Reintegrating a Traumatized Nation: Grief, Memory, and Reconciliation at Finnish Civil War Sites

Author(s): Timo Ylimaunu; Paul R. Mullins

Year: 2019

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Transformation of Historical Archaeology: Papers in Honor of Charles E Orser, Jr" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In 1918 Finland fought an enormously brutal civil war between "White" and "Red" factions. During and after the war, victorious White forces conducted mass executions and buried large numbers of Reds and their sympathizers in shared graves, but there was very little formal commemoration of that landscape of Red mortality. Yet during World War II Finns were compelled to collectively fight and acknowledge still-bitter 1918 divisions. That process is reflected in the memorialization of Civil War sites that had witnessed many of the war’s most traumatic moments. This paper examines how memorials acknowledged national grief, constructed the war in public memory, and aspired to reconcile Finland.

Cite this Record

Reintegrating a Traumatized Nation: Grief, Memory, and Reconciliation at Finnish Civil War Sites. Timo Ylimaunu, Paul R. Mullins. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, St. Charles, MO. 2019 ( tDAR id: 449242)

Keywords

General
Civil War Memorials Memory

Geographic Keywords
Finland

Temporal Keywords
20th Century

Spatial Coverage

min long: 19.648; min lat: 59.807 ; max long: 31.582; max lat: 70.089 ;

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 174