Finland's Holocaust Silences of History

In this pioneering volume, a group of "third generation" scholars subject the contested ligature between Finland and the Holocaust to critique. Finland's Holocaust: Silences of History traces the implications of antisemitism in Finland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through Finland's alliance with the Third Reich during much of World War II, to the complex negotiation with its wartime past. Taking up a range of issues - from cultural history, folklore, the arts, and sports, to the interpretation of military and national history - this collection examines how modern Finnish memory and the writing of history have both engaged and evaded the figure of the Holocaust. As the first English-language introduction to the changing position of Finland in contemporary international Holocaust historiography, Finland's Holocaust is essential reading for any student of antisemitism and the Holocaust, providing a critical perspective on the role of political and cultural historiography in modern Finland.

Simo Muir is Adjunct Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of World Cultures, University of Helsinki, and author of Yiddish in Helsinki: Study of a Colonial Yiddish Language and Culture. Muir has published on the history of Jews in Finland and about pre-war antisemitism in Finland.


Hana Worthen, Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, is the author of Playing 'Nordic': The Women of Niskavuori, Agri/Culture, and Imagining Finland on the Third Reich Stage and of articles on performance and ideology, as well as on the historiography of Finland and the performance of national identity.

1. Introduction: Contesting the Silences of History; Hana Worthen and Simo Muir
2. Stories of National and Transnational Memory: Renegotiating the Finnish Conception of Moral Witness and National Victimhood; John Sundholm
3. Modes of Displacement: Ignoring, Understating, and Denying Antisemitism in Finnish Historiography; Simo Muir
4. "I Devote Myself to the Fatherland": Finnish Folklore, Patriotic Nationalism, and Racial Ideology; Ilona Salomaa
5. Towards New Europe: Arvi Kivimaa, Kultur, and the Fictions of Humanism; Hana Worthen
6. Discrimination against Jewish Athletes in Finland: An Unwritten Chapter; Malte Gasche and Simo Muir
7. Elina Sana's Luovutetut and the Politics of History; Jouni Tilli
8. Negotiating a Dark Past in the Swedish-Language Press in Finland and Sweden; Karin Kvist Geverts
9. Beyond "Those Eight": Deportations of Jews from Finland 1941-1942; Oula Silvennoinen
10. "Soldaten wie andere auch": Finnish Waffen-SS Volunteers and Finland's Historical Imagination; Antero Holmila