The History Man

Jason Lavery arrived in Ylivieska as a 16-year-old Rotary exchange student in 1982. He can't stop coming back.

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By Ritva Liisa Snellman
     
      The start of courses at the country’s summer universities is, well, a pretty sure sign of summer’s having arrived.
      And an almost equally confident indicator is that the Helsinki Summer University kicks off with a course on Finnish History from Prehistoric Times to the Present, and the name on the door is Prof. Jason Lavery, Ph.D.
      This will be Lavery’s thirteenth summer teaching in Finland.
     
He regards his intensive course of eight lectures - which begins on Monday and runs until June 12th - as a very useful teaching experience.
      In the space of 24 “academic hours”, open to the public and with the opportunity for students to earn academic credits, he should take his listeners through 10,000 years of Finnish history, and when those listeners represent an extremely broad congregation, the lecturer has to be very careful and precise in his choice of words.
     
Two-thirds of those who enrol on this course are foreigners.
      The remaining third are Finns, and they, quite naturally, are a much tougher house to win over.
      A good many Finns will tell you flat-out that no foreigner, least of all an American, can know Finnish history well enough to pass it on to others.
      “On the contrary”, Lavery tends to respond to the charge. “A foreigner has the ability to be more objective about the topic.”
      “Of course I have my own particular predilections for this and that, since I’ve been dealing with Finland one way and another for 25 years. But that does not influence my work as a historian. The aim of the course is to open up Finnish history to foreigners, so that they would have a better understanding of the present.”
     
The 10,000-year span that is promised contains a few historical chapters that still have powers to steam up Finnish audiences.
      The bloody events of 1918 and Finland's position during the Cold War are just such hot-button issues.
      Lavery takes the battles of the Winter War (1939-40) and the Continuation War (1941-44) at a brisk canter, since advances, tactical retreats, and shifting battlefronts are not really as pivotal from the historian’s point of view as those Finns who make a study of military history would have one believe.
     
Lavery does not get fazed by the occasional minor emotional tempests.
      His task as lecturer is to offer facts and to describe certain interpretations of history, and a few controversies that still exist to divide opinions.
      To the Finns, the country’s Civil War (or whatever name - and there are several - one chooses to give it) is a very significant matter, and it is still discussed and debated 90 years on.
      Lavery does not find this in the slightest bit surprising: “Hey, my country’s Civil War took place nearly 150 years ago, and that is still up for discussion, too.”
     
Finland turned out to be a place of fatal attraction for Lavery, right from his teens.
      At 16, he wanted to be an exchange student in Europe for a year, preferably in some German-speaking country. Unfortunately, the only places going spare were in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland.
      With nothing much more concrete to go on than the fact that he liked winter sports and thought “the language might be an interesting challenge”, he picked Finland.
      “Well, come on, I was only 16 and I was dumb”, he grins.
     
Lavery found himself plunked down in Ylivieska for just under a year.
      Nowadays, he looks back on it less as a custodial sentence and more as a wonderful opportunity.
      A year in a very standard provincial town has proved to have been a very significant experience.
      Ylivieska is a town of around 13,000 souls in Ostrobothnia, about 120 kilometres south of Oulu. It is not famous for anything very much except it was the birthplace of Finland’s 4th President Kyösti Kallio, and these days it is for some reason a Mecca for people buying used cars in the region.
      But the truth of the matter is that a year in a place like this teaches one a great deal more about Finland than a similar stint in the fleshpots of the south, like Helsinki or Espoo.
      Lavery’s stay in Ylivieska went smoothly enough, since he was on a Rotary International exchange programme, and the Rotary families he lived with had prior experience of exchange students and their needs.
     
He learned the language (another thing that might be tougher in Helsinki), made firm friends who are still his friends, and got enough emotional glue on his hands from the Finnish way of life that he kept flying back, summer after summer, to meet his mates in in Ylivieska.
      One summer passed doing a season working in a Helsinki hotel, and he also spent one academic year at the History Faculty at the University of Helsinki.
      Back in the United States, Lavery studied history, first at Berkeley in California, and later doing post-grad and doctoral studies at Yale.
      As the subject for his doctoral thesis, he chose relations between Scandinavia and Germany in the 16th century under the title The Holy Roman Empire and the Danish-Swedish Rivalry, 1563-1576. He preferred not to do his doctoral work on Finnish history, as he did not want to get labelled in academic circles as some kind of esoteric Finn-freak.
     
In 2002, he became Associate Professor of European History at Oklahoma State University.
      His chair at Oklahoma State carries teaching requirements and a research component, but he has the luxury of choosing the subjects he wants to study himself. These days they naturally revolve around Finnish history.
      “I’ve also had offers of funding from Finland and some interesting project openings” says Lavery.
      As a senior academic, he no longer has to worry much about possibly being pigeon-holed as a weird Finland specialist, and anyway it has already happened: in the U.S. Lavery is seen more as a scholar of Finnish and Scandinavian history than as a Germany expert.
     
Two years ago he published a snappy one-volume History of Finland (Greenwood Press).
      Now he has spent a year at the University of Helsinki on a visiting fellowship, studying the Reformation era in the 16th century.
      Lavery believes that there has been a relative dearth of writing about the role of the church in Finnish history.
      One reason might be that the Evangelical Lutheran Church has always been a presence here, and as such it has rather been taken for granted and not explored very much.
     
Finally, there has to be the compulsory question that always gets demanded of foreigners.
      What’s the best thing about Finland, then?
      “Salmiakki*, salmiakkikoskenkorva, and Helsinki IFK”, comes back the response in a flash, presumably much to the disappointment of fans of Jokerit, the capital's other league hockey team.
      “Oh, and I like coffee, too.”
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 1.6.2008
     
     
Finland from Prehistory to Present (24 lessons, 3 credits) Prof. Jason Lavery, Ph.D. June 2 - June 12, Mon - Thu 17:15 - 20:00 Helsinki Congress Paasitorni, Paasivuorenkatu 5 A (You have missed a couple of lectures, but you can still catch everything from 1809 onwards. Further details at the link below
     
*Translator’s Note: Salmiakki is... well, probably better you don’t know what it is chemically. But suffice it to say, it’s the salty licorice product that all Finns miss most (along with rye bread) as soon as they go abroad. And mixed with Koskenkorva, the grain spirit liquor also much beloved of Finns-who-drink, it forms a vodka cocktail whose strong licorice flavour can blind the unwary to the almost 40% alcohol kick it carries. So much so that the ready-mixed bottles were actually withdrawn from sale by the state liquor retailer Alko for some years. When they returned, they were milder, at 32% alcohol by volume.


Links:
  Helsinki Summer University: Finland from Prehistory to Present
  Jason Lavery: The History of Finland
  Salmiakki (Wikipedia)
  Salmiakki Koskenkorva (Wikipedia)

RITVA LIISA SNELLMAN / Helsingin Sanomat
ritva.liisa.snellman@hs.fi