“I Devote Myself to the Fatherland”: Finnish Folklore, Patriotic Nationalism, and Racial Ideology

Abstract

In present-day Finnish academia, it is often assumed that the blatant antisemitism and xenophobia of the 1920s and 1930s never penetrated its institutions or its discourse. And yet, as recent studies have shown, Finnish academic culture was in a variety of ways influenced by the cultural and political proximity between Finland and Nazi Germany, both before and during their formal alliance in the 1940s. In this chapter, I set the manifestly racialized activities of two organizations in the 1920s and 1930s—the Akateeminen Karjala-Seura (Finnish, Academic Karelia Society, AKS) and the Isänmaallinen Kansanliike (Finnish, People’s Patriotic Movement, IKL)— against the background of the predominant instruments of nineteenth-century cultural nationalism: the emerging study of folklore and folk religion. From their earliest moments, these inquiries had a decisively nationalist cast, and the invention of a Finnish mythology not only incorporated a notion of national identity and distinction, but provided an instrument for exorcizing “foreign” elements, notably those of Swedish and Russian culture (Finland was subordinate to Sweden from 1249 to 1809, and a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire from 1809 to 1917).KeywordsFolk ReligionRacial IdeologyJewish QuestionCultural NationalismLocal Jewish CommunityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.