Battleground of Humanisms: How Väinö Linna’s Under the North Star United What Liberalism, Socialism, and Fascism Tore Apart

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the contest between the three major modern political ideologies—liberalism, socialism, and fascism—the Nordic countries found a middle way with social democracy. For over four decades, Finland remained a class-divided anomaly after the failed socialist revolution in 1918 and fascist rebellion in the 1930s. Väinö Linna’s Under the North Star trilogy (1959–62), one of history’s most directly influential literary works, helped the Finns come to terms with their painful past, which enabled them to rejoin the Nordic path of social togetherness. By drawing on Yuval Noah Harari’s work on the history of human ideologies, my analysis of Linna’s trilogy suggests that insights from works of fiction that help societies unite may also prove useful for meeting the challenges we are expected to face in the present century, as we move toward a posthumanist era.