Visions of Battle and Defeat
Summer 1944 as a History of Experiences in Finnish Nightmares and Films
Abstract
This article studies the content of and connection between war-related nightmares and films after the Second World War in Finland. The first research question concerns how the final battles and the end of the Continuation War in 1944 became visible in war veterans’ post-war dreams. Second, I study how the war nightmares’ themes appeared in Finnish movies in the 1940s and 1950s. I approach the topic from the perspective of the history of experiences, which entails an examination of how the events at the frontlines in the summer of 1944 turned into soldiers’ lived reality and affected their lives at night, and furthermore, how this wide experiential basis was reflected in wider Finnish post-war culture. I show that a great majority of the war veterans’ dreams were oppressive nightmares, but that there were also examples which can be called defensive dreams, in which a soldier retained his agency. These dreams can be interpreted as telling of a specific Finnish experience of defeat: after all, the Finns were spared from experiencing an unconditional defeat. The same themes appeared with a delay in the Finnish movies of the 1950s, where war experiences started to take a more integral shape.
Keywords: movies; history of experience; nightmares; war veterans; Second World War; dreams
