Soldiering and the Making of Finnish Manhood
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Soldiering and the Making of Finnish Manhood Conscription and Masculinity in Interwar Finland, 1918–1939 ANDERS AHLBÄCK Doctoral Thesis in General History ÅBO AKADEMI UNIVERSITY 2010 © Anders Ahlbäck Author’s address: History Dept. of Åbo Akademi University Fabriksgatan 2 FIN-20500 Åbo Finland e-mail: [email protected] ISBN 978-952-12-2508-6 (paperback) ISBN 978-952-12-2509-3 (pdf) Printed by Uniprint, Turku Table of Contents Acknowledgements v 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Images and experiences of conscripted soldiering 1 1.2 Topics in earlier research: The militarisation of modern masculinity 8 1.3 Theory and method: Conscription as a contested arena of masculinity 26 1.4 Demarcation: Soldiering and citizenship as homosocial enactments 39 2 The politics of conscription 48 2.1 Military debate on the verge of a revolution 52 2.2 The Civil War and the creation of the “White Army” 62 2.3 The militiaman challenging the cadre army soldier 72 2.4 From public indignation to closing ranks around the army 87 2.5 Conclusion: Reluctant militarisation 96 3 War heroes as war teachers 100 3.1 The narrative construction of the Jägers as war heroes 102 3.2 Absent women and distant domesticity 116 3.3 Heroic officers and their counter-images 118 3.4 Forgetfulness in the hero myth 124 3.5 The Jäger officers as military educators 127 3.6 Conclusion: The uses of war heroes 139 4 Educating the citizen-soldier 146 4.1 Civic education and the Suomen Sotilas magazine 147 4.2 The man-soldier-citizen amalgamation 154 4.3 History, forefathers and the spirit of sacrifice 162 4.4 Self-restraint and the moral dangers of military life 169 4.5 The manly military nation and its others 177 4.6 Conclusion: The invitation into military manliness 186 iv 5 Stories and memories of soldiering 193 5.1 The historicity of experiences and memories 197 5.2 Entering the military world 208 5.3 Understandings of disciplinary practices 220 5.4 The male body in military service 233 5.5 Comradeship: magical unity and violent tensions 247 5.6 Submission or resistance: finding trajectories to manhood 262 5.7 Conscript soldiers and women 275 5.8 Conclusion: Class, age and power in army stories 281 6 Soldiering and the contested making of manhood 286 Swedish Summary – Sammanfattning 305 References 311 Acknowledgements Many persons and institutions have given me invaluable support, feedback and advice during my work on this dissertation. I want to thank the sponsors and employers who made it possible for me to concentrate on my research: the Research Institute of Åbo Akademi Foundation, Agneta and Carl-Erik Olin’s Memorial Fund, the Foundation of Waldemar von Frenckell, and the Academy of Finland Research Project “Male Citizenship and Societal Reforms in Finland, 1918–1960”. I especially thank my supervisors, professor Max Engman, whose encouragement was decisive for my stepping onto the post-graduate path, and PhD Ann-Catrin Östman, who taught me to think about gender and whose enthusiasm was always so contagious. Pirjo Markkola, Holger Weiss, Nils-Erik Villstrand and Laura Hollsten at the History Department of Åbo Akademi University have also been steady and generous advisors and supporters along the road. The Special Seminar on Nordic Masculinities, led by Markkola and Östman and with the collaboration of Matias Kaihovirta and Hanna Lindberg, made our department an outstanding place to study manhood in history. The History Research Seminar at Åbo Akademi University, the national research school “Identity – Genesis, Manifestation, Metamorpho- sis”, and the Nationalism Seminar at Helsinki University have provided very stimulating feedback forums for different stages of the research process. I thank all academic teachers and fellow PhD students who have read and commented on my work. The resulting book owes much to the insightful and critical comments of professor Marianne Liljeström who examined my licentiate thesis and docent Tiina Kinnunen, who pre-examined my dissertation. Professor Jens Ljunggren has provided essential feedback over the years, not least as examiner and pre-examiner of both my licentiate and doctoral theses. I have also had to privilege of receiving comments on incipient ideas, articles and conference papers associated with this research by several distinguished scholars, all of whom widened my perspectives and deserve my warm thanks: Joanna Bourke, Joy Damousi, Claes Ekenstam, Dan Healey, Jeff Hearn, Elizabeth Hemenway, Jan Löfström, Lena Marander, Henrik Meinander and Birgitta Svensson. I further want to address warm thanks to my colleague Ville Kivimäki, whose innovative research inspired me to take experiences and emotions into account; to Ylva Gustafsson and Sofie Strandén who provided viewpoints on the monograph manuscript from the neighbouring academic vi disciplines of philosophy and folkloristics; to Fredrik Rahka who gave the important feedback of a non-academic professional publisher; and to Teemu Tallberg, Kirsi Kinnarinen and Arto Jokinen who shared with me their thoughts on masculinity research and making the world a better place. The warm and joyous community around the postgraduate “coffee table” at the History Department has been of great importance, both for relaxation and academic identity-building, and I thank all its wonderful members. A very special place in the history of this work also belongs to the Donner- Gustafsson family, who lodged, fed and diverted me during years of academic commuting. Last but not least, heartfelt thanks to my friends and family, and most of all my husband Mathias, for putting up with the preoccupations of a man lost for a long time deep inside the pages of this book. Helsingfors November 2010 1 Introduction 1.1 Images and experiences of conscripted soldiering Around 1930, two of the most brilliantly talented Finnish male novelists of their generation went into the army to do their military service. Both of them returned from their military training replete with stories to be told and both quickly wrote one book each about what they had experienced. Yet these two accounts of the conscript army and compulsory military training in interwar Finland were as different as day and night. Pentti Haanpää, an autodidact and a farmer’s son from rural Northern Finland, presented his readers with a bitter critique of the nationalistic rhetoric surrounding the conscript army. He depicted life in the army as a grey, barren and anguished world of physical hardship, meaningless drill, humiliating treatment and unfair punishment. The conscripts in his fictional short stories are men of little education; farm hands and lumberjacks used to hard work and plain living. Nevertheless, these men think of the barracks and training fields as “gruesome and abominable torture devices”. For them, the year spent in military service is simply time wasted. Haanpää described Finnish working men as brave soldiers in war but extremely recalcitrant conscripts in peacetime. Military service offended two basic elements of their self-esteem as men: personal autonomy and honest work. If they could not be in civilian “real” work, they saw more adult male dignity in fighting the system by deceiving their officers and dodging service than in submitting to fooling around in the training fields playing pointless war games.1 Mika Waltari, the other author, was two years older than Pentti Haanpää and had already attained a Bachelor of Arts before joining up. Yet his diary-like documentary of life as a conscript is marked by an unreserved boyish eagerness, depicting military training as almost like a Boy Scout camp with an atmosphere of sporty playfulness and merry comradeship. He is carried away by the “magical unity of the troop, its collective affinity”, depicting his army comrades as playful youngsters, always acting as a closely knit group, helping, supporting and encouraging each other. To Waltari, his 1 Pentti Haanpää, Kenttä ja kasarmi. Kertomuksia tasavallan armeijasta (Helsinki, 1928), quotes pp. 12– 23. 2 fellow soldiers were like a family; the officers admirable father figures, and the barracks a warm and secure home. He pictured military service as the last safe haven of adolescence before an adult life of demands, responsibilities and duties. At the same time, the army was the place where boys, according to Waltari, learned to submit themselves to a higher cause and thereby matured into the responsibilities of adult manhood.2 Haanpää and Waltari represented different ways of being men and different ways of ascribing military training with gendered meaning. From the perspective of the Finnish military and political establishment, Haanpää’s heroes displayed problematic masculinities that had to be reformed, whereas Waltari and his comrades demonstrated the kind of wished-for masculinity upon which the independence, prosperity and stability of the new Finnish national state would be built. Haanpää strongly identified with the perspective of the lower-class, uneducated men he served with. He shared their suspicion of all “masters” with their fancy rhetoric about the nation and its protection. Waltari came from a middle class background and was trained in elite schools to a self-discipline not unlike the one that the army demanded. Together with other educated young men pre-destined for prestigious positions in society, Waltari was trained for military leadership. He understood his military service from a perspective informed by bourgeois nationalist ideology and modernist ideas about the future of Finnish society. As illustrated by Pentti Haanpää’s and Mika Waltari’s diverging portraits of military service, the Finnish conscript army was created and developed within a field of social and political conflicts and ambivalence. After independence from Russia had been gained in 1917, everybody seemed to hope or fear that soldiering and military training carried great significance for the meanings attached to Finnish manhood. Yet in the aftermath of a short, but bloody civil war in 1918, there was no consensus on the outcome.