Believing Local History

Believing Local History

Gotland University

Belief and non-belief, fact and fiction have been central elements in many scholarly discussions concerning the definitions of folklore genres. Believing and belief are tricky words that can be understood in at least two different ways.

Our American colleague, Elliot Oring suggested one way of separating between the two meanings of the word “belief”: on the one hand we can talk about belief in supernatural phenomena, on the other, we can say that we believe that the supermarket will provide us with the items we want to buy (Oring 2008, 128). Another common example is to compare the difference of meaning between the two sentences “I believe that God exists” and “I believe in God”. Another, somewhat similar dichotomy concerns ideas about fact and fiction. Scientific facts can be so astounding that they are hard to believe, and historical facts can appear as elements in fictive narratives. Fiction in its turn can sometimes be narrated so realistically that it is taken to be facts, like in many folk legends. Statements that are not scientifically approved can be repeated so often that they are finally accepted as facts. Since Jacob Grimm in his 1816 foreword to “Deutsche Sagen” proposed that “Das Märchen ist poetischer, die Sage historischer“ (Grimm 1816, v), folklorists have spent much time in trying to pinpoint folklore genres along a scale between fact and fiction, while often at the same time trying to determine to what degree they were “believed in”. Few scholars seem to have any problem in agreeing that fairy tales belong on the fiction end of the scale, and that they are generally not believed. Folk legends, on the other hand, are regarded to be fiction, told as facts with the implicit purpose that they should be believed.

In this presentation, I will discuss some examples of how individual memory narratives may support or contradict collective oral versions of local history. Grand narratives of local history exist at many levels in a society and may be so strongly accepted that many people believe them to be true.

Material

The material I have studied consists of some 40 tape-recorded life history narratives. The narrators were all retired citizens of my home town Visby, Sweden, who were asked to tell about their lives. The interviewers were all younger than the narrators. The recordings were made during a concentrated collection period in the summer and fall of 1995, and at the time of the interviews the narrators were all living in Visby on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. Thus all these life histories were recounted from the same temporal and geographical point of view. The material has a clearly defined “here” and “now”. Furthermore, the narrators were all born between 1910 and 1930, thus representing more or less one and the same generation.

The Self-Biographical Paradox

The orally narrated life history is a cultural form with its own specific genre conventions. Its themes are typically the narrators’ chosen memories of their own lived experiences, but the form is seldom a merely chronological enumeration of facts.

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The persons in a life history can be either subjects or objects in relation to the narrated events, answering directly to the grammatical active and passive voice. As active subjects, they will play the role of agents who initiate changes and push the action forward. As passive objects, on the other hand, they will get the role of being carried away as victims in the hands of ruthless villains or an inescapable fate. During the interview situation, the narrating “I” is acting out a social role as the speaking subject with the interviewer as his listener, while the experiencing narrated “I” plays the role of an object in the story. Narrators, who want to be true to their own experiences, cannot easily exclude those episodes of their lives where they for one reason or another were out of control. In such instances, a tension might build up between the narrating “I” who is in control (at least theoretically) of the situation and the narrated “I” who is not (at least not all the time). We can call this the self-biographical paradox.

Tradition Dominants in Local History

There are also instances were the narrated “I” seems to be in perfect control, acting as a subject, but all the same the story line sometimes is hit by an external factor from local history and is forced to change its direction.

In narrated individual life histories it is not surprising to encounter elements of local or regional – or even national and international – history. After all, most events in individuals’ life histories have actually taken place in physical locations where many other people’s lives have also been enacted. Some local events that can be more or less external to the individual life history narrator seem to possess an extraordinary power of influence, which makes it likely that they are referred to in one way or another, when a life history touches upon a place or a time close to them (cf. Tangherlini 1990, 377f; Palmenfelt 2009).

The Swedish folklorist Albert Eskeröd proposed the term tradition dominant to indicate prevailing phenomena (primarily supernatural beings) in local traditions, or in his own words:

As the concept motif appears to be more appropriate within folk narrative research, it seems proper to identify those various phenomena that dominate a local tradition by the word tradition dominants. By tradition dominants thus will be understood such elements that in the common folk tradition dominate

different groups within it (Eskeröd 1947, 81. My translation).

As a qualifying criterion later generations of folklorists have added that tradition dominants, for instance supernatural beings, can be identified through their power to attract features that in other traditions typically belong to other beings. This process is usually called motif attraction.

Obviously we can find elements in life histories that possess such a capacity to dominate local traditions, but these are seldom supernatural beings. Instead the dominant units can be local events or stories about such events that have become so firmly established in people’s minds that they possess an agency to demand dominant positions in all narratives about local history. These dominant units can be regarded as expressions of an ongoing interplay between

collective ideas and individual narrative forms. By positioning their narratives in relationship to these dominant units, narrators inscribe themselves in the collective body of local oral history or emphasize that they are declining such membership. Dominant units that are

repeated often gain in volume and importance, which makes it ever more difficult for future narrators not to relate to them.

One Swedish grand narrative

In one commonly accepted Swedish grand narrative, the first two decades of the 20th century were dominated by class struggles and the organization of the workers by the Social

Democratic party. In the 1920s the first Social Democratic government was formed, and in the 1930s Sweden suffered from the international financial crisis and the founder of the Swedish safety match company, Ivar Kreuger, committed suicide in Paris. During the years of the Second World War, Swedes stuck together backing up the broad coalition government to help protect the country’s neutrality and stay outside the war. During the 1950s the welfare state was realized and Sweden was profiting from the economic boom, when the rest of the world was still but slowly recovering from the war sufferings.

War Stories

All the informants taking part in this study had experienced some of the effects of the Second World War. Although Sweden succeeded in keeping its neutrality, the war events taking place all over the Baltic Sea area naturally had a profound impact on everyday life on the island of Gotland as in the rest of Sweden. Foods and other necessities were rationed, a general black-out was commanded, there was a shortage of fuel and coal, and at least two of the war winters were extremely long and cold. Furthermore, Gotland had a strategic position in the Baltic Sea, around two thousand mobilized soldiers from mainland Sweden were placed on Gotland and the entire population of the island depended on the civil passenger and cargo boat traffic with the mainland.

Circumstances like these were more or less present in all of the narratives I have listened to. Not surprisingly, serious consequences of the war appeared in the individual experience narratives. On November 24, 1944 the Swedish passenger ship the Hansa, plying the trade between Visby and the Swedish mainland, was sunk by a Soviet torpedo and 84 people died. Hundreds of Gotlanders lost close relatives and in my material I find surviving family members testifying about their grief. Sailors and ordinary passengers described the rough crossings during the worst ice winters, which could take up to 50 hours instead of normally 10-12 hours. Some also had the experience of being hailed and boarded by German war-ships. One nurse reported about volunteers receiving refugees who were arriving to Gotland in small boats from Estonia and Latvia. One active communist told about how he was deported to a working camp in Northern Sweden.

References to commonly shared experiences of food-rationing, mobilization, hard winters and black-outs appear and reappear in the stories, but seldom in central positions. More often they seem to constitute a collectively acknowledged backdrop to the individual life histories, in the form of a setting that defines the narrative arena both emotionally and materially.

Here are three examples of how such narratives may sound:

Once my mother had got a rationing-card for cream from a neighbor whom she had helped with sewing a dress. Mom sent me to the milk store to buy the

cream. It was a small bottle, perhaps one deciliter. The bottle was cold and slippery and my hands were sweaty, so I dropped the bottle and it fell to the paving stones and broke. When I came home with the broken bottle and the glass splinters, my mother beat me. That was the only time during my childhood that mother beat me. But I went back to the milk shop and told the lady what had happened. She felt sorry for me and used a card that somebody had lost and gave me another bottle of cream. When I came home with the cream my mother hugged me and wept and said that she was sorry that she had beaten me.

The first ice winter was 1940 and we had to go out under all circumstances. Nobody in the crew had any ice experience. Once we got stuck in pack ice and just drifted away with the ice. We had three hundred soldiers onboard and food was finished in no time. Three of us walked ashore on the ice and we borrowed a carriage and two horses and drove to the store to get food. The horses got nervous because the road was icy and slippery, but one of the mates had been a farm hand so he could handle them. We lay stuck in the ice for three days until the ice-breaker arrived and took us free.

When the mobilization order came, I had to go by train to Visby. At the

regiment everything was a mess. Everybody was supposed to get their uniforms and proper equipment. We waited for a fortnight there without anything

happening. Then there was a order that we who belonged to the transportation company should go up to Slite to do some work. They put us up in an old barn for a week’s time. This was in October so we almost froze to death. After that they put us in the Mission Chapel where there was a coal stove, so that was better. Our job was to build fortifications on Enholmen Island. We went there everyday with a lorry full of gravel and worked. After the war was over, I went back to working in the dairy.

This is how abstract phenomena generally appear in oral narrating. When asked to tell their life histories, narrators normally do not start with elements from national or local history. Instead, memories of ice winters, food rationing or mobilization (or any other similar subject) will appear as chronological or causal links in the story line of the narrator’s own life.

Knowledge of the existent natural or social situation may constitute both limitations and sources of inspiration to the individual teller, but will rarely appear as the main themes of a personal experience narrative. Many stories about smashed bottles of cream will perhaps contribute to creating a collective abstract representation of “food rationing”, while the other way around the theoretical concept of “food rationing” in its turn may evoke images of spilt cream floating out over dirty paving stones, a desperate child and a disappointed mother. A collectively acknowledged understanding of the concept “ice winter” can perhaps be created by stories about long, tiresome and sometimes adventurous boat crossings. But these stories also introduce another element, that of a shared island identity. Even today, when the boat crossing between Gotland and the Swedish mainland takes no more than just over three hours with four regular tours every day, stories about laborious boat trips are still prolific among Gotlanders, very often I believe, with the explicit purpose of emphasizing shared experiences.

Perhaps the same can be said for the solidarity felt between males in connection with stories about military work that can be hard, dull and sometimes apparently be meaningless. Very often stories about being a soldier emphasize long periods of waiting.

Stories like these three examples may contribute to creating a generation group consisting of those who have experienced the food rationings, the war ice winters, and the mobilization. This age group is formed by the narrators in contrast to the younger interviewers, in a way excluding them from the feeling of affinity. It is no daring guess to assume that also in other situations these persons and others belonging to their generation continuously have been building this spirit of communitas by telling and re-telling similar stories.

Stories like these are just what would be expected from Swedes telling about their war time experiences. Their message and tendency fully agree with the commonly accepted Swedish grand narrative I mentioned earlier.

What was surprising to me, however, was that the majority of the stories in fact described the war period as rather pleasant. Several of the female narrators emphasized how delightful it was going to the Saturday dances, when there were ten young men in smart uniforms to every girl. They pointed out the advantages with the black-outs, when you could walk arm in arm and kiss without being observed. Younger children made it a sport to sneak around in the dark and flash torches to expose hugging couples on the parch benches.

Many of the male narrators reported about the pleasant life in the countryside camps when they were on guard-duty. To a large extent, the mobilized soldiers were farmers’ sons, used to spend lots of time outdoors, they knew how to cut fire-wood, how to make a cooking fire, they enjoyed sleeping in a tent, bicycling, going for a swim, picking berries and mushrooms in the forest. Their narratives resound of excitement, but not of fear. To them, the war was a thrilling adventure, but it never became threatening or dangerous.

In such stories, narrators are obviously breaking the genre rules for how Swedish war time stories are supposed to be told. In opposition to the grave, dark grand narrative about a struggling, but united nation, these narrators tell about joy, fun, merry episodes, practical jokes, sense of freedom, and amorous escapades. How is it possible to tell such stories in spite of the extraordinary war time conditions that must have deeply affected everybody’s everyday life?

I can think of a number of plausible explanations. In the officially accepted Swedish grand narrative, the strenuous war time hardships are used as a dramaturgically efficient dark background against which the successful realization during the 1950s and 60s of the Swedish welfare society stands out in bright contrast. However, the historical fact is that the Swedish government through skilful political maneuvers managed to avoid that Sweden was directly involved in the war activities. Compared for instance with our Nordic neighbors, very few Swedes have very dramatic war experiences to tell about.

Furthermore, most of my narrators were born in the 1920s and 1930s, meaning that during the war, they were teenagers or young adults without families or children to support. They give voice to the experiences of a younger generation. When they were commanded to perform different wartime duties, they could regard them as a kind of obligatory but thrilling vacation from their ordinary tasks. In their life histories, they faced the real hardships after the war, when they entered the regular labor market, formed families, strove to hire an apartment,

raised children, and fought to make ends meet. For them, the results of the economic boom and the welfare society became visible considerably later.

Certainly, they must be aware that their picture does not conform to the officially accepted one. Some of the narrators even mention how they at the time were scolded by their parents for not taking the war seriously. All the same, my impression is that these narratives should not be interpreted as a conscious, subversive questioning of the official history. Maybe we could regard them as complementary statements: “This is also what the war was like”.

Conclusion

From my point of view it is not important to decide whether the facts presented in the stories I have discussed are historical or not, nor whether the narrators really “believe” in what they are telling. To me as a folklorist it is enough to be able to show that individual memory narratives may support or contradict existing grand narratives at different levels of society. To me, this is also the case with other so called belief narratives, for instance folk legends. We know that they do exist (or did exist) and we know that people in one way or another had to relate to them. What and how much people actually did believe is more or less impossible for us to decide.

While folk legends typically deal with the extraordinary, the deviant and the unexpected, both individual life histories and collective grand narratives are dedicated to normal, everyday, predictable matters. Maybe we could regard grand narratives as the smallest common

denominator of local history, formulating the agreements that everybody subscribes to – while folk legends explore the boundaries of normality, the almost unknown borderlands facing the backyards of the unbelievable.

Grand narratives lack the legends’ focal concentration on one single, dramatically charged chain of events. That may be one reason why they seldom show the elaborate form of the verbally formulated narrative. Grand narratives have no obvious temporal extension, no clear line of development following a hero’s handling of a complication from its introduction to a satisfactory resolution. From the perspective of a single individual it is next to impossible to follow the long and slow developing processes of a society. That is why we perceive of the grand narratives as fragments of an indiscernible whole or as embryos that may once

amalgamate into a coherent entity. On the other hand the causal elements appear to be strong. Grand narratives obviously have a function to support cause and effect-explanations or as a common cultural standard with which you can compare your own experiences and values (cf Hyvärinen et al 2010). Largely, they consist of non-narrative, descriptive elements and we cannot even say for sure that they have a consistent verbal form. Probably they are never narrated. Instead they are ever-present as collective frames of reference for what is considered to be normal and how it is accepted to talk about local history.

But to what extent they are believed, still remains an unanswered question.

References

Eskeröd, Albert 1947. Årets äring. Etnologiska studier i skördens och julens tro och sed. Stockholm: Nordiska museet.

Hyvärinen, Matti, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo and Maria Tamboukou [eds] 2010. Beyond Narrative Coherence. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.

Labov, William 2006. Narrative pre-construction. Narrative Inquiry 16 (1).

Oring, Elliot 2008. Legendry and the Rhetoric of Truth. Journal of American Folklore Vol. 121 No. 480, 127—166.

Palmenfelt, Ulf 2009. Dominant Units in Life History Narratives. Paper read at the ISFNR

congress in Athens, Greece, June 2009.

Tangherlini, Timothy R. 1990. “It Happenend Not Too Far From Here…”: A Survey of Legend Theory and Characterization. Western Folklore Vol. 49 No. 4, 371—390.