Modes of Displacement: Ignoring, Understating, and Denying Antisemitism in Finnish Historiography

Abstract

Although the end of the Cold War enabled the investigation of suppressed questions concerning collaboration, resistance, and the impact of Nazism, until very recently, a general belief has prevailed that Finland was almost entirely free of antisemitism during World War II and before, and for this reason is exceptional.1 Historian Dan Stone duly points out that although the inquiry into a national mythology is “a potentially dangerous development breeding resentment and reopening old wounds, it also permits a more thoroughgoing critical treatment of the past than has hitherto been possible.”2 For Stone, antisemitism has been among the most neglected topics in Holocaust Studies because historians have taken it for granted that without a history of antisemitism the Holocaust would not have taken place.3 Yet as historian Klas-Göran Karlsson points out, “the old Cold War structures have been replaced by new or new-cum-old patterns of identity, developments and allegiances,” especially in Eastern Europe, where national and nationalist ideas confront demands for an international accounting for the past.4 Indeed, as social psychologist Florin Lobont, who has researched antisemitism and Holocaust denial in the former Soviet Bloc, explains, “Due to the deeply selective character of collective memory, and the distressing character of a negative past affecting the shaky self-image and self-identity of majority national communities, a proposed vision of the past that obliterates negative aspects is often eagerly welcomed.”5 Many of these countries see themselves as victims of Soviet imperialism, and so both admitting their participation in the Holocaust or taking the Holocaust as a unique, archetypal genocide would undermine their own self-victimization.