Search results for "world war II"

Landscapes of Loss and Destruction: Sámi Elders’ Childhood Memories of the Second World War Sámi Elders’ Childhood Memories of the Second World War

2019

The so-called Lapland War between Finland and Germany at the end of the Second World War led to a mass-scale destruction of Lapland. Both local Finnish residents and the indigenous Sami groups lost their homes, and their livelihoods suffered in many ways. The narratives of these deeply traumatic experiences have long been neglected and suppressed in Finland and have been studied only recently by academics and acknowledged in public. In this text, we analyze the interviews with four elders of one Sami village, Vuotso. We explore their memories, from a child’s perspective, scrutinizing the narration as a multilayered affective process that involves sensual and embodied dimensions of memory.

‘Where the F… is Vuotso?’ : heritage of Second World War forced movement and destruction in a Sámi reindeer herding community in Finnish Lapland

2017

In this paper we discuss the heritage of the WWII evacuation and the so-called ‘burning of Lapland’ within a Sámi reindeer herding community, and assess how these wartime experiences have moulded, and continue to mould, the ways people memorialise and engage with the WWII material remains. Our focus is on the village of Vuotso, which is home to the southernmost Sámi community in Finland. The Nazi German troops established a large military base there in 1941, and the Germans and the villagers lived as close neighbours for several years. In 1944 the villagers were evacuated before the outbreak of the Finno-German ‘Lapland War’ of 1944–1945, in which the German troops annihilated their militar…

Spanish Fascist Women’s Transnational Relations during the Second World War: Between Ideology and Realpolitik

2018

Spanish fascist women played a very active role in the Falange’s cross-border relations with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. From the very beginning, fascist women took a preeminent place in these contacts and exchanges in order to see with their own eyes how both fascist models were at a practical level. These relationships between fascist women’s organizations were born out of deep ideological affinity and were especially fluid, firstly on a bilateral level and after 1940 on the ‘New Order’ Europe-wide multilateral, transnational collaboration. However, they lacked neither of political calculation nor could abstract from the wider fra…

Exotismo y educación colonial. El guineano como curiosidad en las ferias muestrario de Valencia, 1942-1948

2020

El propósito de este artículo es analizar la presencia de Guinea en las ferias muestrario que se celebraron en Valencia durante la década de 1940. En ellas, de acuerdo con la doctrina de la Hispanidad, la colonia se delimitó como un territorio a civi­lizar –cristianizar y españolizar–, siendo de vital importancia en el discurso público la retórica nacionalcatolicista que entreveraba negocio y misión. Para ello, los organizadores optaron por la estrategia de poner en escena los recursos naturales de la colonia y a sus habitantes, especialmente a los fang de la Guinea continental. El interés del caso valenciano es doble. Por un lado, nos permite entender las dinámicas puestas en marcha por el…

The Saving Narratives of Daša Drndić

2018

The starting point for this paper is the assumption that by obsessive revisiting the events of World War II, the Croatian writer Dasa Drndic attempts to influence indirectly the present. It parallels her narrators’ declarations who—with a great dose of probability—can be simultaneously read as her alter egos. Hence, the article investigates and describes the strategy whose main aim is to retain memory about the past. In Drndic’s texts this function is achieved through the acts of archiving, writing down, and grouping. These acts constitute non-standard ways to enhance the literary text with, for example, whole pages filled with the victims’ names (integrated within the text or acting as a p…

Ambivalent Déjà-vu: World War II in the poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles

2021

This article addresses how the poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles enters into a dialogue with the memory of World War II. Poems by Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Sinéad Morrissey are analysed, showing how World War II is a controversial source of comparison for these poets. While World War II provides important ways of framing the suffering and claustrophobia of the Northern Irish conflict, evident differences also mean that such comparisons are handled warily and with some irony. The poems are highly self-conscious utterances that seek to unsettle and develop generic strategies in the light of traumatic suffering. This essay draws on Michael Rothberg’s concept of mult…

Pillage and Restitution: What Became of Works of Art Removed from France to Germany during World War II?, Paris, 17 November 1996

1997

Remembering and Forgetting, Discovering and Cherishing

2018

The events of the Second World War left considerable material remains in Finnish Lapland, ranging from the remnants of structures that were destroyed in the 1944–45 Lapland War, through to small, portable objects connected to soldiers, prisoners of war and civilians. These material remains have variously been saved and cherished by survivors and their families, disregarded as ‘war junk’, ‘discovered’ by hobbyists exploring the landscape, amassed and exchanged by private collectors, and accessioned into official museum collections. These various processes represent transformations of material culture to take on various meanings and embodiments, depending on the different individuals and orga…

Post memory and cinematic affect in The Midwife

2017

The Second World War has proved a rich source of inspiration for fiction films worldwide. The Finnish fiction film The Midwife (Kätilö, Antti J. Jokinen, 2015) is aimed at an international audience with a story that takes place in the context of the Lapland War in Finland in 1944. The film tells of a romantic relationship between a local woman and a member of the German army, in a highly affective manner. This article argues that the film downplays elements that might have interested the national, or local, audience, and that it privileges affect over knowledge. To bring out the film’s transnational character, the article begins by analysing it in the context of national, or local, and glob…

Latvian Emigrants in the United States: Different Waves, Different Identities?

2019

AbstractThis chapter studies the relationships and interaction among the Latvian emigrants from different migration waves in the United States. It specifically examines reasons for the inability of the existing and politically and culturally active Latvian diaspora community in the United States to integrate newcomers from Latvia. The diaspora community is formed mostly of migrants who left Latvia after World War II. The research is based on a mix of two sources of information and methods – qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with the ‘new’ Latvian emigrants in the United States in 2014, who began arriving there in 1991 and quantitative data analysis of The Emigrant Communities of L…