Introduction
The article written by Anssi Halmesvirta is divided into
two parts and mostly based on experiences in Finland
Halmesvirta understands and defines public history in
the following way:
"I understand
by it non-academic history discourses or such discourses which use or abuse
arguments and views on history in public for partisan, day-to-day political and
ideological purposes".[2]
Part I
1. The development of public history is related to
the nation-building or eventual nation-dismantling. Halmesvirta’s opinion
states that it is vital to study mechanisms on how abstract ideas as a nation
are communicated. This approach should deal with how different collective identities are
being created and new memories are being manufactured or old revived in public
history debates.[3] According to the writer, one important dimension of this process is the nationalist myth-making where
fabricated stories and even lies are used in order to create a false collective
memory and identity. This can be exemplified by two examples from Halmesvirta
on how the collective memory can be shaped and used in different ways towards
different actors: [4]
a) France
have confessed that the wartime Vichy
was responsible for
deportations of Jews to concentration camps. However France
had it difficult to confess the crimes the French colonial administration
committed in Congo
b) The myth of how Finland USSR Finland
2. Halmesvirtas second point was that public
history remains usable in and open to political struggles. As such it appears according
to him that public history contains and promotes particular (partisan)
interests concerning the representations of power. One example was the view on
history regarding Finland
3. Halmesvirtas third point was that there
were creative, radical or oppositional representations of public history which
could challenge the state (or church) control for recollection, commemoration
and publication. Here he took example from his home village Kiuruvesi in Central Finland . In his village the memory of the Civil
War between the Reds (Socialists and Communists with crofters) and Whites (the
bourgeoisie with great landowners) of the year 1918 was regarded still very
much alive. Following the defeat of the Reds in spring 1918, the so-called
White Terror started and in Halmesvirta’s home village some Reds were summarily
executed nearby the village cemetery. Their corpses were buried in a far-off
forest which later became the ‘Red’ cemetery. The memories about the ”Reds”, or better said ”Red
memories”, were awakened in the 1990s when local Socialists proposed in the
village council that a monument should be erected in the memory of the Reds on
the spot of their execution. This proposal was opposed by the extreme
right-wing parties in the council arguing that the ‘Reddish’ monument too close to the cemetery
of the Whites which would ‘insult’ the memory of the White martyrs of the Civil
War buried there. The issue became so sensitive that issue became that after
some political skirmish the idea of the Red monument was dropped as the village
council majority voted against it. Finally, the Reds decided to erect their own
monument in the far-off cemetery of their own. Two contradictory
interpretations of the memory of the Civil War still live in the village today
irrespective of what the professional historians have already agreed on it.
4. The fourth point
was that the public history displays and represents the ‘winners’ such as
”great men”, heroes or cultic figures,
and ‘losers’ or ‘victims’ positing such moral polarities that incite controversies.
One recent example of this was the erection of a statue of ex-President Ronald
Reagan at a central square (Szabadságtér) in Budapest in Hungary Budapest
5. His fifth point
was that people evidently, as exemplified in the fourth point, tend to illustrate
or make emotions relevant to past events or persons. Halmesvirta’s opinion
is that it would be necessary to study how this bears on public history and
individualized views of about history and memory. According to him, it seems
that memories created by public media are becoming more intimate so that some
people are somehow cherishing their own memories privately. He took an example
about how in Finland popularity of local, village, or family history is quite
high and many amateur historians who are running after memories of the elderly
people which are about to be forgotten.[7]
6. The last point in the work of Halmesvirta
was the hypothesis that also public history is ‘owned’ since the memory-building
is controlled and manipulated by some particular interest groups. In the case
of Finland Finland Finland,
Part II
The second part of
Halmesvirta´s paper examined what he considered to be a neglected theme of
public history studies. This regarded the commemoration as expressed, preserved
and reworked in memorial speeches. According to him, there is a commonly held
belief in nationalism that if a nation does not have collective memories, it
may not be revered and can be forgotten, even destroyed.[8]
Therefore, the more beautiful the memories are, the better for the nation, as
he wrote.
Furthermore he
wrote that consequently, it may not be amiss to study national memories and concentrate
on the memories fashioned around such personalities and institutions that were
depicted as educators of a nation. Only after this approach, one could proceed
to studying cult practices and systems built in public history to honour and
adore these
sublime
institutions and persons in the process of pantheonization.[9]
Halmesvirta exemplified with the performance of the politicians in Finland
A) Interprets the
(nationalistic, neo-nationalistic, patriotic) ethos of the times
B) Performs the
speech-act itself
C) Shows eloquence
D) Aims at pleasing
the audience
E) Praises the dead
(laudation)
F) Offers epidictic
(show-off) amplification of feeling, and
G) Sometimes
assumes a poet’s role
Halmesvirta’s
opinion was that all of these aspects should be taken into account in order to
explain and understand the means by which, for example, memory of a person or a
personality cult is being constructed and kept alive through generations.
Furthermore on also has to study the long-term continuum and the varying
contexts of the memorial speeches dedicated to the ‘a great person’ because
this is the means by which one can detect and analyze the changes of
commemorative tone
and voice in a specific political culture.[10]
Therefore from the
methodological point of view, a few hypotheses of what the memorial speech is
can be put forward according to tom Halmesvirta [11]:
1) It is a document
of the frame of mind of an age, and in this sense it can be studied by methods
of intellectual history
2) It shows how a
person was significant to his times as evaluated by his fellow-men and women
3) It does not only
”speak out” a personality cult but manifests a cultic
meaning of a leading
idea or ideology of the time
4) It provides
self-affirmation of identity to the audience
5) It paints a
publicly moralized portrait of the character of the ”great person”
6) It has an
independent, pragmatic function in a political culture (as part of public
history and memory culture)
7) It blurs the
borderline between the audience and the orator (I = We)
8) It tends to
homogenize a society by abolishing hierarchies
9) It re-creates
continuity to personality cults by transmitting the tradition of commemoration
to the future
10) It can express
bias from the part of the orator, and
11) It has many
modes (lament, consolation, appeasement, reprimand, confession etc.) to express
feeling.
One more general
point of this list was that the memorial speeches are ceremonial acts which are
performed at various levels of history-political culture ranging from every-day
funeral speeches to memorial speeches delivered. The starting-point in the
long-term research of memorial speeches can be dated back to the early 19th century
when nationalism in Europe
started to develop. Halmesvirta states that human beings and institutions
(idols), the authors, disseminators, supporters and transmitters as well as
rewriters of traditions have been neglected while the concepts and structures
of nationalism have been extensively studied. Therefore cult-studies can be
contextualized according to the three phases or types through which nationalism
emerged in modernity: [12]
(1) the phase of nation-building
when nationalism was transformed from cultural revivalism towards political
nationalism in the 19th century
(2) the interwar
(c. 1918–1939) phase of aggressive nationalism when nationalism assumed forms and
ideas of dreading and/or maligning the ‘Other’, the potential enemy or neighbour
threatening its existence and identity, and
(3) the postwar
(1945–) phase of reconstruction and rebuilding of the nation in the spirit of
optimism and hope.
Halmesvirta means
that the frame of mind of the three types of nationalism left its mark in the
representations of cult giving them their distinctive expressions to be
studied. Therefore this approach include many factors that have influenced the
development of nationalism in a concrete way and thus makes it possible to
compare memory cultures and politics in different European countries in order
to create model of cult-making processes. The method introduced by Halmesvirta
comprehends the elevation of the role of persons ( such as ”great men”) and
institutions (such as ”Universities”) behind nationalism (including
patriotism).[13]
[1]
Halmesvirta, Anssi. ”Public History in the Making. A New Methodological
Approach to Study Memory-Building. CeuS Working Paper No. 2011/2 for Jean
Monnet Center for European Studies. Publication date: 2011-02-01. Downloaded: 2016-05-28. Website: http://www.monnet-centre.uni-bremen.de/pdf/wp/2011-2%20Halmesvirta,%20Anssi.pdf
[2] Ibid
s.3
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
s.5-6.
[5] Ibid
s.8
[6] Ibid
s.9
[7] Ibid
s.10
[8] Ibid
s.11
[9] Ibid s.12 Halmesvirta wrote about the examples from
politics. In late Conservative PM Harri Holkeri’s
funeral, speeches were given with different patriotic/nationalist historicizing
voice and
tone by highest authorities, the present PM Jyrki Katainen and President
Tarja
Halonen. They are regarded as speech-acts that do not only express reverence
for the
‘great’ such as sages, statesmen, war-heroes, and other cult-figures of among
artists, scientists and their virtues but present to the audience a wider
vision of ‘national’,
public
mission fulfilled by them.
[10] Ibid
s.13
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid
s.14
[13] Ibid
s.14-15. Halmesvirta wrote also that: The memorial speeches may have
remarkable consequences for the culture of commemoration which also have to be
outlined concomitantly with the study of speech-acts themselves. The building
of monuments and the general phenomenon of pantheonization serve the revival
and refreshing of memory. It enhances and makes the nationalist or
neo-nationalist ideology ‘move’; it is self-congratulation as an asset to
strengthen national identity. It institutionalizes national memory in
monumental, ceremonial manner. Thus: the orator acts as the ‘master of the
ceremony’ (praising and representing a body) and the memorial speech becomes
the tool or vehicle to conduct it.
