Public History in the Making: A New Methodological Approach to Study Memory-Building by Anssi Halmesvirta

Introduction

The article written by Anssi Halmesvirta is divided into two parts and mostly based on experiences in Finland.[1] The first part comprehends six arguments concerning the study of public history and memory-building in general. The second part consists of proposing a methodology for examining a special field of memory studies. Such as of memorial or commemorative speeches made by representatives of a government.

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 government

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 became a state, developed and officially formulated by President Urho Kekkonen. The myth was made in his speeches during the mid-1960s which was performed within the  ”Finlandization” policy. Because of the opinion that it was a necessity to have ”good” relations with the USSR. Kekkonen stated that it was Lenin gave Finland its independence as a gift after World War One.

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 joining the European Union. The candidates of the pro-Union majority like intellectuals, urban bourgeoisie and the working class saw it in a positive light whereas the anti-Union candidates of the agrarian population and the so-called ‘true Finns’ find every fault in it.[5]

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. Its promoters informed the public that it did not only symbolize the emancipation of the Hungarians from the ‘colonial’ tyranny of the Soviet system but that it signalled that Reagan had freed all Europe from Communism. In contrast, the statues of the Communist ‘losers’ have been removed from the city to a far-off statue park, nowadays a cult-site for Socialist nostalgia-mongers. And as Halmesvirta writes, one cannot find any statues of Gorbachev in Budapest squares.[6]

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 he argued that the so-called consensual, positive interpretation of Finnish history dominated public history platforms at least until the turn of the millennium. This was according to him maybe the case because of Finland’s Europeanization process after 1995 that brought a change with it. In the case of Finland, there are several parts of the history that were neglected. Such as the history of Romani in Finland who were forcefully Christianized in special educational camps until the 1960s, the narratives of the about 10.000 so-called war-children transported to Sweden and the life-histories of those women who fell in love with the German soldiers in Lapland at the end of the Second World War (the Lapland War) and who were stigmatized as non-persons in 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 when such individuals were holding speeches. What he regarded as a salient genre of national memory-building and culture embedded in memorial speeches usually given to prominent people after their funeral can be typified as communicative acts. A such institution in the form of the speech can be recognized in the following way:

  

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]

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[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.