Guardians of the Land? Smallholders Living Their Nation in Interwar Finland

This chapter relates small-scale landowning to the lived nation by exploring what it meant to become a landowner. Pirjo Markkola and Ann-Catrin Östman study how smallholders in peripheral areas encountered civil-society organizations promoting modernization in the 1920s. Focusing mainly on the work of the Ruth Foundation, this chapter shows how smallholders made use of opportunities to keep and maintain their farms and what kind of emotions, ambitions and calculations were attached to landowning. By investigating the encounters between smallholders and various organizations, Markkola and Östman explore classed and gendered everyday practices on a grassroots level. A small corpus of ego-documents, read in the context of economic development programs represented by the organizations, deepens our knowledge of smallholders living and practicing their nation in the 1920s.

Nimble Nationalism: Transgenerational Experiences of East Karelian Refugees in Finland and Sweden

Looking at the relationship of experiences and memory Jalagin discusses the significance of the nation for a minority of a minority. Focusing on Soviet Karelian refugees who sought asylum first in interwar Finland and then in post-World War II Sweden, the chapter explores family histories as presented by government authorities in archival documents as well as in written and oral history narratives. Jalagin argues that the nation-state dominated the national experience because the refugees were meticulously controlled by government immigration policies and practices. While considering Sweden their home country, the refugees emotionally tended to identify with the Finnish migrant community in Sweden. Their sense of Finnishness testifies to flexible nationalism, making the nation-state an ambivalent, yet important element in their life.

Lived Historiography: National History as a Script to the Past

The chapter studies the role of historiography in experiencing the past. Haapala analyzes how written history and its conceptualizations offered people a framework for understanding, defining, and living the past emotionally, and understanding how their present experiences became connected to history. It is claimed here that academic historiography often played a major role in creating historical and national identities by providing a script, as well as intellectual and emotional tools, to live the past. National history was invented by nineteenth-century intellectuals and it became a powerful, imagined narrative for the nation for two centuries. That success can be explained only by realizing the societal and political role of history writing as an autobiography of a society.

National Sentiment: Nation Building and Emotional Language in Nineteenth-Century Finland

During the course of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, the term “national sentiment” was coined and subsequently established in several European languages. The emergence of the term in several different languages at roughly the same time is indicative of changes both in the experiences of nationhood and of emotion. This chapter explores the development of the term “national sentiment” in Finnish public discourse and argues that it was transformed during the course of the nineteenth century. Early in the century, it denoted an individualistic feeling that romantic intellectuals hoped people would turn to, whereas it later became a description of a collective emotion. It was used to describe the atmosphere among one of the nationalities in Finland in particular, or the Russian empire in general. In this process, the term became more restrictive and lost its links to performing emotions relating to the nation.

Feeling the Nation through Exploring the City: Urban Pedagogy and Children’s Lived Experiences in Postwar Helsinki

In the post-1945 world, Finnish schools were appointed the new task of fostering democratic values and educating peace-loving citizens. By exploring postwar art and environmental education in Helsinki, understood as means to expand children’s emotional competences, Malinen and Vahtikari provide a unique analysis of the ways educators, children and urban space co-produced the nation in everyday (school) practices. Malinen and Vahtikari show the importance of fully acknowledging the spatial, material and sensory aspects of emotions when discussing children’s emotional formation and historical manifestations of everyday nationalism. To illustrate the adult-children co-creation of different ideas, practices and emotions with respect to the national community, the chapter uses two sets of contemporary sources: educators’ writings and children’s drawings.

Temporalization of Experiencing: First-Hand Experience of the Nation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Finland

Kokko tests and develops further Benedict Anderson’s thesis about “imagined communities” through analyzing the experiential change that the emerging of first-hand experience of the nation required at the individual level. The analysis of readers’ letters published in the Finnish-language press provides a rare history-from-below approach to the emerging experience of the nation. Besides focusing on the mid-1800s’ Finnish grass roots experience of the nation, the chapter draws attention to the form of belonging which existed prior to it. ‘Temporalization of Experiencing’ presents the first-hand experience of the nation as a social phenomenon. The chapter indicates that the absorbing of the experience of the nation was based on a transformation in the structures of experiencing that was linked to the modernization process.

The Image of Marshal Mannerheim, Moral Panic, and the Refashioning of the Nation in the 1990s

This chapter shows how the social and political changes in Finnish society in the early 1990s were reflected in the images of C. G. E. Mannerheim (1867–1951), the Marshal of Finland. By looking at the debate concerning the construction of the Museum of Contemporary Art right next to the Mannerheim equestrian statue in Helsinki, Tepora analyzes the public dispute as a moral panic that sprang from the 1990s recession, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and joining the European Union. Arguing for the study of nontotalitarian personality cults, Tepora shows how the opposing sides in the debate either rose to defend the conservative Mannerheim image as an unchanging emotional figure or recoded the figure to reflect their liberal and cosmopolitan perspectives.

Red Orphans’ Fatherland: Children in the Civil War of 1918 and Its Aftermath

The Civil War in 1918 divided Finland into White winners and Red losers. These divisions affected all citizens, including children. Drawing from a regional oral history collection from the 1970s, this chapter analyzes how the children of the Reds were integrated into the shared fatherland, and how they understood and experienced the nation. The Children of the Reds had to respond to different expectations and demands. At school, they were taught emotions and values that stood in contrast to the values to which they were raised at home. The children of the Reds experienced the feeling that they belonged to the losers of the war and were marginalized within the context of the nation.

Divided Nation on Records: The Transnational Formation of Finnish Popular Music During the Gramophone Fever

Tikka and Suodenjoki explore how imported gramophone records shaped the idea of Finnish popular music and thereby fed the experiences of the nation among Finnish consumers in the late 1920s. They focus on Finnish-American records, which were imported to Finland by transnational agents during the so-called gramophone fever. As these records reached consumers, they tapped into experience communities that were based on the deep political divides of the newly independent nation-state, which had witnessed a Civil War in 1918. In a very short period of time, modern popular music, played and danced to in homes and public spaces, became a key means by which people lived out the nation and its class-based demarcations in their everyday practices.

Nocturnal Nation: Violence and the Nation in Dreams during and after World War II

This chapter shows how nationally framed war experiences occupied and shaped Finnish dreams during and after World War II. By studying written dream reminiscences from the 1980s and a war veteran survey from 1999 to 2000, Kivimäki analyzes how the war nationalized the most private spheres of life. Civilians’ war dreams were more symbolic than those of soldiers, which were characterized rather by a relentless reenactment of traumatic experiences. War-related dreams had an impact on people’s nightlife long after the war was over. Yet the frequency and content of war-related dreams changed over time, and sometimes the dreams themselves could become a site of relief from recurrent nightmares.