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-1945 Trauma as a social construction 1.Theory of Cultural Trauma The Unknown Soldier was turned into a survival Story. From individual to Collective.

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 between elite (official politics) and people.

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 historiography and 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?)