Muted National Memory

Abstract

The encoding of female bodies as symbols of the nation is a multifaceted process where some female bodies are uplifted to represent the nation and its honour, but others are abjected. I examine in this article Finnish women who fraternized with German soldiers during the Second World War. The bodies of these women carry historical and political content that could not be reconciled with the Finnish post-war national identity narrative that sought closure. The Finnish national subject came into being through the establishment of ‘Hitler's brides’ as others, and a variety of state-initiated disciplinary mechanisms were used to silence them. The taboo of speech became a lifelong condition that was broken just before the biological deaths of these women. When the taboo was broken their corporeal representations and voices were not simple representations of a past event, but political performances and utterances which intervened in a past and present national context. I show how the agentative figure that emerged was not that of a superstite (survivor) witness with confessional tendencies but that of a parrhesiastes, the one who speaks the truth.

Keywords:

• abject
• agency
• female body
• silence
• trauma
• voice
• war

Acknowledgements

For insightful comments of an earlier version of this article, I want to thank the external reviewers. Research for this article was funded by the Academy of Finland.

Notes on contributor

Tarja Väyrynen is Academy Research Fellow at the University of Tampere. Her current research deals with post-conflict trauma politics, hegemonic history-writing and silence. She is leading a research group on corporeality, movement and politics (COMPORE) and has published recently, for example, in Body & Society, European Journal of Women's Studies and Millennium: Journal of International Studies.

Notes

1 See, for example, Ehlstain (1987), Mosse (1996), Helén (1997), Yuval-Davis (1997), Butalia (1998), Nagel (1998), Das (2000, 2008), Enloe (2000), Jarvis (2004), Valenius (2004), Hutchings (2008), Siltala (2009).

2 On Nazi ideology and its racial categories in Finland see Junila (2000: 143); Westerlund (2011: 121–33); for an alternative view Heiskanen (2011); and for racial ideology in other European countries see Ericsson and Simonsen (2005); Kundrus (2005); Ericsson (2011b). It should be noted that Finland was not a part of the so-called Lebensborn system, which provided children's homes for children born outside marriage to Nazi soldiers.

3 On out-of-wedlock birth rates and social benefits see Junila (2000: 262–75); Uhlenius (2011: 130); Westerlund (2011: 56–7, 113–25); on the German child support system see Timm (2005).

4 For a critique that is targeted at the embodied view of trauma used in this article see Ruth Leys (2000) and for a problematization of the relationship between the traumatic event and its subsequent representation see Susannah Radstone (2007).