The 1918 Finnish Civil War Revisited: The Digital Aftermath

Abstract

Today heritage sites not only preserve the memory of grandiose moments of history, but also include the darker ones, which were previously either preferably forgotten or went unrecognised. In Finnish history, it is difficult to find a more painful example of these "sites of pain and shame" than the 1918 Civil War. This article examines the different ways that the 1918 Finnish Civil War is commemorated and represented on the Internet today, on both private and institutional websites as well as in social media, from the perspective of participatory history culture and vernacular authority. People have always shared information concerning the past with each other, but the way that this can be observed on the Internet today is novel. Only after the rise of new technology, the Internet and especially Web 2.0, people have had the possibility to share their experiences and interpretations side by side with history professionals to this degree. In relation to memory and heritage politics, this means that we need to re-examine the boundaries between private and public memory and official and unofficial heritage, and recognise new forms of collaboration between audiences and institutions.

Difficult heritage on social network sites: An integrative review

“…The 20th-century history on SNS was mostly dominated by WW1 and WW2 ( N = 38). Studies related to WW1 address events such as the Greek–Turkish war (Halstead, 2018; Mylonas, 2017), the Finnish civil war (Heimo, 2014), the Anzac assault in Gallipoli (Sumartojo, 2020) and the fate of Austro-Hungarian Empire descendants in Italy (Irimiás and Volo, 2018). Additional studies, not related to WW1, addressed the traumatic social media memory of the Holodomor famine in Ukraine in 1932–1933 (Paulsen, 2013; Zhukova, 2020) and of the Italian Hall tragedy in 1913 during the Copper Strike in Michigan (Heimo, 2017).…”

“…Two media concepts were summoned repeatedly as tools for understanding memory practices and dealing with difficult heritage on SNS. First, several works referred to ‘participatory culture’, a notion coined by Henry Jenkins et al (2015) to describe human participation in mediated events (Heimo, 2014; Heimo, 2017; Knudsen, 2016; Knudsen and Stage, 2013; Morgan and Pallascio, 2015). Two related terms, participation and crowdsourcing, considered as mechanisms for creating multiple interpretive perspectives and communicative realities, were illustrated in studies of conflicting stories of South Africa (Bosch, 2020), the Kashmir uprising (Osuri, 2019), intangible heritage in Turkey (Pietrobruno, 2014), Cambodia (Benzaquen, 2014), Rhodesia (Kirkegaard, 2017) and Poland (Arrigoni and Galani, 2019a).…”

Genre - text - interpretation: Multidisciplinary perspectives on folklore and beyond

“…The brochure for the collection, however, made no mention of any wars. The representations of history culture through oral history, fiction, local history and the internet form an ongoing, controversial and boundless process concerning the year 1918 in Finland (see 2014a). Because especially war history, tends to foreground certain facts, dates of battles and victories, there is a need for counter-narratives and counter-knowledge, the stories concerned with human experiences and suffering.…”

‘On Election Day the Husband Tied His Wife to a Table Leg to Stop Her from Voting’: Political Narratives, Gender and Archived Heritage in Finland

“…Evidence of the societal split was present on a day-to-day level, as people did their shopping and banking, or even in their leisure time, when practising sports or enjoying other kinds of hobbies. As recently as this year, the Finnish media asked the country's citizens how the Civil War had affected their families (see also Heimo 2014). The question quickly spurred a lively discussion on the Internet: while some presented evidence of how traces of the political past continued to haunt even the younger generations, others dismissed history's influence on the present generations.…”