Traumakonstruktionen. (Swedish)
In: Scandia, Jg. 76 (2010-06-01), Heft 1, S. 9-39
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Zugriff:
The article is a historiographical study of the disunion in 1809 and relations between Sweden and Finland in the following decades, as viewed chiefly by Swedish historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Any number of historical accounts written since the end of the nineteenth century have described the Treaty of Fredrikshamn, signed on 17 September 1809, as a national catastrophe or trauma, implying that all the Swedish public, regardless of social class, mourned the loss of the eastern half of the country to Russia. Despite the fact that the subject of history, at least the academic variety, has long since abandoned a nationalistic perspective, the view of the disunion as a national Swedish catastrophe in some measure lives on. Nevertheless, relatively recent research has shown that this interpretation is problematic for a variety of reasons. Studies of public opinion in the 1810s and 1820s, for example, have found that regret at the loss of Finland was at best muted. Moreover, it has been pointed out that terms such as 'Swedish' and 'Finnish', or 'Sweden and 'Finland', had meanings at the start of the nineteenth century that were completely different from those a century later, not to mention from today. Therefore it is misleading to interpret the disunion in nationalistic terms. It cannot have escaped many that historians have long been exercised by how the loss of Finland was handled in Sweden in the early nineteenth century, while in conjunction with the anniversary in 2009, several new books and anthologies have been published that offer new perspectives on events in 1809 and their consequences for both Sweden and Finland. This article thus considers the full range of views on the disunion that have been current in Sweden since very first - an approach to Swedish research on the loss of Finland never attempted before. The article opens with an analysis of attitudes in the 1830s towards the Finnish war and its consequences, at a time when the historian Erik Gustaf Geijer and others were particularly occupied by the issues. There was hardly any mention of Sweden's war losses as a national catastrophe; rather, their main concern was the constitutional consequences for Finland. The rise of the belief in the later nineteenth century that the Swedish nation had 'mourned' Finland is then traced. Finally, shifts in perspective on the Finnish war noted since 1960 are discussed, reflecting the increasing concern with questioning, problematising, and nuancing how historians in the early nineteenth century viewed the disunion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Titel: |
Traumakonstruktionen. (Swedish)
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Edgren, Henrik |
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Zeitschrift: | Scandia, Jg. 76 (2010-06-01), Heft 1, S. 9-39 |
Veröffentlichung: | 2010 |
Medientyp: | academicJournal |
ISSN: | 0036-5483 (print) |
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