Conveyors of Intimate War: Letters in the Intergenerational Transition of World War II Memories in Finland

Abstract

In this chapter, I examine how Finnish families have remembered World War II through letters written during the war. The war generation kept their letters hidden out of fear of evoking painful memories and due to the difficulty of expressing personal war experiences in the social and cultural context of the postwar era. After the passing of the war generation, letters have become key mementos in family remembrance. Their children have been eager to read them and have compiled them into dozens of anthologies. These anthologies primarily contain letters from romantically attached couples, typically parents of the editors. The war generation’s children relate to letters differently than their parents did. Unlike the war generation, they do not read letters as testimonies of hardship but instead connect them to romanticized memories of their parents, shaping a more positive memory of the war. The analysis illustrates how family sentiments shape the memory of war.