMA post-1945Trauma as a social construction

1. Theory of Cultural Trauma

The Unknown Soldier was turnedinto a survivalStory.From individual toCollective.

TRAUMA AS EXPERIENCE

2. Cultural Trauma Process

The healing process, and the justification.

POST-89 AND THE NEW EUROPE

3. Prosthetic memory

Few things have changed. Always a conflict betweenelite (official politics) andpeople.

Finland at war on screen since 1989

• The Finnish cultural memory of WWII is upheld through four discourses:

1. the historical discourse (evidence)2. the discourse of the witness (evidence) 3. the discourse of victimisation (ethics)4. the discourse of the defensive victory

(moral/justification)

POST-89 AND THE EXTENDED EUROPE

4. Transnational memory ”Stories of national and transnational memory”FINLAND'S HOLOCAUST: SILENCES OF HISTORY, ed. Simo Muir and Hana Worthen (Palgrave/MacMillan 2013)

The limits of a national historiographyand the placing of the nation as agent and subject.

Post-89 was the prism

1. The study of trauma requires a historical distance.

2. Studying trauma as a process showed that to work through is a process in time (the Finnish entry to the European Union as a coming of age)

3. The post-89 hangover that show how contradictory historical processes actually are

4. Transnational obligations, the dissolution of a nationalist perspective.

Themes and subjects

• 1. Memory as something that is embedded in history (time)

• 2. Memory and ethics (deference)• 3. The dialectics between communicative and

cultural memory (memory generations)• 4. Memory politics (who should be

remembered?)