1 Between Defeat and Victory: Finnish Memory Culture of the Second
This is the accepted manuscript of the article, which has been published in Scandinavian Journal of History. 2012, 37(4), 482-504. https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2012.680178 Between defeat and victory: Finnish memory culture of the Second World War Ville Kivimäki, Åbo Akademi University, Finland Abstract: The article focuses on five essential phenomena in the Finnish memory culture of the three Finnish wars fought in 1939–45, namely, 1) the memory of the fallen; 2) the influential work by author Väinö Linna; 3) the contested memory politics and veteran cultures in the 1960s and 1970s; 4) Germany and the Holocaust in the Finnish memory culture; 5) and the ‘neo-patriotic’ turn in the commemoration of the wars from the end of the 1980s onwards. The Finnish memory culture of 1939–45 presents an interesting case of how the de facto lost wars against the Soviet Union have been shaped into cornerstones of national history and identity that continue to have significance even today. Using the growing research literature on the various aspects of the Finnish war memories and memory politics, the article aims, first, at outlining a synthesis of the memory culture’s central features and, second, at challenging the common contemporary conception, according to which the Finnish war veterans would have been forgotten, neglected and even disgraced during the post-war decades to be ‘rehabilitated’ only from the end of the 1980s onwards. Keywords: war (the Second World War); Finland; memory; commemoration; war veterans; war memorials; war fiction; the Holocaust; finlandisation 1 Between defeat and victory Finnish memory culture of the Second World War1 1.
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