Latvia’s Vanished National Heroes

Abstract

The nineteenth century saw the invention of the national hero. His main function was to serve as an ideal for the nation. Latvia, however, is an exception to this general rule: after it regained independence in 1990, the national hero simply disappeared and no heroic image emerged. On the contrary, it was now the victim that became the emblem of Latvia’s regained independence. The country, of course, did not lack “heroes,” for there were in fact many candidates for the creation of a national hero, yet the hero as such no longer seemed to fit the new state. While the path Latvia had chosen of rejecting or refusing national heroes had an impact on its integration into Europe, it also contributed to ongoing frictions among its own ethnic communities.

Notes

1. See, for example, the mythos of Langemarck in Karl Unruh, Langemarck. Legende und Wirklichkeit (Koblenz: Bernard & Graefe Verlag, 1986). According to the mythos during a battle in November 1914 in the First World War young German soldiers while singing “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” broke through enemy line and took 2000 French soldiers as prisoners.

2. The Scholl siblings were executed for participating in the non-violent resistance organization White Rose against Nazi Germany. A large number of schools are named after them. Within years after the death of Bismarck, over a hundred monuments were erected in Germany in his honor; however, after 1945 this was no longer the case.

3. There are some other smaller minority groups, like Polish, Roma, and Livs, but they do not play a significant role in the public debate.

4. “Gesellschaften imaginieren Selbstbilder und konstituieren über die Generationsfolge hinweg eine Identität, indem sie eine Kultur der Erinnerung ausbilden; und sie tun das—dieser Punkt ist für uns entscheidend—auf ganz verschiedene Weise.” Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 2007), 18. My translation.

5. Anthony D. Smith, Myth and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 65. Quoted in Guntis Smidchens, “National Heroic Narratives in the Baltics as a Source for Nonviolent Political Action,” Slavic Review 66.3 (2007): 487.

6. While teaching in Latvia I would ask my students about their heroes. They all had big problems answering the question.

7. Isaac I. Schwarzbart, Is the Commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Going to Remain a Permanent National Memorial Day? Survey and Analysis (World Jewish Congress, 1954), 2. See Markus Meckl, “The Memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” The European Legacy 13.7 (2008): 815–24.

8. To borrow a phrase from Daina S. Eglitis and Laura Ardava’s “The Politics of Memory: Remembering the Baltic Way Twenty Years after 1989,” Europe-Asia Studies 64.6 (2012): 1035.

9. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Werke, ed. Wilhelm G. Jacobs and Peter L. Österreich (Frankfurt a. Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997), vol. 2, 629.

10. For the nineteenth-century invention of the Baltic heroes, see Smidchens, “National Heroic Narratives in the Baltics,” 484–508.

11. Although many historical events contributed to this success, the idea of the nation and its rhetoric were heavily influenced by German Romanticism and German Idealism. See, among others, G. H. Merkel, Die Letten vorzüglich in Liefland am Ende des philosophischen Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zur Völker- und Menschenkunde, ed. Thomas Taterka (Wedemark: Harro v. Hirschheydt, 1998).

12. The Rīgas Brāļu kapi (Brothers’ Cemetery) in Riga commemorates the soldiers who died in the struggle for the country’s independence.

13. See Smidchens, “National Heroic Narratives in the Baltics,” 484–508.

14. Daiga Mazversite, “Nekad nenolasita runa,” Avots 1 (1989): 43, quoted in Smidchens, “National Heroic Narratives in the Baltics.” Translated by Smidchens, 489.

15. “Mir scheint, dass der treffende Hinweis von J. Lapins über ‚die an Heldentaten armen Zeiten’ in großen Masse die plötzliche und große Popularität der lettischen Schützen erklären. Jede patriotische Propaganda braucht zur Kriegszeit heldenhafte Beispiele, um die ihrigen anzuspornen.” Uldis Germanis, Oberst Vacietis und die lettischen Schützen im Weltkrieg und in der Oktoberrevolution (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1974), 88.

16. See Germanis’s detailed analysis in Oberst Vacietis. Many of the Riflemen who stayed in Russia after the revolution were later murdered by Stalin.

17. Daina Bleiere, Ilgvars Butulis, Antonijs Zunda, Aivars Stranga, and Inesis Feldmanis, History of Latvia: The 20^th Century (Riga: Jumava, 2006), 443.

18. Bleiere, et al., History of Latvia, 444. Translated by Valdis Bērzin̜š.

19. Andrejs Plakans, A Concise History of the Baltic States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 398.

20. Daina S. Eglitis, Imagining the Nation: History, Modernity and Revolution in Latvia (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 59.

21. http://latvianhistory.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/the-times-of-barricades-in-1991/; accessed 28 January 2014.

22. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/02/opinion/l-latvia-and-the-jews-384890.html; accessed 16 January 2014.

23. Artis Pabriks and Aldis Purs, Latvia: The Challenges of Change (London: Routledge, 2001), 53. Another Russian speaking participant Marina Kostenecka, recalls the event: “By Sure, the main speech at the Plenum was delivered by Mavriks Vulfsons. The public statement made by the Art Academy Professor of the existence of Secret Protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact became not simply a sensation, but a signal for the start of the Singing revolution. In Latvia’s history, Vulfsons’ speech will forever remain the program document that launched Atmoda [awakening]. … We cannot forget what it was that united people of different nationalities at the barricades.” Marina Kostenecka, writer and journalist, recalls on a blog, at: http://www.lv90.lv/?id=1670&obj=1752&setlang=1; accessed 29 December 2014.

24. Mavriks Vulfsons, Nationality Latvian? No, Jewish: Cards on the Table, trans. Karlis Streips (Riga: Jumava, 1998), 81–83.

25. Daina Bleiere, History of Latvia, 432–33.

26. Guntars Abols, The Contribution of History to Latvian Identity (Riga: Nacionālais apgāds, 2003), 255.

27. “Slūžas vaļā,” interview with Dzemma Skulme, Ir (3–9 October 2013), trans. Zane Brikovska.

28. Seen by the author on a visit to the museum in December 2013. The period of “awakening” and the barricades has a strong presence in Latvia’s collective memory; however, as this inscription shows, the contribution of people of non-Latvian origins is simply erased from this memory and nationalized.

29. Quoted in Smidchens, “National Heroic Narratives in the Baltics,” 488.

30. Here I should also mention Žanis Lipke who saved more than 50 Jews in Riga during the Holocaust.

31. See chap. 7 of Klāvs Sedlenieks, “And Burn Today Whom Yesterday They Fed”: Citizens and State in Montenegro (Tallinn: Tallinn University Press, 2013).

32. Bertolt Brecht, [Unglücklich das Land, das Helden nötig hat.], sc. 12 of Leben des Galilei (1939; Life of Galileo); my translation.

33. Eglitis and Ardava, “The Politics of Memory: Remembering the Baltic Way,” 1045.

34. After teaching for many years in Latvia, I recall that none of my Latvian students seemed to have been aware that the first leader of the Red Army was an ethnic Latvian; on the other hand, whenever we discussed the Holocaust, they often mentioned the high number of Jewish communists, but never mentioned the ethnic Latvians within the Secret Police.

35. Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941–1944: The Missing Center (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1996), 321, 327, 329.

36. Andrew Ezergailis, Nazi/Soviet Disinformation about the Holocaust in Latvia: Daugavas Vanagi: Who Are They? Revisited (Riga: The Occupation Museum of Latvia, 2005).

37. Or in the case of Iceland by republishing the heroic Sagas.

38. Smidchens, “National Heroic Narratives in the Baltics,” 488.

39. One aspect of a victim’s identity is described by Jean Améry in At the Mind’s Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980). Being a victim, he writes, nourished a resentment that “nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past. … and blocks the exit to the genuine human dimension, the future” (68).

40. Jean-Michel Chaumont, La Concurrence des victimes. Génocide, identité, reconnaissance (Paris: La Découverte, 1997).