Does Helsinki’s Sanomat make Helsinki’s Public?

People I know boycott Helsingin Sanomat for all sorts of reasons. But it’s been the mouthpiece of the mainstream for 120 years, even back when Uusi Suomi came out in print and other papers were still going strong. Because it’s big it’s bound to be in the firing line, but its current editorial don’t mind. The flak comes indiscriminately from all directions. But HS certainly has power and one has to approach it with due caution (not least its infuriating habit of gratuitous if apparently well-meaning racial and ethnic stereotyping) but the writing is quality stuff.

Now, the anthropological point: it’s created a public, a Finnish public, or a Finnish-reading public. Benedict Anderson launched this idea in a book published in 1983, The Imagined Community. The argument is more or less that newspapers and novels (literacy) brought people together from widely dispersed areas and made them feel part of a larger whole than had ever previously been possible. By reading, people participated in an imagined or virtual community that went far beyond their village and even beyond the regional baron who taxed them. Writing also standardised the way people spoke and fostered homogeneity across space. Gradually this product of imagination, the nation, became hugely important even though individuals would never, ever be able to meet most of their compatriots. Of course, nations were also made concrete in things like Parliament buildings or National Banks (above right).

But who could deny that HS helped create Finland’s “imagined community” as it still does? Today this (right) popped onto our doormats, with invented headlines such as “Electric Light”, “Narinkka Square’s outlaws: do civic rights extend to Jews?” and other thoughts pertinent to 2009’s readership.

Back then to Helsinki. A homogenous town? Not in 1870 when 1/5 of its population spoke something other than Finnish as their first language.

So who Helsinki’s public might be has changed over the decades. In the 19^th century it included people who spoke Russian, Swedish, German and Yiddish, Roma and Tatar etc. Under Russification policies (late 19th century) Helsinki started to notice language more, and speaking Finnish, and to some extent Swedish, became a way to make a political point. Before and after independence, it seems Helsinki’s residents were comfortable with what today we’d call multiple identities. Speaking one language at work, another in bed, or praising God on a Friday, a Saturday or a Sunday. To be able to continue to do that in Finland, Jewish Finns fought alongside (and in command of) German soldiers in the second world war.

One can’t help thinking that a city’s cemeteries say something about its cosmpolitanism. Here, Russian orthodox graves in Hietaniemi.

But after the war cultural difference gradually became less apparent and less tolerated. Some say Finland became the most ethnically homogenous country in Europe after Albania. And yet, as singer and author M.A. Numminen has written, in the 1960s it went without saying in some Finnish circles that one spoke at least Swedish, English and German. Maybe French and Spanish too.

But undeniably sameness became a virtue in the post-war decades. With the IT revolution, publics fragmented again, geographic and virtual communities regrouped and Helsinki’s 2 Chinese restaurants became hundreds of “ethnic” eateries. Not everyone liked this. By the end of the twentieth century there were those, especially in rural areas, who felt that Helsinki had gone off on its own route, leaving the rest of the country behind. Some people even talked as if Helsinki were literally moving “into Europe”. As this week’s pilot strike demonstrated, it’s still up here on its old co-ordinates.

What could be changing is that tolerance will have to go back on the menu. Cultural difference and racism are routinely debated on the pages of HS. Another change is that the bulk of Helsinki’s population feels thoroughly at home here. In 1900 the city was cosmopolitan but it was tiny, and the group of people whose families went back generations was even tinier. In 2009 “barefoot” (born and raised here) Helsinkians are a bigger proportion of its residents and, I hope, for that more at home with strangers.

No consensus on Finnish hospitality

The trees are almost bare now. Winter is coming and it’ll soon be even colder than it is now, and darker. What a time to arrive as a stranger. Particularly if you feel unwanted.

Mark Twain once said about land, “they ain’t makin any more of it” or something. Meawhile the global population is rather large compared to years gone and with income polarisation, endemic violence and environmental degradation pushing people out of places they once considered home (a process that’s happening within countries and cities not to mention across different parts of the planet) it’s the poor who are generally being squeezed. So anyone with an interest in the way places look, even lucky places like Helsinki, is going to have to factor that in.

This week a new reception centre for refugees is to open in Punavuori, as reported by Vartti online magazine. Like many others probably, I found out by reading the week-end paper’s interview. But it was an asylum article with a difference, a portrait of a group – OK, two engaged women – who have established the “Refugee Hospitality Club Punavuori” to make sure that as well as cries of “not in my back yard” we get a compassionate message of “why not in our back yard?” What exactly their activities will consist of is yet unclear (at least to me) but the idea is that there is a volunteering opportunity here for us already-locals that these folks are ready to organise. Oh, and they are on facebook!

The balance (?!) between mobile and sedentary, local and foreign isn’t one that Europeans (or many others, I suspect) have found that easy to negotiate, but it’s good to see that the shrill views of those wishing to restrict hospitality to a narrowly defined type of human being, are not the only ones circulating out there.

On which note, Finnish users of facebook have set up a rather lovely group, loosely translated thus: I accidentally wound up on Helsingin Sanomat’s internet discussion site: shouldn’t have

P.s. just some thoughts on the political background to all this. Finland has been known for its consensus politics, at least until recently. Some now feel that the country has lost the common sense of purupose it once had and that any consensus there might once have been surely is now gone. Related to this, Finland is now also a land of differences and that appears to be a problem. The Finnish media in 2009, however, is busily producing a new consensus or at least a political truth: asenneilmapiiri on kiristynyt literally translated = attitude atmosphere become tighter/tenser. Presumably they are trying to find an inoffensive way to say that racism, fear of difference and readiness to be hurtful have become understandable, even acceptable. I’ve read this phrase in 2 papers (not necessariy fresh) in recent days, and of course, on online discussion threads. Shouldn’t have.

The shopping issue

Our protagonist once did some research into the transformation of the British high street, with a particular focus on the role of retail planning on the places where social interaction takes place in a consumer society. Not very original perhaps, but fun and well supported by the mass of interest and serious research by, for instance, the New Economics Foundation.

And so she finds herself bemused but angry, by both the steady and ongoing disappearance of high-street shops (independent might be pushing it) and the fact that people she talks to about it shrug it off with the view that it’s how Finns like it. After all, they say, the market is the market (is the market). It’s for that reason, presumably, that Eira and its environs have higher-than-average numbers of traditional shops (“kivijalka kauppa”, from kivijalka, the stone foundations from which shop windows open out to the street, and “kauppa”=shop) . This one in Töölö, turned into a purveyor of cultural or creative services (not that we can be sure, it doesn’t open up to the pavement to invite us in) feels more “kivijalka” than “kauppa”.

Our protagonist hasn’t got any independently verified data, but she suspects that disposable income around Eira is among the highest in the country. She noticed today that there were shops for the more thrifty households here too, even a couple of smaller super-markets. The word frequently used for small older shops is Blah Blah’s “valinta”, where the last word means “choice”, presumably to signify that the customer in this shop could freely choose (and squeeze and prod) the produce for sale before committing to a purchase. These shops still exist in some parts of Helsinki. Hardly “independent” in the sense that many British readers (and foodies) think of it, they do however, make possible exchanges at a specifically human scale, of goods and money, as well as pleasanteries, local news and gazes.

She hears people around her comment on the sad loss of these shops, but it’s always justified by the “use it or lose it” slogan or by the simple fact that, the market being the market, people just prefer cheap. Er, why then don’t those here in Eira who DO have the choice, flock to them? More on this too and on possible connections between consensus politics, the success of the co-operative movement, and the assumption that what’s good for such and such industry is “good for the country”.

The Baltic’s fallen daughter

Here in Helsinki everything is clean, or used to be. That was before they plugged the Hole with a shopping centre designed by Franz Kafka, that succeded where the Swedes, Russians and Germans had all failed by destroying the Finns’ consensual cooperativeness and self-, no let that read “other”-respect. The square with it’s diagonals intersecting on a huge turd became a magnet for every kind of detritus, fast-food wrappers, broken glass, free newspapers and still-breathing (just) human bodies.  Without warning, nor agreement, pedestrian crossings were casually ignored like the Romanian beggars kneeling behind dirty grey polystyrene mugs containing a few coins. Those who noticed them — while pretending they didn’t — wondered how they supported themselves. Was it a grant from the City Arts Department? Was it a plot by the unreconstructed Communist Party of Finland (Marxist-Leninist)? Were they actually a collective illusion,  a form of mass hysteria? What no one could deny were the ever more daring, dive-bombing seagulls that would, as some who lived to tell the tale recounted,  snatch ice-cream out from the mouths of babes and sucklings. Some even claimed that sucklings had been plucked from their mother’s breasts but those who noticed that Hyla ice cream eaters were immune (what species would add to the woes of the lactose-intolerant?), also insisted that this breed of seagull was vegetarian, driven to such extreme conduct by their dogmatic avoidance of fish. Meanwhile, a crime had been committed under the very noses of the taste police. Someone had stolen the restaurant from the railway-station and left an eyesore of a sushi-pod in its place. Or rather completely out of place as what place would such an abomination have in the Temple of Saarinen? Cracks appeared in pavements, windows went unwashed and the Four Cyclists of the Apocalypse thought about it for a bit but decided to give it a miss this year.