Cultural Trauma of the Civil War of 1918 Staged and Commemorated in Finland

Abstract

The Centennial of one of the cruelest of European civil wars fought in Finland between the Reds and the Whites from January to May 1918 has evoked a spectrum of theatre productions illustrating variations of styles and approaches on the events. The turn in the treatment of this cultural trauma occurred with the interpretations and narrative perspectives that were fixed in the 1960s, when an understanding for the defeated Red side was expressed in historiography, literature and theatre. Since that, the last six decades the Finnish theatre and public discourse on the Civil War have been dominated by the Red narrative as the memory of the 1918 Civil War provided an important part in the new identity politics for the 1969 generation. Since the 1980’s the topic was mostly put aside so that before the 2018 revivals of the Civil War topic, the productions seem to have been reactions by the artists confronting the developments at the end of the Cold War. Some theatrical events can even be tied to the cultural trauma of the 1969 left evoked by the collapse of the socialist block. The Centennial productions repeated the Red narrative but they also provided more balanced interpretationson the tragic events.