Between Defeat and Victory: Finnish memory culture of the Second World War

The article focuses on five essential phenomena in the Finnish memory culture relating to the three Finnish wars fought in 1939–1945, namely, (1) the memory of the fallen; (2) the influential work by author Väinö Linna; (3) the contested memory politics and veteran cultures in the 1960s and 1970s; (4) Germany and the Holocaust in the Finnish memory culture; and (5) the ‘neo-patriotic’ turn in the commemoration of the wars from the end of the 1980s onwards. The Finnish memory culture of 1939–1945 presents an interesting case of how the de facto lost wars against the Soviet Union have been shaped into cornerstones of national history and identity that continue to play a significant role even today. Using the growing research literature on the various aspects of the Finnish war memories and memory politics, the article aims, first, at outlining a synthesis of the memory culture's central features and, second, at challenging the common contemporary conception, according to which the Finnish war veterans would have been forgotten, neglected and even disgraced during the post-war decades, to be ‘rehabilitated’ only from the end of the 1980s onwards.