War continues in us
By Ritva Liisa Snellman
It is easy to see that the photograph was taken in Finland in the 1950s. The children wear home-made clothing, and their hair was also trimmed at home. The table cloth is worn, but the worst of the rationing period has eased, because there are two kinds of sugar on the table.
Mother has baked sweetbread, and the little Irja stirs her cup eagerly.
What is missing from the picture is the father of the family.
In that decade, fathers were always at work, cutting down trees, at construction sites, or in factories. Even if they were at home, they were often not really present.
Finland had a rough time in the war years. When peace came, plenty of exhausted, ragged, and broken men came back, who tried to pick up their lives from where they had been left a few years earlier.
It did not always work out that way. The war moved from the trenches to the homes, to veterans’ houses that were built on the edges of the cities, and housing that was set up in cleared forests. Some of those who had been at the front spoke about their experiences, while others said nothing at all. And then there were men who needed other warriors and a bottle of spirits as support.
The war had also been rough on children. It left 50,000 war orphans, 70,000 “war children” who had been evacuated to Sweden, 150,000 children who had been evacuated from areas near the front lines, and hundreds, and even thousands of children who had been fathered by a German soldier or a Russian prisoner of war. However, the war also left its mark on the lives of the baby boom generation born after the war.
Those whose childhood occurred in the 1950s learned quickly whose father was nice, whose was severe, who had shaky hands, who did not sleep, or if he did, would wake up the family with his nightmares and screams, and who would come back from a bout of drinking and chase the mother and children out into the cold night.
But it was not the practice to talk about these matters.
“Don’t bother your father”, the mothers would say with stern expressions on their faces.
An entire generation learned not to talk about difficult matters and taught the next generation to do the same. The model could be passed on to a third generation as well.
The little girl in the photograph also remained silent for a long time. Childhood in the village of Oikarinen near Rovaniemi was poor, but care-free and peaceful - at least when father was away. When he came back from cutting trees, or from his travels, the whole family had to be on guard. Even when he was sober, Father was restless and unpredictable. When he was drunk, he was aggressive and frightening.
“Not until I was an adult did I understand how the war had affected my life as well”, says Irja Wendisch, 55. “When I was young I thought that I had a difficult childhood. I didn’t understand that Father’s behaviour stemmed from his experiences at war.”
It took time to understand that, as well as distance, and three decades of living in Germany.
Wendisch pours espresso into tiny cups, and offers pastries with glazed berries on top, that she bought from the nearby bakery.
It is autumn in Berlin. The leaves on the trees have turned from green to yellow.
Right now the war seems to be very far away - a faded memory in the history books, from where it will be brought out again in November, when it is time to mark the anniversary of the beginning of the Winter War. It will be 70 years this year.
“But the damage caused by the war is felt in the lives of many people”, Wendisch says. “And they could be passed on to the next generation, if they are not handled right.”
Wendisch has written a book on the experiences of the baby boom generation scarred by the war. Me sotilaiden lapset (“We Children of Soldiers”) was published last summer. The book is Wendisch’s third. The previous two are also linked with the war.
The first book, Tohtori Conzelmannin sotavuodet Lapissa (“Dr. Conzelmann’s War Years in Lapland”) came about when the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine asked Wendisch, who worked as a journalist in Germany, to write something about German soldiers and Finland in its Finland supplement.
Wendisch called friends in her home village and asked them about German soldiers who had been there. She finished the article, and became interested in a German doctor who had worked in Oikarinen. She went through archives, looking for information. She sought out the doctor, who was still alive, and was able to read the letters that he had sent to Germany from Finland.
Small-scale history seemed to be her field, and Wendisch continued to conduct interviews and visit archives. Her second book Salatut lapset (“Secret Children”) dealt with the children of German soldiers in Finland.
Already then Wendisch knew that she also wants to write about the children of Finnish soldiers and what life was like in homes where the father of the family was in tatters after the war, and was incapable of being a caring and responsible parent.
“I thought for a long time if I had the right to write about my family. But I would not have been able to write exclusively about the experiences of other people and not about my own, considering that I am criticising the Finnish culture of silence.”
Writing about her own emotions and her own family members was the most difficult thing.
Wendisch walked the streets of Berlin day after day with a notebook in her pocket, and felt completely blocked.
Wendisch’s own childhood was typified by fear, which has followed her throughout her life until the most recent years. A child who has grown up in an atmosphere of fear will not have confidence of survival, even as an adult, and will worry about the future even when everything is well. After all, this cannot be the situation for very long.
Studies show that of those children who made it through the war, the ones who were able to live a normal childhood made it through the rough experiences relatively unscathed. The same is true for the years after the war.
Not all parents were up to the task, and children often had to live the lives of adults - mediating in problems between the parents, protecting their mothers, or functioning as a family scapegoat in order to spare their younger siblings from the wrath of their parents. Anguish, disappointment, insecurity, rootlessness, and a vague sense of shame were typical feelings, but they were not to be expressed, and they could not be talked about.
Most of the soldiers who returned from the front adapted to civilian life, or at least they appeared to do so. Feelings of depression caused by the experiences at war were covered up by keeping busy. It did not awaken attention, because the years of reconstruction were a time of optimistic activity. Society was expected to care for those who had suffered physical disabilities, and work was the best medicine for other troubles.
Children were also taught the virtues of hard work from a very early age, because success was seen to come exclusively by the sweat of the brow. Girls were supposed to be nice and to work diligently and inconspicuously. The boys were supposed to be tough workers who must not complain easily. The seeds of the fanatical Finnish work ethic were sown after the war.
When the age of shortages and rationing came to an end, Finland appeared to recover from the war. The country became industrialised, people moved from the countryside to the cities, or to Sweden. The standard of living improved, and life moved forward. The experiences of growing up in the postwar years were consigned to the dark corners of the memory, or they seemed to have been completely forgotten.
The baby boom generation, which are now reaching their 60s, are in a phase of their lives, where old traumas, repressed emotions, and childhood events that were left unexplained, can suddenly pop into mind. It is not about falling ill, but rather a need to ponder their own past.
“They must not be left unprocessed, because a person can fall ill in that way”, Wendisch says. She does not like to use the word “trauma”, which she feels has suffered an inflation of sorts. “Injury” is a better description of the impact left by wartime. Sometimes the injury is no more than an almost invisible crack, which does not cause any problems until later. It can be fixed by talking.
Immediately after the war people did not have the awareness to deal with trauma caused by the war. The whole concept was foreign. Men returning from the war were left to deal with their psychological injuries on their own and with the help of their families. There was hardly any talk about the psychological well-being of the children of soldiers.
Also in Germany it was considered self-evident as late as the 1960s that there was no need to ponder the psychological consequences of the war. Both researchers in the field and the children who had started their adulthood agreed. The matter was closed in a way.
The thinking has changed in recent years. German psychoanalyst Michael Ermann, a wartime child himself, published a study this year, according to which “the children of war” suffer considerably more than others from fears, depressions, and psychosomatic ailments than Germans do no the average.
Erdmann says that even babies and small children can hold memories of wartime events and perilous situations for decades - not on the conscious level, but through “body memory”. For instance, a bombing or similar dangerous situation can provoke a state of excitement in a child that the body never forgets. A similar stimulus can spark a flashback of panic or fear in adulthood.
Famine experienced by a mother has been found to affect the metabolism of her children and grandchildren. The wounds of war and the postwar years get passed down the generations as behaviour models. If the parents’ injuries are not diagnosed, or if they are silenced, the children are rendered unable to make a distinction between the older generation and theirs, and they cannot shake off the subjects that were never spoken about.
Wartime experiences are also passed down the generations through the way children are raised. As the baby boomers tried as best they could to avoid making the mistakes that their parents made, toughness in upbringing was exchanged for exaggerated leniency. Or then the parents might suffer from emotional disorders that are so deep that they are incapable of raising children at all.
Wendisch is at peace with her past now, but it took her years to reach that stage. Like many of her contemporaries, she had to become an adult too early. After finishing school she moved to Germany, studied at a university there, married her German boyfriend, got a family, and worked as a journalist.
Her life went well, until just before turning 40, she suddenly felt exhausted. With the help of a friend, she was admitted into classical psychoanalysis. After months of therapy she got in touch with memories that had been buried so deep that she understood that her exhaustion stemmed from her childhood fears.
Wendisch appreciates the way that the war is discussed in Germany. This is thanks to the so-called generation of ‘68, which forced the country and its media to adopt a new culture of discussion. The country is still confronting its past - sometimes excessively so, in Wendisch’s opinion.
In Finland the culture is quite the opposite. People talk about the war all the time, but there is also a tendency to be silent about it. There is no discussion, although there would be plenty of things to discuss.
One topic is Finland’s linkage with Germany.
“In Finland people still do not like to talk about how Finland tried to win the war. Instead, there is a tendency to use artful turns of phrase to talk about a separate war. It is hard for a country to handle its own shameful history.”
The war ended 65 years ago, but its traces can still be seen in Finnish society. People have shaken off their fanatical tendency to save on everything, but many grasp on to material goods to hide their insecurities. A powerful yearning of owning one’s own house can partly be a throwback to the period of reconstruction.
The baby boomers were thought to be diligent and independent. The same demands are put on today’s children as well. In Finland children can walk to school on their own. In many other countries, young children are not left at home alone in the afternoon.
Irja Wendisch summarises the special features of Finnish society in a short list: “Silence, shame, a culture of heavy drinking, and a constant emphasis on self-reliance.”
Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Gustav Schulman sees the severity and uncaring nature of Finnish society to be a result of values that were strengthened by the war.
“The tribulations of the past are seen as seriousness and a lack of joy. People want to eliminate everything that is ‘unnecessary’ from their lives. There is little appreciation for the arts and culture. Economics and the struggle for existence is more important.”
Schulman notes that Finland is the most violent country in Scandinavia, which is also reflected in the behaviour of the young.
School violence, including bullying, is three times as prevalent in Finland as it is in Sweden. There are many factors behind violent behaviour. Schulman feels that one possible reason for this could be the mental injuries caused by the war. If today’s parents cannot tolerate, or recognise emotions, and if they cannot deal with them, then they do not have sufficient means to help and support their children.
“We must keep in mind that the 1930s were a violent time, when people drank heavily, fought and were severe toward their children. The war simply reinforced existing cultural practices”, says Ville Kivimäki, who is doing research on the war experiences of the Finns for his doctoral dissertation.
“People in Finland constantly talk about the war, but the talk is a kind of loaded ranting, not an actual discussion”, Kivimäki says.
The war has also had some positive significance. Kivimäki takes as an example Historiaton sukupolvi (“Generation without History”), a study written ten years ago by Sirkka Ahonen, which examines the significance of the war for the youth of the 1990s.
The events of the Civil War of 1918 were a mere curiosity for the young people of that time, but the Winter War and the Continuation War offered a narrative that helped build a national identity. The story of the war was a safe survival story for many young people struggling during the recession. Finland survived the war, so it can also survive the recession.
In moments of collective adversity Finns often easily resort to warlike expressions and military terminology. The war was also used to bring up hard values for dealing with the recession of the 1990s. Tough survivors of the ilk of Lauri Törni were brought up.
Kivimäki feels that there is something false in speaking about the “spirit of the Winter War” in connection with economic slumps and recessions. “It is political rhetoric, because the sacrifices called for in the spirit of the Winter War apply to those who are weaker; they are not common sacrifices.”
Pragmatic and severe decision-making is, or can be, a throwback to practices learned through the war.
“However, on the front, people took care of the weaker ones. It was not just a myth”, Kivimäki notes.
One possible result of the war could be that Finland remains a global exception with respect to conscription. Serving in the military is still an important part of the growth of young men.
“War has been seen in Finland as a collective experience. What has not received very much attention is how varied a group of people the Finns were then, and how varied their experiences were. The discussion would be made easier if there were more research on the special groups”, Kivimäki says.
What kind of a country would Finland be now if the Winter War or a Continuation War had never happened?
“It is impossible to know”, Irja Wendisch says. “But it could be that Finland would resemble Sweden slightly more than it does now. That means that people in Finland would take things easier, and would dare feel confidence that life will see us through.”
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 18.10.2009
RITVA LIISA SNELLMAN / Helsingin Sanomat
ritva.liisa.snellman@hs.fi
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| 20.10.2009 - THIS WEEK |
 War continues in us |
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