Stories of National and Transnational Memory: Renegotiating the Finnish Conception of Moral Witness and National Victimhood

Abstract

while the constant avoidance of problematizing nationalist narrativization in Finland ensures a continuing memory practice and commemoration in the name of the nation, since the 1990s academia, politics, and everyday life have witnessed a turn to memory. This overwhelming interest in memory is, no doubt, the consequence of the rise of affordable and cheap technology that has made it easier to store and access material from the past, encouraging everyone to be his or her own archivist; of the end of the Cold War, which has forced nations and political communities to revise their narratives about the past; and of Europe’s admission to participating in the Holocaust, which has spawned a variety of commemorations and memorials. Yet in the renegotiations and reinterpretations of the so-called age of risk society, of late or second modernity, memory studies—memory being an ideal object of study for the humanities and social sciences—is afflicted by an increasing strain between what could be characterized as culturalist vs. universalist positions. Arising from a Bourdieuan disciplinary struggle over the right to interpret the past, this tension also sometimes marks a disciplinary divide between historians and social theorists: scholars who stress the necessity of a cultural connection between the past and the present vs. scholars who advocate for memory as a platform for future transnational solidarity.¹