How to Become a Perfect Danish-Estonian Historian: Homage to Vello Helk

Jaan Undusk

1 The Man and His Career

This is a simple story about a Danish historian of Estonian origin, Vello Helk, doctor honoris causa of the University of Tartu (1996). He was born in Varstu village in South Estonia on September 23, 1923 (his original family name being Hintervaldt until 1936), and he attended gymnasium in the local provincial centre, Võru, after which he was taken—like many other Estonians—into the German Army in 1944. After the Nazi capitulation, he left Germany for Denmark in 1945. From that time on he lived in Denmark, almost seventy years of his long life. Although he was nearly deaf for the last twenty-five years, he was still active as a publicist until recently, in the last years mainly as a reviewer and a political columnist in Estonian and Danish newspapers. He died on March 14, 2014, being ninety years old, on the Estonia’s Mother Tongue Day.1 Together with his wife, he is buried in Birkerød, near Copenhagen. Helk’s life story as a humanities scholar is not very typical for an Estonian of his generation abroad; on the other hand, one cannot deny in it some charac- teristic patterns of behaviour of an exile historian. The result has been, as sug- gested in the title of this essay, an almost perfect synthesis of Danish and Estonian inspirations. Vello Helk is exceptional also among the Estonian historians because of his memoirs that were published in thirteen parts in the historical journal Tuna (Tallinn) from 2002 to 2005.2 In addition I carried out written interview with him in November 2009, to clarify some details of his biography. After that, we were in electronic correspondence occasionally. Helk’s peculiarity consists in not writing in the published part of memoirs about his childhood in Estonia, about the days of war, and his joys and sorrows as a refugee—about all that which is the very stuff of most of the other autobi- ographies from that period (though he admits in a private letter, fragments of youth and war memoirs exist at least in manuscript). He informs us almost exclusively about his professional career in the Kingdom of Denmark. Obviously this is the part of his life of which he is proud of and which can be taken as a

1 Pillak, Küng and Ohmann, 2014. 2 Helk, 2002/2005.

How to Become a Perfect Danish-Estonian Historian 237 model of person-building in foreign surroundings after World War ii. He composes his life like a Bildungsroman in which the first quarter is absent. The memoirs, entitled programmatically “From student in exile to Danish archivist,” begin with Helk’s matriculating in the University of Århus in 1947, and then practically end when he retired in 1990. We are not given much informa- tion about his first years in Denmark as a refugee from the Baltic region. Helk begins with the moment when he steps across the threshold of the new society. His professional career was successful indeed. He became a Danish citizen already in 1954, while studying at the University of Århus. After working in archives in Århus and Odense from 1956 on, Helk became employed in the Danish National Archives in Copenhagen in 1959 and was promoted to one of the head archivists in 1970; during a short period between 1977 and 1978 he even rose to the position of Danish Deputy State Archivist (due to the fact that the elected State Archivist was ill); this made him the first man of his field for a while. He has been awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Dannebrog, a very high decoration. Although he did not become a university professor, a goal he did not entertain, he actually achieved much more; there are but a few persons of such an elevated responsibility in every country. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Vello Helk was the man who made a most brilliant offi- cial career among the Estonian historians abroad. Of course, the formal career is not the only reason to speak about Vello Helk. He is an almost ideal example of an historian working for several national his- tories simultaneously. There are people of Estonian origin in the wide world who write on Estonian and Baltic matters. And there are, of course, other historians of Estonian origin who are not professionals in Estonian history, having chosen to write on other historical topic. But there must be only very few among them who have contributed—on a high international level—to several national historiographies. Vello Helk is one of that rare breed. In the Festschrift on the occasion of his 75th birthday, the leading essay is correspondingly entitled “Vello Helk as a Danish and Estonian historian;”3 therein one can find a systematic overview of his life and work.4 In Denmark and for most of the international audience, Helk remains a Danish historian or, as some of his fellow countrymen in Denmark know, a Danish historian of Estonian origin. Helk has never concealed from his closest collaborators that his first homeland was Estonia and his mother tongue is Estonian. Although he had acquired a good command of Danish as a student already at the end of the 1940s, he has always been speaking Danish with a

3 Küng and Tering, 1999. 4 See also Piirimäe, 1996b; Küng and Tering, 1998; Helk, 2002/2005, xii: 116ff.