I ELD, I BLOD, I FROST, I SVÄLT” - Doria

concepts of empathy and sympathy are important components of my reasoning.
The trust I was shown by the interviewees adds an interesting facet to the study
of fieldwork. Through something I call empathic interviews, I strive to reach
both an emotional and an intellectual understanding of the interviewees as well
as the content of our conversations.
The four main themes that emerge in my thematic analysis of the material
are: work, body, ethnic others, and war’s aftermath. The interviewees told me
about different kinds of chores and tasks, and about the individuals they
completed them alongside. Through this they told me about belonging to a
certain community. They told me about how their bodies served as tools or as
obstacles in the work they performed. They told about the suffering they
endured; about how they got wounded or hurt; about taking care of wounded
bodies. The interviewees spoke about three ethnic others: the Finns, the
Germans, and the Russians. The Finns and the places associated with them
were experienced as different, but mostly in a good sense. The Germans were
spoken about as friends who turned into enemies. The Russians were
considered enemies from the start to the end, both on an individual level and as
a part of a war machinery that was described as overwhelming. My interview
subjects spoke about the time after the war as full of change. They spoke about
the journey back home from the war, about a Finland that was different from
what it was before, and about how they tried to settle into this strange country,
in order to finally gain the redress they felt they deserved.
This thematic analysis points to further questions: Which actors appear in
the narration about war? Which patterns exist in the narration? Why is the war
narration considered important in and of itself and important to mediate to me?
Why were there things the interviewees did not want to tell me on the record?
Why do men and women speak about war in dissimilar ways? Is there
“another” narration about war to be heard in the interviews? My conclusion is
that war narration enhances a sense of community, communicates the resolve of
the participants, defines who belongs in the discourse of war, and illustrates
changes in the post-war period. I experience war narration as mythologizing
and symbolically charged. Characters I wish to call type figures produce this
symbolic charge. The narrators transfer their direct or indirect opinions about
right and wrong through type figures as The Steadfast Soldier, The Florence
Nightingale Nurse, or The Communist. By scrutinizing the type figures, the
moral concepts of these narrators can be identified and studied. I find that
“correct” appreciation of the fatherland is one such ever-returning moral
concept. The ultimate moral thesis that is transmitted through the war narration
is that the home must be defended.
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